[REUPLOAD: IMPROVED AUDIO] Oceangate Titan: analysis of an insultingly predictable failure
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- Original video with improvements to the audio. It still sounds terrible due to the cheap mic....but since there are some pretty major lessons to take away, I'd rather people can hear me.
I never intended to touch this subject again - I've moved onto more interesting topics. But since the original video has been getting attention lately, this is the least I could do.
Sources used:
Original video:
• Oceangate Titan: analy...
2022 documentary showing previous dive
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001...
Dave Lochridge court case against Oceangate
media.wbur.org/wp/2023/06/ans...
James Cameron's choice words about the incident:
• "Titanic" filmmaker Ja...
Alvin DSV abridged operating procedures. The entire WHOI site for Alvin was used for research:
www.whoi.edu/marine/PDF/ATL%2...
SUBSAFE: The US Navy's comprehensive safety program for submarine's. Originated from a broadly similar accident (USS Thresher) in the 1960's):
history.nasa.gov/columbia/Tro...
An informed summary from someone with far far more experience than me:
• The Titan Tragedy
A Review on Structural Failure of Composite Pressure Hulls in Deep Sea
www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/10/10/...
Chapters:
00:00 new 2024 Intro
01:10 Original intro
03:52 Communicating Risk
06:48 'The Hull Is Solid'
12:58 'Not Safety Critical'
19:33 Other Factors
Hi everyone. This isn't really intended for everyone who originally saw the video, there is nothing new here. It's just to make sure any new viewers can at least hear what I'm saying - I still get regular comments about the poor audio in that original video.
Joke's on you, I don't like being told I'm not intended to watch something. I'm watching it again! Cheers
Aye, as someone who watched the original, I am still going to watch this one. Your perspective was unique at the time, and remains relevant to this day. I'm glad to see (or rather hear) an audio improvement. Keep up the excellent work, boss 🐻
I enjoyed the updates and the better audio, so there!
no problem. i'll gladly watch another of your videos AGAIN. because they are great!
You're uniquely qualified to explain the incident perfectly, I'll definitely be watching it again 👍
The fact a thruster was installed backwards and nobody even knew until it was at depth is fucking insane.
I remember a prebuilt PC reviewer being shocked that one of a pair of cpu cooler fans was mounted backwards. Basically the CPU was constantly thermal throttling because the 2 fans opposed each other. The builder even tested it and knew it was thermal throttling but didn't think it was a problem. That was inexcusable. It was a $5000 pc btw
It speaks to the carelessness of the build quality: if you can’t put something on the correct way (a concept a 5 yo with a Lego set does flawlessly) how half-assed is your pressure vessel?
Wtf
I've watched it once, I'll watch it again!
Me too!
Same!!
Yep! Definitively worth a rewatch!
Lmao same here, great stuff on this channel.
Same! Worth every second!
The only surprising factor is how many dives it completed before it failed.
Not too surprising. A lot of things endure beatings many times and then suddenly fail without undergoing anything worse than what they'd endured previously. There were plenty of reports of cracking sounds on previous dives. It's just like the FIU bridge collapse where the cracks were forming in the structure after its initial placement, which were growing everyday. If they'd taken the thing back down and set it on the ground the cracks would've stopped growing - like the Titan surfacing - and it was only after it had sat on its pylons for a while that it eventually crumbled. It didn't help that engineers had told the builders to re-tension the bolts as that probably accelerated its collapse seeing as how it collapsed basically while they were re-tensioning them. If they hadn't re-tensioned the bolts it will would've collapsed, just maybe hours or days later than it did. The Titan was the same way though, it endured all kinds of stress damage with each dive and was "worn out". I think that they've at least demonstrated that you can fabricate a carbon fiber sub that is usable a few times, but only if it's treated as disposable and discarded or re-built after 2-3 dives. The window should've been twice as thick as well, and they could've done things like add reinforcement rings inside the carbon tube to improve its compressive strength. I'm sure we're not done seeing carbon fiber used as a structural material for deep sea diving, far from it.
@@CharlesVanNoland The FIU bridge collapse is THE best recent example of the enfeebling of (gestures broadly) American technocratic civilization, just an incredible instance of nobody knowing or checking all the way from top to bottom, start to finish
@@Holabirdsupercluster lmao ok. People like you are why aliens won't talk to us
@@CharlesVanNoland reminds me of that commercial JAL disaster where the rear bulkhead blew after a crappy repair. thing flew like 150x before it went!
@@CharlesVanNoland Fascinating analysis and good comparison. Thanks.
You are remembered by the rules you break..... Stockton Crush.
Words to live by....wait..
Indeed he will be. Sad he took others’ lives with this disaster.
"Captain Crunch"
@@GeoStreber while he was dumb for doing what he did....I don't think THAT is appropriate. Even if it's funny.
Oh, dear
In the photo of Rush holding the game controller, it’s not the game controller that really concerns me. It’s the fact that the monitor mounts appear to be SCREWED INTO THE CARBON FIBRE PRESSURE HULL.
There was an inner sleeve fitted inside the pressure hull they were able to screw into❤
@@brendan5419 haha cheers for the info, I’m glad the designers weren’t quite that idiotic!
@@svenwilson5668 but it wouldnt surprise me if Stockton had used 8 inch framing screws and driven them straight through the hull.
It all looked a lIttle sketchy to me, considering the task it had to perform.
Its was a cylinder in other words Poseidon's Playpen.
I don't think Rush hired those younger engineers because of cost cutting.
My bet is that the guy was such a narcissist that he couldn't handle anyone pointing out his flaws, especially after firing his engineer who warned him about the safety of Titan. As you correctly pointed out, a guy in his 50s would have talked back, but younger engineers might not due to a gradient in authority, even if it's percieved authority.
To quote the fictional version of Anatoly Dyatlov from the 2019 miniseries Chernobyl, after a younger engineer refuses to raise reactor power after correctly identifying the reactor be stalled due to an increase in neutron absorbing xenon isotopes:
"Safety first. Always. I've been saying that for 25 years. That's how long I've done this job, 25 years, is that longer than you, Akimov? Is it much longer? So if I say it's safe, it's safe, and if the two of you disgree then you don't have to work here and you won't. [...] Raise the power."
Yeah…definitely not disagreeing with you here.
Safety job contractions take 9 months training certification Philippines but better to add experience u can be government or private with good pay but end we all now safety come price most don't wanted pay .
Young engineers are normally also more optimistic...
@@deth3021 Yap .to pay student loans need good job
Not great, not terrible
Industry: most deep sea accidents are caused by human error, not structural failures or bad engineering.
Stockton Rush: hold my beer.
6:55 we have that exact stepladder!
and by "we" I mean "the landlord, who lives downstairs, who loaned it so we could decorate"
Oh no, stepladder I'm stuck on the ocean floor!
I spent decades building SCADA systems for critical infrastructure. My background is more computational that it is anything else. When I first heard about Titan and its controls, my first reaction was “where the heck is the redundancy for controls?”. Bluetooth, for one example, is a single point of failure that doesn’t recover well from interference or other disruptions. Other aspects of the control system design screamed “you didn’t think this through” - in particular the “acoustic monitoring system” - first the concept sounded like utter nonsense to begin with, especially when you have a working understanding of how suddenly any pressure vessel can fail.
It wasn’t just a lack of redundancy that did Titan in, it was a lack of understanding of what redundancy and fail-safe design actually means. Nothing was going to solve the materials problem of choosing a mixed material design, but that same lack of understanding was reflected throughout the design of the control and monitoring systems governing the craft.
Imagine driving real car with laggy, third party Bluetooth controller, lunacy.
The accustic warning system. That warned you a millisecond before you were crushed by the implosion.
I'd forgotten about your little blowout preventer joke at the beginning, and it prompts me to say: now that your channel has really hit its stride, can you please consider making a video about the safety and risk engineering involved with deep water drilling, and perhaps using the Deepwater Horizon as your illustrative example?
You had me going with the blowout preventer bit. I was absolutely baffled and terrified that was a thing, glad to hear it's not so lol
Billionaires cutting corners for what? To prove a point? Had he not been in the vessel he would have been charged with negligent homicide.
You don’t become a billionaire by valuing human beings over profit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Had he been a billionaire he could have afforded to do it right, he wasn't and so he skimped... Compare with Victor Vescovo who spent 50 million doing it right.
He must've had plenty of confidence in the design, to go down with the others proves he wasn't worried about it. If he'd stayed on the ship it might've been different.
It may be the same video again but I'm still watching it because damn, I can't believe it's been almost an year. Feels like it happened a month or two ago but I already forgot the details.
Building, we use concrete for resisting compression and steel rods as the tension members. The Ocean Cemetery, had no compression material, only tension material. Look up, empty fuel trucks, collapse on Utube when the vapour condenses, No compression resistance. I built industrial vacuum cleaning equipment, some using 200 litre industrial PVC drums, reinforced with steel rods for compression resistance, along with pressure resistance valves.
_CHEESUS_ what a great point, to which, in other viewings of other docs, I didn't give a _nanoseconds_ thought.
But the instant you mentioned it, I was forced to admit not only my OWN ignorance of relevant safety issues, but the _MONUMENTAL_ stupidity and _arrogance_ of S. Rush. _NO_ _SEATS_ _OR_ _RESTRAINTS???_
I remember how even _VERY_ _MINOR_ turbulence on airplanes tossed me around _badly!!!_
I would've applied the epoxy in abundance, and instead of reaching up and putting it all over the titanium I would've slathered it all over the end of the tube - IN EXCESS, so that it's purging out after combining the parts together - and done it in a big vacuum chamber to hopefully eradicate bubbles and air pockets. Their approach of just hand-applying a random layer of epoxy into the titanium and setting it down on the tube is so janky and goofy. There were probably tons of air pockets trapped in there that would cause the epoxy to slowly yield under pressure, water ingress would shove its way through there.
'Hopefully' being the operative word here. I wouldn't have trusted my life on that seal for several reasons.
23:22 "What's this for?"
"It keeps the tigers away."
"LOL, is it like elephant-repellent rock? Don't be silly, nobody was eaten by a tiger, I'm removing... " /roars and panic screams./
Stockton Rush’s design philosophy in a nutshell
Gives a new meaning to the phrase 'a Rush job'
more like ‘a crushed job’
Misperception of risk affects every aspect of life. Experiments have been done with PhD level mathematicians (who are not necessariy experts in probability and statistics) with simple coin tossing run theory type problems and they universally misperceive the correct probabilities which are governed by highly non-linear type relations which are impossible to work out in your head. When I first heard about this vessel and looked at what Rush did I thought the whole thing just reeked of misperceived risk given the highly dangerous environment. Your story about the fins also struck a chord, About 40 years ago I was body surfing a 4-5 metre wave with a cheap plastic handboard that had a preposterous little fin on the undernerath for "control". When I pulled off the wave the turbulence was such that my arm and hand were flung so violently the little fin hit my head and cut my head open. I was 400 m from the shore and was disoriented and had to swim back to shore in the pounding conditions with loss of blood. I have never used a handboard since. Small little thing but in the wrong context it becomes a big thing.
Statistics are magic was how I felt when I both started and ended my first stats class.
Rush looks like a kid with a toy. Deadly toy for him and four others.
Darwin in action for all of them. By climbing aboard that death-trap, they improved all of humanity. (Well, the ones who didn't have kids improved humanity, anyway - the others just got out of the way to make room for someone more worthy of using the oxygen they were wasting)
Yeah. Like a four year old playing with a loaded gun.
So on the topic of fire risk, I once spilled a glass of water on a plugged in USB C cable that was laying on my desk. It started smoking and was a moment away from fire when I cut power. Would I like that kind of thing in a DSV? No thanks.
USB C charging always unnerves me because of how much heat is generated, and I never charge anything if I'm not in the same room or at least an adjacent one. Glad to know that's not my devices.
@@waxwinged_houndwait, why does usb c charging specifically generate heat?
@@Phlosioneer No idea. I've just noticed it. Every charge block heats up like crazy when I charge with USB C. Regardless of outlet, regardless of cable used, regardless of block used, regardless of device charged (yes I have tested it extensively to try and figure out what was going on). The devices heat up a lot too.
I wonder if it's the electricity? I'm not an engineer, electrician, or physicist so I dunno.
@@waxwinged_hound I'm not an engineer but I’m pretty sure what is generating the heat is the waste energy as the charge brick converts 220V AC down to 9V or 5V DC for whatever you are charging. If you use a more modern GAN charger (basically modern metals in the converter that are smaller and more efficient) it will produce less heat.
@@ccllvn Oh neat! That's something I'll need to keep in mind, seems like something I should look into.
I was just rewatching the original while this was uploaded! What are the odds?!
Thesis well presented & clear: why no mechanical failure before Titan - no cost cutting & serious attention to risk reduction. OGs Titan was the inevitable first.
There is another method for testing the suitability of fiber reinforced composites (FRC) for use in deep submersibles: cyclic testing of models to destruction & nondestructive testing & inspection ultrasonic/x-rays etc after each dive. There is a company making deep submersibles using FRC hulls: these are ROVs & are tested, inspection. (One client reportedly is the USN.) As a test pilot and having been in aerospace (?) Rush should’ve known (did know) aviation practice is periodic inspection. Airbus undoubtedly broke many test specimens & preproduction components before using Carbon FRC on its products. (“Broke” is reference to Rush’s comment about breaking things. - so I seem to recall.) So did reputable bicycle manufacturers. OG had one data point for number of cycles until Titan’s design failed.
Pressure vessel failures are often explosive/sudden such as aircraft fuselages (UK COMET jet) or implosions (USS Thresher). Sometimes one gets a warning (leaks) in a system (perhaps low pressure boilers) with a **large margin of safety** or minute fatigue cracks are found before reaching critical length. In Titan’s case, what good is a warning of imminent failure within minutes when it may take hours to surface? None.
Hey, Alex, thank you for your comprehensive analysis. Your audio quality was fine on the first video, but I’m more than happy to watch it again!
I still to this day don't understand how he was allowed to build such a thing when he fired his engineer and yet no one was keeping an eye on it and made sure it was built to standard i mean a game controller to drive it
I hadn't considered a fire, but absolutely even a small, quickly extinguished would have left the air unbreathable and there were neither respiratory equipment available nor a way to vent the contaminated air.
They had some breathing apparatuses in case of fire/smoke but it looked about as non-standard as the rest of the build...
"Any rational engineer would have returned to the surface and cut the dive short."
Unless they were a Boeing engineer working on the first OFT of Starliner, in which case they'd upload the fix to the thruster mapping and hope no one catches them.
Yeah, I know it's not quite the same as without the patch Starliner couldn't even have returned, but it still blows my mind that such a fundamental mainline failure slipped through testing.
I haven't followed Starliner in a while, they still had issues? I have fond memories of the first uncrewed demo flight with the mission control representation in the background showing the capsule firing modt of its thrusters in all directions... just saw the headline they actually made it all the way to the ISS. It's so delayed most of the crew had been reassigned to other flights.
Every one attacks Boeing
But the FAA is the entity that certified the max as safe. No one attacks the FAA
Hey Alex, have you considered being a guest on the Well There's your problem podcast? They would love to have you to talk about this or some other engineering disaster
"My name is Alex and my pronouns are OK. GO!"
I can’t think of a worse guest to appear on there. I’d be incredibly unfunny and boring compared to their usual guests.
@@Alexander-the-okoh, I disagree! if they ask, please say yes :)
@@Alexander-the-okDon't put yourself down like that!
@@Alexander-the-ok I'd watch the podcast if you were on it.
A great video and a very relevant analysis of the shortcomings of the Titan that ultimately cost the lives of six people including Stockton.
As I have pointed out in comments on other videos on this matter, carbon fiber is NOT a good material for pressure vessels that are subject to COMPRESSIVE stress.
As you have stated, the carbon fiber is a woven material that gets its "stiffness" from the bonding agent, epoxy resin. Carbon fiber, as such, is extremely strong when subjected to expansion stress. It has a very high tensile strength. If, however, you push a piece of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy resin against an immovable object, it will split and crumple because it is the epoxy resin that is bearing the load and NOT the carbon fiber. That said, I would not use epoxy resin alone to bond any two sections of any material, whether or not they are of the same material, if that bond will be subject to significant changes in temperature and/or pressure. Asymmetrical changes of the two sections will not be equally distributed to each other because they are bonded by a different material. That's why pressure vessels are welded together if at all possible.
Stockton was a narcissistic con artist that preyed on the rich and ignorant people who were sold on his false assurances that he knew what he was doing. I can't imagine how he was allowed to even operate his swindling scheme at all, the fact that the dive site was outside the areas of control of any country not withstanding. It was clearly a ripoff akin to running a bungee jumping operation using elastic straps meant for securing small items to a motorcycle's seat.
Unregulated, untested, unsafe and absolutely unlawful. Stockton's racketeering killed five people along with himself, making him a mass murderer. No one should be allowed to run a scam that risks the lives of paying customers without legal oversight. The disclaimer that his victims had to sign was a huge red flag. The fact that he also killed himself is no consolation to the families of his victims.
"I used carbon fiber for the hull of my deep diving submersible because it is lighter and therefore more buoyant." That statement alone is the true measure of the imbecility of the man. Enough said.
I just got re-recommended the original
Video and had re-watched it yesterday. I’ll watch this version today.
Hey Alex. I just wanted to say that when I stumbled across your channel from that original video I decided to watch more of your stuff because you knew what you were talking about and are comprehensive.
Keep up the good work.
All that hull monitoring system could ever provide (if it even worked) is a warning of imminent death.
And not even enough time to "bend over, out your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye"
Love it when Alex makes a video, even when it's a re-upload,
Honestly worth the rewatch! The minor changes and additions add a lot to video and show your growth as a creator. It's also not a very long video, so nothing is lost on the viewer's part if rewatched
This is the best video on the Titan I've seen and I've seen quite a few. While Rush seemed to start the company as an engineer, as expensives sky rocketed, he became a deep sea ocean hobbyist. Using his accreditations to give the illusion of competents and safety. I can't see how Rush wouldn't know the sub would fail.
I was hoping we would have a preliminary report by now but I also understand the scale and scope of such a thing is not easy and cannot be rushed. I just hope we will get to hear the exact failure mode at some point. Also I think this video is how I found your channel which is awesome because you cover a lot of aerospace stuff which is my jam! Something about silver lining...
23:16 "Move fast and break things" doesn't even work for software.
Honestly completely happy to rewatch this over dinner :D was a v big fan of the first and I'm happy to see your channel grow since the OG! greetings from a lab chemist! Love seeing the engineering side of science and RAs
Kind of adorable how you left in the part about trusting that Ocean Gate tested their own claims about air supply. I think we all can tell by now that they did nothing of the sort.
Was about to watch the original and was indeed redirected to this one. Thanks!
Man, I'd hate to be those guys smearing that epoxy adhesive on to the ends of the carbon fiber cylinder !
First time of watching this video. When you started on about the blowout preventer my eyebrows started to climb! I thought “this is an SPF nothing can be that reliable and if it was you still wouldn’t rely on it”. Glad it was to prove a point and not literal.
I didn't see the first video, but I'm sure glad I watched this one. Great analysis of the Titan failure from your engineering experience.
It will be fine "*slaps the roof of sub*"
*sub implodes
Watched the OG version, and watching again, it was and is a fantastic video, well presented.
agree also reconfirms that hubris often times leads to failure.
I had seen the latest Triton's submersible design, they are making acrylic ball that will go to the depth of Titanic, it make a lot more sense to use acrylic like that, much easier to machine.
And best of all, it's very open with 360 viewing angle.
Yeah that sounds like a great idea, I wonder why most real DSVs aren't built out of acrylic. It's not like it is much weaker than alternative materials, right?
Also it provides better isolation - much better then a metal hull, so it would be not as cold inside on depth.
My bet: CO2 and other gasses will diffuse into the acrylic and then expand once decompressed leaving bubbles in the plastic. This is a known issue with acrylic and similar plastics.
@@KnowledgePerformance7 presumably they can lower an acrylic pressure vessel with cameras, sensors, perhaps an artificial human in the form of a CO2 source, see what happens when they winch it down and up again
@@KnowledgePerformance7 this could be solved easily with a second layer made out of something else on the inside right?
My gut feeling was that something sounded iffy when you were describing the blowout preventer that would "always work". I guess I should listen to my gut more often. Or at least I should double check suspicious claims when possible.
I thought he was going to say it was installed and lead to an oil spill.
I was going to complain about how the audio quality in the "improved audio" version, however, i went back and double checked the original and JESUS CHRIST. i don't remember it being that bad but thank you for re-uploading this
Watching the build of the vessel reminds me of an amateur building something in their garage. And I’m confident he hired young people because he didn’t want the criticism and reality checks senior engineers would most certainly provide.
A clear case of ego and hubris leading to unnecessary deaths.
Thank you for reuploading this.
Cool video! Thank you! Make one about Starship!
Sorry.
czcams.com/users/postUgkxCCWW8Zgvt8doiT50oh4_ZLqeJDWjdwuX?si=uthefP3u1aW-leOi
You have earned this like and sub, and hopefully many more! I heard some things here others have not mentioned, so well done. I especially liked the point of…paraphrasing: “if you rely for everything on your backup being failsafe, you don’t have a backup and it’s not failsafe”.
Kind of akin to the swiss cheese model of risk management you see a lot in aviation. If you cut a whole bunch of BIG holes in all your layers of safety cheese because you believe your last layer catches everything and as no holes, you’re gonna be awfully flustered when your last layer of cheese has even a tiiiiiny little hole in it… (and you’re also gonna let loads more “simple” incidents get to that last layer of defense…)
I could tell by looking at the changes in his face between when he building it and when he was getting ready for the dive that he was a man under tremendous financial stress. He showed all the signs that his body was full of Cortisol so he would have been suffering similar symptoms to Cocaine withdrawals.
I think that the big lesson here is that we need more rich people making bespoke unreliable submersibles for rich people.
As my A&P instructor says...(Aircraft mechanic/"Engineer" in UK[Airframe and Powerplant])
"DIY kills and costs cheap, Engineers are expensive but keep you alive. (Us mechanics get paid to listen to Engineers and make sure the maintenance manuals are followed)"
Unlike the water, air is sort of inverse. But you enter a stripped down transport category aircraft, its a pressure chamber just like a deep sea vehicle. Literal bulkhead at the tail section. I cant imagine using carbon fiber for that. You would cause decompression and let me tell you, its a long way down. As for Mr Rush, it was so quick he never knew his mistake.
Thanks for doing this - I will admit to having to leave your previous video because I just could not get over the audio quality. Glad I could watch, I found very informative
Thanks. I appreciate the audio is now just ‘bad but louder’ but at least it’s audible without having to turn the volume to 11 now I guess.
I have an engineering degree, computers, doesn’t make me qualified to build a sub. The whole “every engineer should know basics” drives me nuts, you know the fundamentals in your discipline. For example, I can do math in binary in my head and spell my name in ASCII (in hexadecimal) by memory. I’m rather certain a mechanical engineer cannot. For us that’s table stakes, less so if you want to build a sub.
This was an extremely informative and very insightful video. Hypothesis stated, and explained very clearly.
When the CEO of a company tells you safety is a pure waste and inhibits innovation avoid that product.
I will give him credit, though, he did go down with the ship, and he will be remembered in infamy forever.
Stockton Rush was responsible for the implosion.
Damn second time watching it and you do such a good job of explaining technical risk management it’s fantastic
i watched it once, i watched it twice, well maybe 3 times. I will watch it again
Gladly will watch this again!
i almost got whiplash from shaking my head so much at all the ignorant things stockton did making this sub. stockton rush was a walking, talking example of the dunning-kruger effect.
I've watched quite a number of videos about this tragedy. However, this was one of the more informative videos. I'll gladly watch it again.
The cracks in my screen line up with your graph just before middle!
@1710 The screens is screwed into the hull??
The way that epoxy was applied and the way the ring was seated, there is absolutely no way they can be certain there were no air bubbles inside the film of epoxy and even the thickness of the epoxy film is a big question mark unless precisely measured through external dimensions measurements, x-ray, ultrasound or some other method.
Just want to add that Wired has since reported the supposed reasons hull scans were impossible (not that they absolve OceanGate even a little): "Later, OceanGate engineers found that Titan’s full-size hull was too thick for portable ultrasonic scanners, and a coating Spencer had applied to it would further block the signals. Rush decided that moving the entire sub to a lab for scanning would be too expensive, says a former employee who was familiar with Rush’s thinking."
Too expensive does not equal impossible. It equals bad idea that won't be checked.
I thought the investigation would have published some conclusions about the nature of the failure by now, seemed from the recovered wreckage that the carbon tube failed but would have expected some writeup of what they found by now
Most if your critique is absolutely justified, but a point that should be made is that mass produced consumer products actually have much better quantified risk (because of the massive production volumes) and in many cases higher production tolerances and consistency (because if highly automated production, use of jigs etc, that wouldn't be economically viable on custom/low volume equipment, even built on military budgets.) Consumer products also have levels of testing (literally millions of hours, including red team testing by people using it wrong) that custom products could never get. Mil spec electronic components may be "qualified" and have paper trails as well as a massive price tag, but in most cases are actually just the same thing at the end of the day. I entirely agree with your points about if some products are *suitable* for use in that application, but if a product is suitable, don't be so hard on them for using mass produced consumer items - in some respects they are actually a lower risk path.
Cool breakdown, thanks for the video!
Respect to all engineers who work on deep sea electronics. Either Horowitz or Hill did that work, can't recall, but I remember mentions in ART OF ELECTRONICS
I watched the original video a few hours ago. So good I'll watch the directors cut now.
They blew a seal on the way down
I really good video to study is the Alexmundo 2021 trip onboard the mothership. Titan had a problematic dive but reached the Titanic debris field. On the ascent the ballast failed to release, and they tried to ascend with thrusters. It had to be abandoned so they went into emergency mode and used a safety system to dump the whole ballast mechanism. What is interesting is a suspicion I had regarding the alleged transcript. I always got the feeling that a junior or intern was on the communication. In the video it clearly shows a very young lady typing in full sentences to the Titan with Stockton's wife occasionally overseeing it. My point is that if the Titan was descending too quickly this could offer a possible reason why it wasn't picked up or challenged much earlier. I am not suggesting that it was incompetence, but maybe an intern didn't feel confident to challenge Stockton on how he was piloting the Titan. Just a theory but one in my mind since the transcript appeared.
That was the trip where he suggested they sleep on the seabed (!!!?) wasn’t it?
There is another story, not verified but pretty well corroborated of him getting another sub stuck in the wreckage of the Andres Doria for an hour because he insisted on not handing the controls over to David Lochridge, who actually knew what he was doing.
Very good vid, covered the subject well, and your list of credentials is impressive. I have a qualification in the metal trades, we did study some basic Engineering/Materials science. So those graphs are familiar. To me the most gobsmacking thing about the design was that as far as I know, there wasn't enough, or any testing of the design to see if it could withstand the depths it was going to.
I don't know if there are facilities to test that kind of bottom of the ocean pressures but would be a start, failing that there is always figuring out a way to get the sub down to those depths with no one inside the thing as many times as it takes to failure. Then you know for sure. Being sealed into the thing with no way of getting out is a non starter for me as well, however arguable it might be.
All up this was an accident that should never have happened.
Carbon fibre reinforced plastic is strong in tension, not in compression & the tube of the submersible was subject to compression, so it seems like the wrong material!
may I suggest that you put the link to this video on the pinned comment under the original oceangate video, so that people can easily navigate to this version?
Thanks. Looks like I forgot to add it there.
I think Oceangates CEO had every right to test and explore new possibilities with the risk of his own life , not charging 250.000 and taking other people's life's after being warned by his own employees that the construction was a pile of crap a year before the accident. They haven't even contacted the families of the deceased to say sorry. There's stress limits under water that carbon fibre does not meet and they knew it. But yet again carbon is cheaper than titanium....I hope someone takes it to a legal point and shuts that company down before another innocent life is lost in vain
This is great. Thanks for sharing it. :)
I wonder if there is a recording of the crunching sounds made during prior dives, like when it got to a certain depth and when it was heading back to the surface. There was one engineer/expert who rode in the sub and was like "that sound is no good, you really shouldn't be using this" and Rush was like "it's fine, chill."
I actually caught the carbide story being a red flag right from the outset. When I first heard it my initial thought was "Hey wait, isn't carbide really brittle when placed under high pressure? Are you sure this would actually work?"
The whole thing had my teeth grinding. I once saw a description of warning signs that a kangaroo was about to attack. Similar trick, but it was meant to show that you retain memory of the details of something after you forget it's false. I predict that some people's takeaway from this video will be carbide guillotines cutting pipes to seal them somehow.
NDT X-ray inspector here (non-film CT and DR, level 2):
I was skeptical of the whole expedition once I heard the pressure vessel was made of carbon fiber. I've seen too many delaminations to trust Carbon Fiber in this or any similar application...
Good, finally an excuse to rewatch this
Ill give this a rewatch.
Great information, thankyou.
I love the way you started this (I mean the orignal video proper, which I saw months ago): your voice is so low-key that I had, originally, no idea at all that you were having a laugh. I experienced the same thing just now: I was thinking: "hang on, is this the bit where he says he's just been talking nonsense about BOPs... or does it come later?". Either way, I don't exactly know how to characterise this skill: maybe you've missed your vocation as a) a dead-pan standup comedian or b) some profession such as an estate agent.
glad you eventually came around to the jet fins :)
Everything at Oceangate was done on the cheap
Engineers ALWAYS know its going to work, until it doesn't. Talk to the blokes in the field when designing.
i saw a marine biologist with 0 qualifications like yours who once rode in a submarine being invited to give 12-min news segments and presentations on mainstream TV.
you ARE a leading expert if you choose to present yourself as such! legit - like, go and email TV stations with your qualifications and this documentary you made as the 1 year anniversary comes up.
seeing the standard for some of the ‘experts’ speaking on the Titan so far and recently, especially to the general audience, you will absolutely get featured and be able to have a platform to share your thoughts.
have confidence!! just because you’re not a submarine engineer doesn’t mean you’re not an expert!
The whole reason I made this video in the first place is I was sick of news outlets reporting on rumours and making baseless assumptions.
People like me, and indeed subject matter experts, are rarely aired on mainstream news reports because we would have very little to say that didn’t sound either boring to a viewer or adversarial to a journalist (If you haven’t guessed, I have very little respect for most journalists)
I just watched this last night 😂 time to watch it again
Last I knew, Stockton's life support strategy for smoke mitigation in the event something started sparking or overheating was to use airline-style PBE's (Protective Breathing Equipment). It's a sealed hood with O2 canisters that provide 15 minutes of breathable air. 15 MINUTES. No way to vent those fumes of course, but at least you have a quarter of an hour to contemplate your imminent demise.
Yeah we had those when I worked offshore. Better than nothing I guess.
@@Alexander-the-ok They're great to help you combat a fire with a halon bottle and for short term exposure to smoke and fumes to escape a bad situation, but useless if you're more than 15 minutes away from breathable air. Which also highlights the total futility of having a fire extinguisher in that kind of vehicle when using it will extinguish your life as well.
Thanks! You're right. The audio for this is great.
Very interesting, thank you, now speaking as a layman on the engineering aspect of this tragedy I once read somewhere that if a thing looks wrong then it usually is, I do know that a perfect sphere is the best shape to spread the external pressure, therefore perfect for 'Titanic depths', I also know carbon fiber is brittle, but, just my gut feeling would have stopped me from getting on that 'odd looking' contraption!
I may be late to the party here, but test regimes are most certainly available for structures like the Titan, since there are composite pressure vessels all over the place (for internal pressure) and some submersibles have glass fibre pressure hulls and are Lloyds rated (you can see one, the LR3 at the Gosport Submarine Museum). The LR5 submersibles, which were used as rescue submersibles around the world (including the Royal Navy, had a glass fibre pressure hull and steel transfer chamber, but after about 25 years, it was rebuilt in all steel because every 5 years it had to be taken out of the water and rerated; with steel you only need to Xray the welds. With composite, you have to either apply ultrasonic inspection or Infrared imaging of every square inch of the material of the hull itself, so it's not ideal to have your rescue submersible in a shed for weeks being minutely examined if there's ever a disaster. There are 6500m rated ROVs and large UUVs made of Carbon, but they are manufactured with incredibly high precision using automated multiaxial tape lay-up and autoclaving and only carry electronic equipment. The winding process used on the Titan is used on undersea pipes (again using glass, not carbon) and because it's not done in a vacuum, those pipes sometimes fail due to delamination. The pressure hull of the Titan did not seem to undergo testing nor inspection (Rush thought destroying 1/3 scale models in a hydrostatic chamber would do) but there's a submersible in the Gdansk Maritime Museum called the LTS-7 (or Grzes) with a spherical composite pressure hull (once again, glass not carbon) and they went through five full-scale pressure hulls during the development process in order to test the concept; the finished version is super-light but is only rated to 200m with a 10cm / 4 inch thick pressure hull that's a sandwich structure. I believe the 1000m rated Deepflight One (the submersible you see on the opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise) may also have had a core of syntactic foam (although it's not something I've been able to confirm). The Deepflight Challenger was made of carbon fibre, but it was designed for one single dive (and even then, it was fully tested and inspected); Richard Branson actually bought it after Steven Fossett's death and intended to offer tourists the chance to dive in it but the designers and manufactures put a stop to the idea because the intention was to use it one time only, then stick the thing in a museum. There's 1ATM diving suits that go down to 610m made of glass fibre, and back in the 90s, the US Navy had one made of carbon fibre and pressure tested it thinking it would go far deeper. It failed at less than half the operational depth of the Lloyds rated glass fibre versions.
14:40. Wow while in Thailand completing my PADDY ADVANCED dives. At 30mtrs. I was only negatively buoyant in a narrow Circumstance “ I’d asked for mod weights but told they’d run out. After 7- 8 mins at 30m I’d used up half my air so I started shooting up. . My ears sinuses went ballistic pain pain. I turned head Down started swimming like crazy to stop the rapid accent. I probs got to 20m. When the Instructor spotted me swam up grabbed me and stabilised me. Honestly I arrived on deck throwing up totally disoriented with lots of back Stomach pain. Holiday dive course really great completed. My paddy. But honestly put me off diving. Nearly killed me.
I don't know if this question has been asked and answered before, but the monitor mounts are bolted to the inside wall. Did the toilet roll have an inner toilet roll people sat in or did they bolt them to the actual carbon fibre superstructure?
It might be because of the discussion about another company beginning trips down to go see the Titanic.
Watched it the first time and I’ll watch it again.