Titanic tourist sub goes missing in Atlantic Ocean, June 2023 #2

[Teche]

Taken from the above (paste in quotes, I’m on an annoying mobile device):

“A rescue expert says the debris found in the search for Titan was "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".

David Mearns, who is friends with two of the passengers on board Titan, says he is part of a WhatsApp group involving The Explorers Club.

Mr Mearns told Sky News the president of the club, who is "directly connected" to the ships on the site, said to the group: "It was a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible."

Mr Mearns says: "Again this is an unconventional submarine, that rear cover is the pointy end of it and the landing frame is the little frame that it seems to sit on."

He says this confirms that it is the submersible.

Mr Mearns says he knows both British billionaire Hamish Harding and the French sub pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

"It means the hull hasn't yet been found but two very important parts of the whole system have been discovered and that would not be found unless its fragmented," he added.

Mr Mearns also spoke about the fairing of the submarine - shaped like a fishtail - and said: "If the faring is off and the frame is off - then something really bad has happened to the entire structure."

"On the news that we have yet, they haven't found the hull of which the men are inside."”

I wish they would allow the family to be notified and then the press conference before leaking reports.

 

[MachinaCollecta]

I feel a little differently about the time line...I do pray that it was an implosion and it was a quick death for these poor people. I believe, it was said that the last communication was appx 1:45 hours into the decent and they would have put them a little above the wreckage site.
For me, I hope that the loss of communication wasn't the TOD, I hope that before that happened that they did get a change to see what they risk there lives to see. I hope they all got wonderful views of the ship in all her remaining glory and felt that amazing satisfaction before the sub breached. I can picture all of them cheering, smiling, laughing, pointing their fingers and marveling at the sight and I can even picture the father and son embracing for the thrill and excitement.

RIP adventurers...

You very well might be right. I think what you’ve described would be at least a lovely way of them achieving what they wanted even if it has resulted in a sad outcome.

 

[Erutan]

I’m going to choose to think of it as five people who wanted to be as close to the Titanic wreck as humanly possible, and now are microscopically intertwined with it somehow.

NOT a merry outcome, not what the objective was meant to be, but nevertheless that is the result.

I’m grateful that identifiable sections of Titan have been spotted, so we are not left with an eternal mystery once those are retrieved and examined by experts.


Rest together, Titan and Titanic.

Bbm.
Agreed.
Do not want another Amelia Earhart or MH370 situation.

RIP to the five men, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, Suleman Dawood, PH Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush.

 

[imstilla.grandma]

Boeing was not a partner in the construction of the Titan, it said Wednesday, despite a 2021 news release from OceanGate listing the aerospace company as a “partner” that provided “design and engineering support.”

“Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” the company said in a statement, declining to comment further about OceanGate’s assertions.

Similarly, the University of Washington said it was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the submersible despite OceanGate’s claims in a 2021 court filing.

The school’s Applied Physics Laboratory “initially signed a $5 million research collaborative agreement with OceanGate, but only $650,000 worth of work was completed before the two organizations parted ways,” spokesperson Victor Balta told CNN in a statement.

“That collaboration resulted in a steel-hulled vessel, named the Cyclops 1, that can travel to 500 meters depth, which is far shallower than the depths that OceanGate’s TITAN submersible traveled to. As stated earlier, the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the TITAN submersible used in the RMS TITANIC expedition,” Balta added.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/21/us/oceangate-expeditions-submersible-titanic/index.html

 

[Blondiexoxo]

Bbm: Agreed 100 %.
An accident waiting to happen.

I don't believe (for instance) the Dawood's knew how unstable the craft actually was.
Imo.

I think they may have signed the waiver just like many of us do for an operation in hospital for instance. I could believe that they assumed it was just protocol and just a ‘worst case scenario’ thing. I could also see how when something costs 250k a person could easily assume the cost meant the sub was state of the art and that safety would have been paramount of course any of us would think something going to the absolute depths of the ocean would be safe.

MOO

 

[Erutan]

I wish they would allow the family to be notified and then the press conference before leaking reports.

I'd surmise that the families' knew this -- long before it was reported to the press ?

 

[WillenFan21]

Do you guys think the Titan blew up down there day of and its just taken this long for everything float back up?

 

[ArianeEmory]

So many media outlets are releasing information about the debris discovery that there won't be anything left for the official Coast Guard press conference at 3:00PM.

JMO, but I think we’re all accustomed to crime cases and gag orders where the “story” is firmly in one particular jurisdiction. This is a global story at this point, and (again IMO) doesn’t really “belong” to any one country or company.

I also suspect the families of the victims had already been informed well before the debris field info became publicly available.

 

[JDG]

I wish they would allow the family to be notified and then the press conference before leaking reports.

I’m sure the families were given fair notice that this was a possibility/probability long before the media got hood of anything.

 

[d0lphin]

Whereas I'm sorry to hear that the crew are extremely likely to have died, it's a small blessing that it seems like it was sudden. The alternative was a nightmare scenario.

 

[Erutan]

Do you guys think the Titan blew up down there day of and its just taken this long for everything float back up?

I think the debris field is down on the ocean floor ?
Don't quote me on that, I'm not certain.

 

[MsMarple]

It amazes me that the CEO of OceanGate was confident enough to board the Titan. We’ve read about past problems from other passengers, read about the whistle blower ex-employee and the concerns over inadequate testing and sub par equipment like the viewport.

Yet Stockton Rush felt the Titan was safe to dive. And return.

For that matter OceanGate was comprised of a group, not just Rush. They all must have agreed the Titan was seaworthy.

I haven’t been able to connect to the website today.

 

[musicaljoke]

It amazes me that the CEO of OceanGate was confident enough to board the Titan. We’ve read about past problems from other passengers, read about the whistle blower ex-employee and the concerns over inadequate testing and sub par equipment like the viewport.

Yet Stockton Rush felt the Titan was safe to dive. And return.

For that matter OceanGate was comprised of a group, not just Rush. They all must have agreed the Titan was seaworthy.

I haven’t been able to connect to the website today.

Indeed. The CEO was willing to bet his life on it.

 

[imstilla.grandma]

Safety always comes down to a cost/benefit analysis, but there can be very different viewpoints on whether the cost is worth the benefit. No company would spend a billion dollars to mitigate a potential one in a million chance of an incident that might kill one person.

But a company certainly better spend a million dollars to mitigate a potential one in a thousand chance that could kill 10 people. That’s what the cost/benefit analysis reflects. Failing to mitigate a potential incident with those odds and consequences could be construed as gross negligence.

Beyond the CEO’s general comment about safety being pure waste, there were some major red flags that have been reported about this submarine. The widely reported “off-the-shelf video game controller” doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the following two issues.

The big one that caught my attention was the pressure rating. As someone who has designed many pressure vessels, the pressure rating is critical. The viewport on the submarine was reportedly only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, even though the submarine was intended to go down to 4,000 meters in depth. That’s the biggest red flag imaginable.

The Missing Titanic Submarine: Reasonable Risks Versus Recklessness

As someone who spent a career safely designing process equipment, the design of the missing Titanic submarine raised major red flags.

www.forbes.com

 

[LaineyJ]

At lunch and the table next to me was talking about this too. Despite it being high profile right now, it’s so weird to be on websleuths and hearing people near me talking about the same thing.

Very sad for the outcome but… at least they’ve apparently found something.

 

[MollyHarps]

I wonder if they even had the chance to see the Titanic before the end? I hope so.

I really hope so

 

[Puzzles8]

CNN interview is finally on

JMO

 

[Luna20]

The debris is the Titan, just announced on CNN

 

[bestill]

CNN interview is finally on

JMO

CNN interrupted that interview to confirm that the debris is from the Titan. ETA 500 meters from the Titanic

 

[pineapple23]

If this is true, then the whole thing seems amazingly and expensively pointless. JMO

Yes they could see. Otherwise as you say, it would be pretty pointless. But it was just a small porthole not a vast viewing area. Titanic sub search: How a fully-certified submersible differs from missing Titan