The fact they took it to some testing facility to test for cyclic fatigue shows that they understood that it was an unknown in the design, decided to test it at a facility designed for exactly that, it failed so they redesigned presumably with a design to mitigate the failures of design one. They probably took design two through the same testing process, and presumably it passed or they wouldn't have paying guests in it.

This sounds like the engineering process going right.

Agreed. The only issue would be if they never re-tested the redesign, but that would be quite unreasonable and they would deserve the lawsuits.

No coincidence the company is in Everett. LinkedIn shows lots of people overlap with Boeing. Also the CEO built his own composite airplane while an undergrad at Princeton.

It's completely unclear how that is "no coincidence" or how that is at all relevant.

the joke, you see, is that there must be something in the water or other environmental factor in the area that causes gross negligence toward commercial vessels

No, that's how a lot of aerospace testing works. You break it, see where it broke, and make that point bigger (thicker).

Yeah, destructive testing is still a must for process checking. Though non destructive methods for even composites keep getting better! Composites are very very hard to test though, and I think it's one of the biggest bottleneck to their usage.

(I work in NDT(non destructive testing) but on the software stack not the probes/scanners. So I'm not sure if my last point is still true these days! )

>They're potentially opening themselves up to charges for killing these people. They knowingly or recklessly put them on a boat when it isn't capable of reaching the depth safely and now they are dead.

Would the fact they almost certainly got the people to sign a fairly extensive release before they took them into international waters be relevant? I don't know how much of the "anything goes on the sea" thing is a myth.

“anything goes at sea” is definitely not right. I think international waters is pretty meaningless from an individual standpoint since the individual or company would always be under the jurisdiction of the ship’s registration as well as their own country (for lots of laws, such as you can’t sail off shore on a foreign ship and cheat on your taxes). International waters is mostly relevant for countries.

The CEO was in the vessel and probably would not have put his skin in the game if he didn't believe the vessel was safe.

I don’t know about that. Charter commercial airline flights have worse safety records than other airlines. Often those involve pilots who are close to the business end of things and make poor choices because of it, even if it presents them some personal risk.

Do you really know “knowingly” or “recklessly”? Unless you do, that is extremely speculative. Not to even mention assuming that they’re dead.