Once you realize that ingenuity is not going to be enough to survive: Seal everyone in, then fake the whole experience with a screen built in to the porthole.
I dunno. I would never go with wireless over cabled, certainly not as my primary steering method, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the only method onboard to control the thing.
Maybe it’s better if these things are build by paranoid instead of adventurous people?
Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface radios, the limited communication with the surface, the lack of any exits, and even the use of carbon fiber (which is strong in tension, good for high pressure tanks, but weak in compression -- not what I'd want for a submarine under massive compression)
The problems here are just several fold: maybe the door won't help you at depth, but there's a pretty wide envelope of conditions in which a fast escape hatch is the difference between surviving a fire and burning alive.
The CEO of OceanGate said he "learned the lessons of aviation", but this is obviously BS if he's locking himself in a capsule with flammable equipment, piping oxygen in, and just hoping it doesn't burn. That's a recipe for disaster we know how to avoid.
If we’re talking worst mistake I think the lack of any form of communications equipment is it.
Hell, have a 4km long cable. Even if you can’t communicate because the sub is on fire or imploded you can drag them back up.
Of course it’s not nice if your sub implodes, but that’s kind of a requirement for using it in the first place.
Your car is filled with cheap off-the-shelf *car* components. There's far more scrutiny given to car parts, even though they're cheap stuff.
But to get back to the controller, while it's not necessarily the worst problem, it is emblematic. That's why people reduce it to that. It signifies immediately what kind of company they were. Emphasis on were.
So many problems with this scheme, though. No rigorous test (depth, survival, atmosphere), lack of SMEs, carbon fiber hull, failed to learn lessons from aviation (don't lock people in a room that can burn), lack of ventilation, failure to provide emergency breathing, no voice comms, and finally the comms loss during testing that was normalized as operating procedure.
All you'd have to do is not make one of those mistakes, and you'd be doing a better job. These are all issues that are solved on US Navy subs, where we train hundreds of people every year to work on and retire just as many. You don't need to know all these systems, though, just find a retired sub chief and have them walk you through the safety systems.
One thing I've picked up working in software, is that you can enter new domains with relative ease if you just align yourself with experts, and at least listen to their advice. This isn't something that happened on the sub, and I'd be surprised if it ultimately didn't contribute to the total vehicle loss.
All credit to SV Seeker, it is a wildly impressive project, but I don't think they would be mad if I suggest they had the resolver spirit while putting that vessel together.
Consumers (who don't really understand the dangers of the environment they're about to enter) just blindly trust that they're in good hands, and in this case it seems like they were deceived about the trustworthiness of this vessel.
But this trip to see the Titanic is completely different. This was an experimental trip on an experimental vessel (they signed specifically to that affect). Anyone who thinks that journeying down to 13,000 feet to see the titanic was going to be as risk free as crossing the Puget sound or going to disney world is crazy. The sheer reason they are paying for this trip is because it has been relatively impossible up to this point. They are breaking new frontiers by doing so which is by its nature inherently risky. There has to be known risk involved here. It isn't a ride at disneyland. This was serious. I am sure they didn't actually expect to die, but they had to know that there was a realistic possibility of that outcome.
Consumers/the general public are less aware of the risk, and as another reply said more likely to trust a company on it's safety. They aren't marine engineers so they have to. That's why it's a regulated industry.
Researches are making an entirely different risk/benefit calculation and it's useful to society that they can make different risk tradeoffs. Key example, astronauts.
In that is an implication that research is more important to society than a holiday activity.
Did they? Knowing the risks, imo, requires more than just being aware of the failure scenarios - it also means having an understanding of the probabilities involved. Playing Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 rounds have the same worse case outcomes, but the odds are very different.
Not doing destructive testing, hiding info from the guy who was supposed to look at the ship, etc. that's avoiding getting a handle on risk.
> None of us would have designed a better submarine
Probably not, but otoh, it sounds like they probably could have done so and failed to take the necessary steps to make it happen.
https://www.chronline.com/stories/woman-paralyzed-in-toledo-...
This would have been a scrappy solution for a sub in a pool where there was a chance for help. You don't take paying customers on a scrappy sub to the bottom of the ocean.
Peers in the industry though have expressed concerns, such as in this 2018 letter:
> This letter is sent on behalf of our industry members who have collectively expressed unanimous concern regarding the development of TITAN and the planned Titanic Expedition. Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-soc...
Or when they fired and sued their director of marine operations who raised safety concerns:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23854184-oceangate-v...
I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.
It's only when it blows up that it turns from "ingenuity" into "amateur hour".
People who participated in this knew the risks. They fucked up. None of us would have designed a better submarine, and I'd wager we're not all that qualified to tell a crappy design from a good one, except - once again - after the fact.