Missing Titanic submarine

[Twinklesgolden]

How horrifying that a submarine carrying 5 people has gone missing. Apparently there’s only 96 hours of air on the submarine when it sets off.

The people on board must be terrified!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65953872.amp

You can't just pop down to the Atlantic floor bed without going through a shit load of red tape first
How do you know?
Same as climbing Mount Everest, it's not like you can just rock up with your backpack
Again a very poor and irrelevant comparison - 800 people a year climb Everest, 500 a week visit base camp. An average of 5-10 people a year die on the mountain - "having insurance" doesn't stop that.

From what people have said here, Oceangate do sound like a bunch of cowboys.

They probably haven't bothered with insurance. The owners can just let the company go bankrupt if need be, and unless they are personally held responsible they can set up a new company doing whatever any time.

I'm sure that whatever happens, but especially if it ends in tragedy, there will be an accident investigation - they're done for marine incidents similar to the investigations for aircraft incidents. And I doubt Oceangate will come out of any such investigation looking good.

By 11am on Friday morning these people are will be dead and lost at sea.

Whatever you think of their money, they are people with friends and fammily who will be devastated right now. It is the most horrible wait, even for me who knows none of them.

All we can do is watch. Horrible.

Well my first thought was I hope they find them soon and they're all alive!

But yeah, if they ARE (very sadly) dead, then I think an early and swift passing would be preferable - compared to 4 or 5 days in there just slowly suffocating ... in the dark.. and knowing they are probably not going to be found... Doesn't bear thinking about.

There's not enough money in the world available to pay me enough to make me go in a thing like that mini sub, and down into the ocean. Not a chance. Feel outta breath just thinking about it. I am claustrophobic though.

I do wish that they are still alive and are found SOON. Within the next half a day. Sadly, the reality of this is vanishingly small.

I don't give a shit that they are rich and privileged. They deserve to survive and live. So stupid and nasty for anyone to say/imply they deserve it coz they're rich! (Like a few people have on social media/various message forums........)

I do agree with pps though, that I don't think anyone should be going too far down to look, as it's clearly dangerous, and we don't want any more fatalities. These men knew the risks when they took on this very dangerous mission, and although it's sad that they're missing. I don't think anyone should be risking their lives going deep down into the ocean to get them.

As far as I know there's no plan to used manned submersibles in a rescue. Very few can get that deep and I don't think any are available. It'll all be ROVs. There's still the risks that are always present at sea, but I don't think those involved in the search and rescue are at any exceptional danger.

It's not possible to insure the sub or the trips. It's a completely unregulated area. There isn't a governing body or anyone that you can complain to.

I heard something about this earlier, they said they wouldn’t be able to as even if they did have a another submersible they would send down it can’t actually do anything at that depth to help out even if they did locate

They didn’t take their millions down with them.

Surely if they lost power and it's dark and cold they have likely already perished?

Depends on what has happened.

If they are stuck on the sea bed then that's where they will stay until ultimately the pressure over time causes an implosion as the structural integrity of the sub degrades. Rescue at these depths is not possible.

If an implosion has already happened and is the cause of the comms failure there won't be much to recover. The pressures involved are enormous. Think of a can of pop being stomped on. The debris will then sink to the sea bed and stay there.

If they are floating on the surface they may be found and recovered (hopefully alive).

A man on the radio had been in one before, and it hit a propeller from the Titanic, got caught up in it,
he thought he was a goner
same thing may have happened.

'Their names known only to god.'

And in my heart .. always..
Plus those currently lost near Newfoundland ...

All life lost is more than a tragedy...

The bodies of the drowned sometimes surface on their own, but this depends on the qualities of the water. The putrefaction of flesh produces gases, primarily in the chest and gut, that inflate a corpse like a balloon. In warm, shallow water, decomposition works quickly, surfacing a corpse within two or three days. But cold water slows decay, and people who drown in deep water, 30 metres or below, may never surface. The weight of the water pins down their bodies.

So at 3800 metres deep and 400 miles from land the bodies will never surface or wash up.

It does sound like some teenagers wanted to go see the Titanic and so they made the idea into a company and designed a vehicle. There is definitely a lack of planning, of contingencies and of understanding the broader context of innovation, e.g. why regulatory bodies exist, ethics, corporate responsibility and so on. Even their public communications is notably poor. Their statements are very awkward and the employees seem to have pulled down the OceanGate signs at their boatyard and gone home. It's the pulling down the signs that says to me unprepared and panicking teenaged minds.*

*I'm sure some teenagers would do much better. I'm just saying it does sound like a harebrained scheme that managed to get some funding.

By the by, does anyone know when the launch ship reported the submersible missing to authorities?

Sadly, small boat disasters happen really frequently. Billionaires in a submarine going missing at the Titanic wreck site is not something that happens every week.

I wholeheartedly agree with you @SophiaElizabethGrace.

News is saying they’re either on the sea bed or on the surface, not in between. If the sub ascended it’s on the surface by now, and if it didn’t ascend it’s on the bottom.

Apparently the ballast was attached with dissolvable links, which automatically dissolve and release the ballast after being in seawater for 16 hours. So the sub has definitely released its ballast by now, and if it was going to float to the top it would have done. The fact that they’re not finding it on the surface suggests it’s on the bottom, and is either trapped or damaged so it can’t float to the top. Unfortunately probably the latter, because the former wouldn’t disable its comms.

The US Navy has a ship capable of recovering the sub from the bottom. They used it to recover a crashed fighter jet from the same depth in the South China Sea last year. The ship has a long cable, they used a remote vehicle to wrap the cable around the jet and winch it to the surface. The problem is that in order to do this they have to locate the sub, which is extremely difficult. They would also have to find it fairly quickly as they would need time to winch it up before the air runs out.

Not entirely sure why they would bother with insurance. If you are willing to sign a declaration to say you know you are at risk of death and are already not only willing but able to pay 250k for a seat and you are a billionaire then there is nothing to insure. Is insurance not for those of us who cannot afford something that may happen that we could not forsee? They would all be well life insured. That said if I was a wife or mum of one of them I wouldnt give a flying one about money at this point I would just want my loved one home.

In case this hasn’t been posted yet:

Titan's depth capabilities were downgraded short of the Titanic

The hull of the Titan vessel "showed signs of cyclic fatigue," according to a January 2020 interview with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is aboard the missing vessel. Rush told Geekwire that due to that stress, the hull rating was downgraded to a depth of 3,000 meters, 800 meters short of the Titanic's depth.

In a December 2019 slideshow that appears to have been presented to the Deep Submergence Science Committee of the University — National Oceanographic Laboratory System, OceanGate listed the depth capability of the Titan as 3,000 meters.

At the time, the CEO was announcing a new round of funding for the company, which he said would go toward funding new vessels that could go deeper than the Titan.

But in 2021, OceanGate announced that Titan, not another vessel, had completed a trip to the Titanic. There had been no public update about Titan's depth rating since it was downgraded.

On the company's current webpage, however, the site uses the exact same language, but with a different 4,000 meter depth, which puts it beyond the depth of the Titanic: "Titan is a Cyclops-class manned submersible designed to take five people to depths of 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) for site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software."
_

Sounds like they didn’t get funding to build a new one and decided to chance it with the Titan. When this was successful I guess they thought it was good enough to carry on with. I wonder if their waivers included this little detail?

Oh my god, imagine the pressure on whoever's driving this things. He's responsible for five lives. Horrible.

Well as we don't know exactly what happened, it's not possible to assign blame to any one individual. It could have been a catastrophic hull failure, or it could have been some external event. We may never know.

Reading this surely means the titan crew are in an even worse situation. The air will be extremely poor quality by now

That is assuming the ballast and dissolvable material all work as intended.

Also, they could very well be on the surface. No-one can say for sure. They just haven't been found, they're not "not there".

@YouLittlePlonka the regulatory position isn’t comparable to access to Mount Everest at all. Nepal legislates for access to Mount Everest within its jurisdiction. The Titanic wreck site is in international waters. Since 2020 a UK-US treaty has to a limited extent protected it by requiring licences for access inside the hull of the Titanic wreck or for removing artefacts. But that is all.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rms-titanic-wreck-to-be-protected-under-historic-treaty-with-us

I thought I'd read somewhere they had upgraded the titan. I can't remember where I read it though..