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Titanic tourist sub missing

I remember reading an autobiographical book by a woman aviator, Beryl Markham, West With the Night, which detailed some of her flights over parts of Africa that were still uncharted, when she was living in Kenya. I remembered her plane was an Avro Avian. Some time later, I randomly happened to be in the air and space gallery at Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and I saw one of those biplanes, and it looked a bit like a model aeroplane, cobbled together with balsa wood and the wings covered in canvas. It did look like the kind of thing that was probably held together with gaffer tape at some point. I was impressed previously, but having seen one, I amazed that she'd flown in that tiny flimsy looking thing. She led quite an extraordinary life.


I grew up with a library that didn't have a book printed after 1950. I got a good education in the "adventure" books they had. My favorite was Frances Chichester. They also had the entire Tarzan and Mars series from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Looking back, these books were chock full of "white man's burden" and "Great white hunter" themes. I was too uneducated in the world to understand that at the time. I will say one thing in their favor, they provided me with an entertainment alternative in a time and place where unhealthy drinking was the main alternative.
 
I had a library that didn't have a book printed after 1950. I got a good education in "adventure" books they had. My favorite was Frances Chichester. They also had the entire Tarzan and Mars series from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Looking back, these books were chock full of "white man's burden" and "Great white hunter" themes. I was too uneducated in the world to understand that at the time.
I really hope tik tok doesn't replace books. I used to read when I was bored. I'm old fashioned and out of touch
 
Jesus fucking Christ.


Oh god, that’s fucking chilling. That poor boy.

I‘m reading on a Canadian news site that was linked to a Guardian article that they apparently tried to abort this when they were about 1000 ft down and still had coms, but couldn’t, so there must’ve been some kind of indication that they needed to get back up. Which is less comforting than they thought they didn’t know what was coming.
 
I grew up with a library that didn't have a book printed after 1950. I got a good education in the "adventure" books they had. My favorite was Frances Chichester. They also had the entire Tarzan and Mars series from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Looking back, these books were chock full of "white man's burden" and "Great white hunter" themes. I was too uneducated in the world to understand that at the time. I will say one thing in their favor, they provided me with an entertainment alternative in a time and place where unhealthy drinking was the main alternative.
Yes. I vaguely recall the book I read being full of 'tales of derring do' and I vaguely recollected her adventures sounding amazing, flying over uncharted territory, technical difficulties with the biplane, she lands in the bush in the middle of nowhere and fixes it kind of thing. There were probably lions prowling around at the time too. All sounded very marvellous and terribly brave. The thought crossed my mind, when I was writing my original post, was about to say 'Well worth reading' and then I quickly thought, Ah, maybe not, it was probably 25-30 years ago when I read it, it was set in colonial era Kenya, it probably hasn't stood the test of time very well in that respect. She did cross the Atlantic though, which was a creditable achievement, whichever way you look at it.
 
This is quite a good thread comparing that bit of trash with a well engineered deep sea sub…



Another example of doing it right is this vessel: DSV Limiting Factor - Wikipedia

And here's a look at its control system. No cheap game controllers in sight:

0320_06_triton_limitingfactor_05b.jpg
 
Oh god, that’s fucking chilling. That poor boy.

I‘m reading on a Canadian news site that was linked to a Guardian article that they apparently tried to abort this when they were about 1000 ft down and still had coms, but couldn’t, so there must’ve been some kind of indication that they needed to get back up. Which is less comforting than they thought they didn’t know what was coming.
Link?
 
That poor kid

19-year old victim’s aunt: He was “terrified” prior to trip
The aunt of 19-year-old Suleman Dawood told NBC that her nephew was “terrified” of the expedition prior to embarking on it.

Azmeh Dawood, the older sister of the Pakistani billionaire businessman Shahzada Dawood told the outlet that Suleman had told a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the journey.

“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath ... It’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh said.

“I feel disbelief … It’s an unreal situation,” she said, adding, “I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to … I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them.”

Azmeh also talked about her younger brother Shahzada who also died in the implosion, saying, “He was my baby brother … I held him up when he was born.”

She added that her brother was “absolutely obsessed” with the Titanic from an early age and that he loved visiting museum exhibitions on the wreck.

 
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AP is reporting that the US Navy, post event, identified an anomaly in their acoustic submarine surveillance data which was likely a signal arising from the failure of the submersible (tallied with the location and time of loss). The USN passed this information on to the USCG, which continued its search because the data were not considered to be definitive.
 
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Except it - arguably - apparently wasn't designed to withstand pressure of the type it was operating at. Wasn't the journey down supposed to take two hours, and they lost contact at 1'45"? So... three quarters of the way down.

That viewing porthole/bubble thing was supposedly not rated to go down to the depths of the Titanic, it was only rated to go down to about a third of the depth. Or something like that. Vague recollection. I forget the exact numbers mentioned. But the spec really wasn't designed to withstand it's operational pressures.

If anything, you'd want it the other way round, over-specced, rather than under-specced. He knew it was under-specced - again vague recollections of previous posts or articles read - but he didn't want to test it/didn't want to spend money on higher spec.
A couple of issues here. A pressure vessel code like ASME U uses safety factors of 3.5 or 4.0. If you’ve bought a viewing port and you believe it’s good for 4x1300m, you might be tempted to assume it’s good for 5200m. Reading some of the interviews with the guy, he said plexiglass would start cracking before failing, allowing them to come to the surface before it popped, presumably. He also said they were using acoustic means to detect overstress of the hull…ie listening for cracks forming and propagating. This is a crazy way to operate, if you are assuming safety factors are that simple. The fatigue life of the carbon fibre and particularly the connection with the titanium is guesswork. I don’t know how many stress cycles this pressure vessel has done, but it sounds like quite a few. A structure can exceed its ultimate strength once, obviously. It may be able to go to 50% ultimate strength 100 times , and 25% 1,000 times. With steel there is a lot of data for the S-N curves (the graph of stress vs number of cycles to failure). Even then, there is a huge amount of scatter. Novel structures without a huge amount test data, like carbon fibre/titanium composite structures need to be very conservatively designed, partly for the ultimate strength, but also for the fatigue strength. Add into that inspectability. Earlier we discussed that carbon fibre isn’t amenable to non-destructive examination…offshore we add a factor of 10 to the fatigue life of a structure we can’t inspect.
 
Posted by petee elsewhere:


Literally everything I’ve seen about this missing submarine is insane and sketchy AF… almost none of it makes any sense whatsoever,” the former president’s son wrote in a multiple question mark tweet on Wednesday. “How long till we find other external factors making it even more so???”

I mean, he's not wrong with the bolded bit, but would love to know where he's going with it (Hunter Biden's laptop? :eek: :eek: :mad: ).

On board the sub are British billionaire Hamish Harding, 59; Pakistani-born billionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood; French maritime expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77; and OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush, 61, who was piloting the vessel.

and I'd question the "expert" bit of that.
 
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Another example of doing it right is this vessel: DSV Limiting Factor - Wikipedia

And here's a look at its control system. No cheap game controllers in sight:

0320_06_triton_limitingfactor_05b.jpg

Indeed, was going to post on that... been googling/youtubing around Victor Vescovo's (no, no idea; another random billionaire) '5 deeps' expedition, which this was built for, it is just a totally different level of operation. I mean they go to Challenger deep, which is a lot deeper, but still. In many ways still a similar order of challenge.

What's additionally baffling is that Hamish Harding has actually been on that one. Did he not raise an eyebrow at any of the shit going on in Rush's operation?

Anyway, couple of links. Though be warned it is horrifyingly TED talky

Actual dive stuff starts about half way through this:



Fill your design and overly dramatic engineering boots. There's definitely some last minute stuff in there, though it comes after they went to Russia to test the pressure hull before even submerging it... And I think it's all rush to a window for a specific test dive that was Vescovo solo. I only skimmed the video because, again, the TED talk of it all:



I'll add that, in light of Suleiman being afraid of the whole thing, the rest of them can just get to fuck at this point. At best maybe Dawood Sr was a bit in the 'Tim nice but dim' mould of rich people, but fuck they should have known better.
 
American military, Navy I suppose reporting that they picked up a sound that could have been an implosion at the time the submersible lost communications with its surface ship.
 
Posted by petee elsewhere:


Literally everything I’ve seen about this missing submarine is insane and sketchy AF… almost none of it makes any sense whatsoever,” the former president’s son wrote in a multiple question mark tweet on Wednesday. “How long till we find other external factors making it even more so???”

I mean, he's not wrong with the bolded bit, but would love to know where he's going with it (Hunter Biden's laptop? :eek: :eek: :mad: ).



and I'd question the "expert" bit of that.

Has he blamed "woke" for it yet?
 
Posted by petee elsewhere:


Literally everything I’ve seen about this missing submarine is insane and sketchy AF… almost none of it makes any sense whatsoever,” the former president’s son wrote in a multiple question mark tweet on Wednesday. “How long till we find other external factors making it even more so???”

I mean, he's not wrong with the bolded bit, but would love to know where he's going with it (Hunter Biden's laptop? :eek: :eek: :mad: ).



and I'd question the "expert" bit of that.
It was hunter biden's game controller
 
Indeed, was going to post on that... been googling/youtubing around Victor Vescovo's (no, no idea; another random billionaire) '5 deeps' expedition, which this was built for, it is just a totally different level of operation. I mean they go to Challenger deep, which is a lot deeper, but still. In many ways still a similar order of challenge.

What's additionally baffling is that Hamish Harding has actually been on that one. Did he not raise an eyebrow at any of the shit going on in Rush's operation?

Anyway, couple of links. Though be warned it is horrifyingly TED talky

Actual dive stuff starts about half way through this:



Fill your design and overly dramatic engineering boots. There's definitely some last minute stuff in there, though it comes after they went to Russia to test the pressure hull before even submerging it... And I think it's all rush to a window for a specific test dive that was Vescovo solo. I only skimmed the video because, again, the TED talk of it all:



I'll add that, in light of Suleiman being afraid of the whole thing, the rest of them can just get to fuck at this point. At best maybe Dawood Sr was a bit in the 'Tim nice but dim' mould of rich people, but fuck they should have known better.

Does anyone know if it's possible for wealthy tourists to visit the Titanic in a proper vessel like this at greater expense, or was the plastic tube the only option? I'd assume, given that these were people probably able to splash an extra million odd without too much pain, that their options were limited to one.
 
Rich, selfish, cavalier fuckers now lionised as "True Explorers" FFS.

These people didn't get on this milkfloat and then die because they were rich, they got on this milkfloat and died because they were cheap.

The posts upthread about other DSV's and the systems and cost involved show what the going rate of going down to 4,000m, and coming back alive, are - but these people didn't want to pay that, they decided that all that cost, testing and redundancy is for losers, and they would be fine going down there on the maritime equivalent of that forklift truck the A-Team turned into a tank that fires cabbages for a tenth of the price.

This thing isn't about wealth, it's about hubris - bad stuff doesn't happen to me because of Who I Am, and because I'm Always The Smartest Guy In The Room.

The kid is a victim of his overbearing father and the fathers pride, but the rest of them..
 
These people didn't get on this milkfloat and then die because they were rich, they got on this milkfloat and died because they were cheap.

The posts upthread about other DSV's and the systems and cost involved show what the going rate of going down to 4,000m, and coming back alive, are - but these people didn't want to pay that, they decided that all that cost, testing and redundancy is for losers, and they would be fine going down there on the maritime equivalent of that forklift truck the A-Team turned into a tank that fires cabbages for a tenth of the price.

Hence my question above. The news about Titan is chaffing-up my googling, but I can't find much about other more responsible outfits offering such trips for more money, though there are references to Titanic tourism having existed for 30 years.

Some things you just can't do. Until recently the only way for civilians to fly in current jet fighters was to chuck the Russian military 20 grand, and I guess if a billionaire offered the British Army a quarter mill for a go in an Apache, he'd be told to fuck off.
 
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