World News

Denounced the laws regulating submarine tourism as having “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation”.

He was a consistent Republican donor, apparently, so probably a devotee of the "regulations are holding back innovation" religion. In other words, "I want to cut costs and make more profit, so I'd rather risk people's lives than spend money to protect them."

This trend of companies firing the person responsible for giving safety warnings is really troubling, and I'm concerned that our whole planet is going to go down like that someday.

needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation

Gosh, I can't imagine something as minor as passenger safety being important... Seriously, is this guy real or is it three psychopaths in a trenchcoat?

"might only provide 'milliseconds'

"Don't give me your mumbo-jumbo Mister Scientist - will the alarm go off or not?!"

At least he wasn't a hypocrite about regulations.

Yeah, if they were resurfacing it must have been bad and readily apparent. Based on the hubris of the COE, I imagine he would be quick to handwave away any signs of problems. Not only was he willfully against safety inspections and so forth, but he knew if he had to abandon a trip due to a concern that his brilliantly engineered sub was breaking, he'd be proving all the nay-sayers right. If it got to the point that the COE decided it was time to turn around, it had to be bad. There is also probably a decent chance that he was on notice and could have abandoned the dive earlier and maybe saved everyone on board, but was motivated to keep pushing lest he be met with a chorus of "I told you so" from the diving community. At any rate, if its true they were trying to resurface, they knew and likely spent their last moments terrified.

So, this

Apparently the viewport was rated for 1300m, and they were driving to 4000m. The fact it survived as long as it did is testament to the manufacturer's standards. The fact that it failed is utterly unsurprising.

Also the inspector they hired to verify the sub's safety was denied when he requested equipment to scan and test the hull integrity, was fired when he raised these concerns, and was sued for leaking company secrets when he tried to report it to OSHA.

Honestly the only surprising part is that it survived the previous thirteen dives before this one.

aerospace engineering

While obviously he intellectually knew the requirements were different, and even managed to build something that survived a few trips, I almost wonder if there is a certain amount of mental inertia there, similar to the old saw, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." In aircraft, and even spacecraft, you do so much more to save weight than would be necessary or appropriate for designing a submarine, and your pressure vessel will never need to handle more than 1 atmosphere. Again, I'm not suggesting that he was literally stupid and didn't understand that at some level, but I haven't heard from anyone who's been around subs who thinks he was on the right developmental track.

The reports I heard said communication was lost when the sub was at a depth of 3300 meters, not feet. But yeah, carbon fiber seems like a bad choice and the thing was an implosion waiting to happen.

Just to clarify, I think the implosion was likely at 3500 meters, not 3500 feet. The total depth they were going down to was about 4000 meters.

Cameron did it in a sub that was tested and certified. The Titan sub was not actually tested or certified, because that would have been expensive.

Hell, Titan's view port was only rated for 1300 meters, not the 4000 meters of the Titanic wreck.

He's pretty involved in the deep sea submersible community by all accounts, supposedly he's dived to the Titanic site 33 times and been involved in the design of some of the vessels used.

Yeah, that's how he found all the Na'vi actors for Avatar!

I feel bad for the 19 year old boy. He didn't want to go and was very nervous, but it was Father's Day and he wanted to please his dad.

Lol quite poetic indeed: Titanic was considered to be "unsinkable" and OceanGate's CEO said "security is a waste".

They both got a hard reality check from nature and physics.

Oh, way dumber than the Titanic. Titanic was one of the safest ships of its era. It could withstand 4 of its watertight compartments being completely flooded and stay afloat. The issue was that they grazed the iceberg in such a way that 6 compartments ended up being compromised. Despite that, it still stayed afloat for 2 hours. Look how much crap its sister ship the Olympic went through and stayed afloat.

This stupid thing was a disaster waiting to happen.