A submarine made out of carbon fibre material built by a company that openly bragged about using off the shelf components to reduce costs, refused to hire domain experts and fired its director of marine operations for voicing concerns over safety, cutting corners? Say it ain't so. Despite James Cameron being known for his films, people forget he's been actively involved in the development of deep sea submersibles. He's been to the Titanic wreckage site more times than most. Paul-Henri Nargeolet who tragically died on this experimental sub has made 35 trips, Cameron has made 33.
It's not even an accusation at this point, it's the truth. And Cameron is more knowledgeable about this subject than most. The reality is deep sea submersible technology is still an underdeveloped field, evident by the fact few vessels exist that can take humans to such depths and even unmanned vehicles are far few and between.
Oceangate's 2019 blog post Why Isn't Titan Classed (now only available in internet caches), is a stunning display of either deeply flawed logical thinking or a willful attempt to confuse people.
The post basically says, (1) the "vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are the result of operator error, not mechanical failure", and (2) the vehicle classification guidelines are too stringent and stymie innovation.
A rationale person might interpret that as: (1) mechanical-related incidents are very infrequent as a percentage of total incidents, because (2) vehicle guidelines successfully minimize rates of mechanical failure, such that remaining incidents are generally operational in nature.
Oceangate ignores this implication and bluffs its way from pointing out that most incidents are operational in nature (for a sample set of largely mechanically certified crafts) to implying that a focus on operational safety is a reasonable way to minimize total risk (for an uncertified craft).
Boeing cut costs too, they bounced right back. That's the real lesson - you can absolutely get away with cutting corners, firing people who voice concerns, and then kill people. Just wait till the next news cycle and everyone forgets.
Boeing, a global leader for both sales and innovation in an industry that drives the modern world. Oceangate, a rebel "innovator" in a niche market for niche customers
also, the corollary why nobody has died on a voyage to Mars yet
Cameron had a fantastic interview last night on CNN. It was one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen done by Anderson Cooper (probably because he barely spoke…).
There is no question that Cameron has extensive knowledge on this subject. His level of detail on materials, design guide, regulatory agencies was incredible. He knows everything about this subject.
He implied that other companies did hire too many 50-year-old white guys, because they wanted people with lots of sub experience, so this supports your theory. Anyone with previous sub experience would be more likely to know what a safe environment did (and did not) look like.
So is the underlying assumption for this comment chain so far that only old white guys could possibly have enough experience, training or other safety expertise? Or that specifically the absence of an old white man is what doomed them? And not the mile-long list of corners he cut, very knowingly?
And to do that, do we have to ignore that he fired a safety engineer for expressing concerns?
No the underlying assumption is that (among the other items on the mile-long list of cut corners) prioritizing demographics over experience and training was a bad idea.
I don't think that "only old white guys could possibly have enough experience, training or other safety expertise". However, it is probably true that if you exclude that part of the labor pool that does not like your safety look, then you may end up hiring a lot of young people who don't have much experience. Needing an excuse for this, one could claim that you're just avoiding old white guys, which sounds better than avoiding workers with experience to know what a normal safety culture looks like in a submarine.
As to the racial makeup of the experienced-in-a-submarine demographic, I don't know of any data on that, but I would not be surprised if it were mostly anglo.
This is more or less my own take, I just got an impression that the GP was pushing a "woke-ism sunk the sub" (which is not farcical, because gestures at everything), which seems like missing the forest by a long shot.
If the folks who were killed in the sub were arrogant, deluded or just thrill seekers, they paid the full price for those faults as will their families going forward. I think of the many times my own arrogance, pride or just stupidity should have gotten me a Darwin Award. I hope we can learn key lessons from this sad incident without flogging the dead and their families.
Most of the key lessons learned so far were already known by OG and the other industry players well before this and other mission failures had occurred. They not only refused to take the baseline and evidenciarily needed steps to make the craft safe, they fired a safety engineer and bragged about their cavalier attitude. They ignored communications from their peers telling them how unsafe their craft was, especially with paying customers on board. They bragged about breaking rules, and they unprededently didn't get basic deepsea dive certifications.
Pointing out the insane hubris and known-ahead-of-time shortcomings is not flogging the dead. In fact, it's highlighting arguable the most important takeaway so far.
No judgement of OceanGate either way, but the Monday morning quarterbacking is pointless.
Doing dangerous things is dangerous. If we had infinite time and infinite money no corners would be cut for anything, all risk would be subdued, and we'd still be waiting on the first person to climb Everest or go into space. Cameron himself has taken risks in subs, and if one of them imploded I'm sure you could find some cheap or untested component to blame.
When James Cameron designed Deepsea Challenger with Ron Allum (his sub designed to go to the deepest known point on earth) he was competing against another team. For structural integrity under repeated compression/decompression, he used steel for the hull of his vessel. The other team was using a composite hull like OceanGate was using. James Cameron raised strong engineering concerns against using a composite hull and told the competing team that they would die if they used that technology due the the risk of the hull shattering under repeated compression/decompression cycles. In the end, Cameron won the challenge by diving to the lowest known point on earth and the other sub was never used. He went much, much deeper in his sub than the Titantic site (which he has also explored many times).
So when OceanGate lost their vehicle, it was basically (in Cameron's view) confirming what Cameron had said all along. It would be like if you had been warning for years that building houses out of straw was a fire risk and then someone's straw theater burned down.
James Cameron's point was that there has been over 70 years of engineering work done on deep sea subs to make them safe and that the OceanGate team was ignoring that knowledge and taking unnecessary risks.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. OG failed to get basic certifications every other deepdive got.
They failed to test multiple fail-safes at depth. There's no indications of testing air supply or scrubbers over time. They bolted from the outside despite claiming to learn from spaceflight (Apollo 1, anyone). The composite hull, viewport, and more were seemed by everyone else to be insufficient.
Previous missions included them finding out the propulsion was on backward, getting snagged on the titanic, getting lost for 5 hours, losing communication with the tracking ship.
Did they systematically fix a single one of these problems? No!
They removed ability for the ship to contact them because the CEO was tired of getting interrupted.
I know it's sacrilegious to say it here, bit billionaires are not magically brilliant by nature, and they got caught up in their own hubris. I'm sorry but this was one of the biggest waste of resources I've ever seen. But god forbid anyone say that because they're "mean" or "just hate the rich" or whatever other uninformed take Ive seen.
Is it quarterbacking, when the person is also a quarterback?
James Cameron has (purportedly) designed and built submersibles, and has made the dive to the Titanic many (edited) times.
I take his pov less as a second guessing game, and instead providing an informed opinion, in part because this event will have repercussions for everyone else who is using submersibles.
It is not even informed opinion. His remarks can be basically put into textbooks and lecture slides as fact. At this point he is basically authority on this kind of public commercial dive. OceanGate basically building something and selling it to the public even knowingly it will fail. And this whole charade of finding 30mins interval alarm were just a total waste of taxpayers money. I hope each and everyone in OG get sued to bankruptcy. Anyone with enegineering qualifications and decided to work there were juat irresponsible.
Cameron's taken risks in subs that took them to more than 2x the depth and back.
The list of DSVs taking people well past the depth of the Titanic and came back is actually fairly long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-submergence_vehicle#Deepe... Maybe having at least someone familiar with those as an SME would save lives and resource, because OceanGate's going to be sued into oblivion
I was chatting with an engineering student (not finished the Bachelors), and he said that the carbon fibre weave from OceanGate's own video made a 2nd year mistake for not weaving diagonally.
I was chatting with a Masters student in Aerospace, and he said CF is great for tension, sucks for compression. Their use is compression, and in essence had a plastic hull going down to 4000m.
It's not just dangerous things is dangerous. OceanGate flew in the face of basics in engineering, fucked around and found out. If only their CEO didn't flaunt regulations and peddled his shit to naive people and expose them to unnecessary risk and taking 4 people with him.
I disagree. Risk isn't binary. Part of being an engineer is trying to quantify the risks of a given design so that anyone subjected to the platform is aware of them. If a submersible with a cylindrical carbon fiber hull fails after five or ten dives and gives no advanced indication of its impending failure, that's a much riskier proposition than a metal structure which can go hundreds of times and shows very obvious advanced warning signs.
To put it in a different context, consider when Uber was playing with autonomous driving. Their miles-driven-per-incident rate was orders of magnitude lower than any commercial fleet of human drivers or even the general population of human drivers.
Engineers have an ethical duty to try to quantify these risks and present them as accurately as possible to those who make decisions. Anything less than that is performance art.
Alot of the people that were tourists* were as arrogant as the designers. Its ironic in this case considering the titanic's construction also had a fair amount of arrogance.
We all know what happens when designers of anything are arrogant.
* notice I said tourists, not explorers of which they were not.
What makes an explorer an explorer? To me, and to most people, I would think it means to find something previously undiscovered.
Nobody was calling the passengers on the MIR submersibles that have been visiting the titanic since the 90's "explorers" because it was already discovered and heavily documented.
At some point it ceases to be considered "exploration". Also, most explorers have been paid to do the exploration, not the other way around.
But in this case, some... not regulations, exactly, because I don't think there's government rules that apply that far out to sea, but some requirements for certification were ignored. Publicly and openly ignored.
The point of safety regulations is that the blood only happens once. In this case, the blood happened more than once, because even the existing rules were ignored.
I don't get where these takes are coming from. Deep sea submersibles are not some revolutionary thing nobody has done before. There's no brave, glorious exploration here. There's already a large body of knowledge and expertise on how to dive that deep and stay safe while doing so. If you ignore all of it and try to go with some hacked-together thing that everyone told you is dangerous because cost cutting and YOLO, you're not a pioneer, you're just a fool.
This comment is so incorrect, it almost feels like a joke. Prior to 2019, Cameron was one of only 3 humans who had ever descended to the deepest part of earth. Cameron is essentially as qualified as you can get in the submarine community.
Off topic, but damn! Richard Garriott is on that list!! I love the guy, man I remember playing Tabula Rasa all those years ago... And kind of crazy now that I know Gabe Newell own one of the very few subs that can do this kind of depth... And that the Titan was piloted with a gaming controller...
I would like to know details on the design and why specifically it's bad. Saying "it's poorly designed because Cameron says so" is not good enough. There is more detail in the YouTube videos from actual marine engineers on why specifically a carbon fiber hull is bad, why acoustic testing is insufficient, etc. They're not known and not relatable to the public yet more informative. That's my point.
> And in 2012, Cameron was the first person to conduct a solo expedition to the deepest known part of the ocean floor, the Pacific's 10,994-meter-deep Mariana Trench.
In this case it's not just because he's a celebrity. He has significant expertise in submarines, see the "Activism and other work" section of his Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron
I’d strongly urge you to watch an interview with him or one of the many documentaries he’s been a part of.
Personally I think he knew the outcome earlier this week and waited to speak to the media out of respect for the families. His first interview was hours after the implosion announcement.
As he says, it’s a very tight knit community in which he is a part of and has been for almost 30 years. I think he’s trying to use his voice to ensure that collateral damage does not occur to other less reckless submersible makers, who in turn tried to warn OceanGate.
I was surprised when he told ABC that he had heard they were trying to resurface and that they were probably aware that the hull was failing due to the alarm system the Titan was equipped with.
I like james cameron, but he's another victim of "popular science". He probably had some input but I couldn't believe he was instrumental in anything when it comes to deepwater exploration. However, he's relatable to population just like Neil Degrasse Tyson or the other space people.
These folks aren't explorers, they're tourists. Robert Ballard was the explorer who had to invent deep water exploration methods from scratch, his input is valid.
More people will click on a link to what Cameron is saying than Ballard (who's he) and we all know thats all that matters nowadays anyway.
Tyson talks about science, and works to popularize it. The better analogy here would be after a space shuttle accident they ask a former NASA astronaut for their opinion and to share their own personal experience traveling to space.
From Wikipedia:
In 2011, Cameron became a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.[132] In his role on March 7, 2012, he dived five miles deep to the bottom of the New Britain Trench with the Deepsea Challenger.[133] 19 days later, Cameron reached the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.[134][135][136] He spent more than three hours exploring the ocean floor, becoming the first to accomplish the trip alone.[134][137]
That hardly makes him an expert on submersible construction when there are others out there albeit few, that have this experience.
The parent comment was on submersible construction expertise of which Cameron has little to none. I'd agree that he has piloting expertise (and definitely unique experience ). Again, whats his naval engineering resume like? How many submersibles or submersible subsystems has he designed? The thing he does have is a good team that he probably listens to of which stockton rush did not have.
He's relatable though and has strong opinions which make for more clicks.
What does this even mean? That if someone is popular or capable of communicating complex science in an engaging way, that is some sort of a bad thing? The fact that you included Neil Degrasse Tyson, a literal astrophysicist, as another example of a “victim” makes it sound like anyone that speaks in any way other than a vocal version of a scientific paper beneath you.
>These folks aren't explorers, they're tourists.
James Cameron has been designing and building diving equipment and underwater cameras since 1989, when he filmed The Abyss. He has been involved in, and oversaw, the design of the deepest submersible ever made. He and Bob Ballard have the most experience in the world of diving to the Titanic. He is one of the few people on the planet that has understanding of all aspects related to this accident. Oh, and they did interview Ballard (who’s he) and Cameron. [1]
Yea, and who's interview was more informative? The guy who was an actual explorer as his primary job and basically invented a lot of modern day deep water exploration techniques or the guy who dabbles in it but is popular with the masses?
If it were anyone else in Hollywood, I'd agree. However, James Cameron is kind of a unique individual. I know someone who worked with him for several years on Avatar, and the stories I've heard are intriguing. Cameron has extreme attention to detail, which is why his films tend to take much longer to produce than other features. What I've heard is that Cameron wanted to look at Avatar fully rendered frame by frame before approving it.
He also, by all accounts, has developed genuine expertise in deep sea diving by having the same attention to detail. This isn't to say he's doing the design all by himself. Rather, he worked with engineers and designers to build subs, and is meticulous on every detail with them, the same process he uses on his films.
His expertise speaks for itself: his sub has dived into the Challenger Deep successfully, because it was solidly & competently engineered.
Cameron is one of the few that went to the Mariana Trench and back, at more than 2x the depth of the Titanic. Before that he's done lots of work to explore the Titanic to make the movie Titanic.
He's not speaking because it's a celebrity. He's speaking because he's been there and done more than the yahoos from OceanGate
It's not even an accusation at this point, it's the truth. And Cameron is more knowledgeable about this subject than most. The reality is deep sea submersible technology is still an underdeveloped field, evident by the fact few vessels exist that can take humans to such depths and even unmanned vehicles are far few and between.