118
Titan sub: crew have died after catastrophic loss of pressure chamber, US Coast Guard confirms
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
118 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22057 readers
90 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It sucks that 4 other people were killed by the CEOs own hubris. But at least they don't appear to have suffocated to death. At that depth, it would have been instantaneous.
Yeah, that was my concern when we got reports of regular banging noises.
What if the banging was them trying to crack the window to avoid suffocating?
Implosions require a lot of pressure, so whatever took them out did it while they were still deep.
My guess is it happened as they approached extreme depths. Metal fatigue and poor design aren't always instantly apparent, but they stack up exponentially. The same way the CEO had piloted it down before he did again, then BANG and done. Would have been practically instant and without warning.
Worth pointing out that only the end caps were metal (and titanium at that, which is already brittle), while the bulk of the hull was carbon fiber, which doesn't ~~gradually fatigue~~ bend and buckle, it fails catastrophically.
Also, they lost signal at 1 hour and 45 minutes into a ~2 hour dive. I don't know how much their dive rate varied, but if we assume it was effectively constant, that puts them at ~3500 meters at LOS.
Combining those two points, two to three years after building the ship, they identified cyclic fatigue in the carbon fiber that reduced their calculated rating to 3000 meters. Since that's not enough to get to Titanic, they completely rebuilt the ship, two years ago.
So yeah, I think you're right. With the public facts available, I think the most likely scenario is the carbon fiber hull was fatiguing again, they decided to trust their acoustic/strain monitoring system that they believed would give them enough warning to resurface (which the guy they fired in 2018 said might only give them warnings milliseconds before there was a problem), and it failed somewhere below 3000 meters.