Hi everyone. This isn't really intended for everyone who originally saw the video, there is nothing new here. It's just to make sure any new viewers can at least hear what I'm saying - I still get regular comments about the poor audio in that original video.
Aye, as someone who watched the original, I am still going to watch this one. Your perspective was unique at the time, and remains relevant to this day. I'm glad to see (or rather hear) an audio improvement. Keep up the excellent work, boss 🐻
I remember a prebuilt PC reviewer being shocked that one of a pair of cpu cooler fans was mounted backwards. Basically the CPU was constantly thermal throttling because the 2 fans opposed each other. The builder even tested it and knew it was thermal throttling but didn't think it was a problem. That was inexcusable. It was a $5000 pc btw
It speaks to the carelessness of the build quality: if you can’t put something on the correct way (a concept a 5 yo with a Lego set does flawlessly) how half-assed is your pressure vessel?
Not too surprising. A lot of things endure beatings many times and then suddenly fail without undergoing anything worse than what they'd endured previously. There were plenty of reports of cracking sounds on previous dives. It's just like the FIU bridge collapse where the cracks were forming in the structure after its initial placement, which were growing everyday. If they'd taken the thing back down and set it on the ground the cracks would've stopped growing - like the Titan surfacing - and it was only after it had sat on its pylons for a while that it eventually crumbled. It didn't help that engineers had told the builders to re-tension the bolts as that probably accelerated its collapse seeing as how it collapsed basically while they were re-tensioning them. If they hadn't re-tensioned the bolts it will would've collapsed, just maybe hours or days later than it did. The Titan was the same way though, it endured all kinds of stress damage with each dive and was "worn out". I think that they've at least demonstrated that you can fabricate a carbon fiber sub that is usable a few times, but only if it's treated as disposable and discarded or re-built after 2-3 dives. The window should've been twice as thick as well, and they could've done things like add reinforcement rings inside the carbon tube to improve its compressive strength. I'm sure we're not done seeing carbon fiber used as a structural material for deep sea diving, far from it.
@@CharlesVanNoland The FIU bridge collapse is THE best recent example of the enfeebling of (gestures broadly) American technocratic civilization, just an incredible instance of nobody knowing or checking all the way from top to bottom, start to finish
In the photo of Rush holding the game controller, it’s not the game controller that really concerns me. It’s the fact that the monitor mounts appear to be SCREWED INTO THE CARBON FIBRE PRESSURE HULL.
I don't think Rush hired those younger engineers because of cost cutting. My bet is that the guy was such a narcissist that he couldn't handle anyone pointing out his flaws, especially after firing his engineer who warned him about the safety of Titan. As you correctly pointed out, a guy in his 50s would have talked back, but younger engineers might not due to a gradient in authority, even if it's percieved authority. To quote the fictional version of Anatoly Dyatlov from the 2019 miniseries Chernobyl, after a younger engineer refuses to raise reactor power after correctly identifying the reactor be stalled due to an increase in neutron absorbing xenon isotopes: "Safety first. Always. I've been saying that for 25 years. That's how long I've done this job, 25 years, is that longer than you, Akimov? Is it much longer? So if I say it's safe, it's safe, and if the two of you disgree then you don't have to work here and you won't. [...] Raise the power."
Safety job contractions take 9 months training certification Philippines but better to add experience u can be government or private with good pay but end we all now safety come price most don't wanted pay .
I'd forgotten about your little blowout preventer joke at the beginning, and it prompts me to say: now that your channel has really hit its stride, can you please consider making a video about the safety and risk engineering involved with deep water drilling, and perhaps using the Deepwater Horizon as your illustrative example?
I spent decades building SCADA systems for critical infrastructure. My background is more computational that it is anything else. When I first heard about Titan and its controls, my first reaction was “where the heck is the redundancy for controls?”. Bluetooth, for one example, is a single point of failure that doesn’t recover well from interference or other disruptions. Other aspects of the control system design screamed “you didn’t think this through” - in particular the “acoustic monitoring system” - first the concept sounded like utter nonsense to begin with, especially when you have a working understanding of how suddenly any pressure vessel can fail. It wasn’t just a lack of redundancy that did Titan in, it was a lack of understanding of what redundancy and fail-safe design actually means. Nothing was going to solve the materials problem of choosing a mixed material design, but that same lack of understanding was reflected throughout the design of the control and monitoring systems governing the craft.
Had he been a billionaire he could have afforded to do it right, he wasn't and so he skimped... Compare with Victor Vescovo who spent 50 million doing it right.
He must've had plenty of confidence in the design, to go down with the others proves he wasn't worried about it. If he'd stayed on the ship it might've been different.
I hadn't considered a fire, but absolutely even a small, quickly extinguished would have left the air unbreathable and there were neither respiratory equipment available nor a way to vent the contaminated air.
He built that like a 16 year old trying to turn a junkyard '71 Chevy Nova into a tuner using parts he got off of Temu. Absolutely disgusting and arrogant. I don't know how i missed the original, but this is the most concise explanation of the shit show that was OceanGate. Everyone else focused on the X Box controller without explaining how that was a problem. Those that mentioned the backwards thruster failed to bring up that they only figured it out 4km down.
Just seeing them during the lifting and fitting operation of the rim to the carbon body without helmets, high vis or even gloves is enough of an attestation to how safety oriented and experienced they were.
Building, we use concrete for resisting compression and steel rods as the tension members. The Ocean Cemetery, had no compression material, only tension material. Look up, empty fuel trucks, collapse on Utube when the vapour condenses, No compression resistance. I built industrial vacuum cleaning equipment, some using 200 litre industrial PVC drums, reinforced with steel rods for compression resistance, along with pressure resistance valves.
It may be the same video again but I'm still watching it because damn, I can't believe it's been almost an year. Feels like it happened a month or two ago but I already forgot the details.
Thesis well presented & clear: why no mechanical failure before Titan - no cost cutting & serious attention to risk reduction. OGs Titan was the inevitable first. There is another method for testing the suitability of fiber reinforced composites (FRC) for use in deep submersibles: cyclic testing of models to destruction & nondestructive testing & inspection ultrasonic/x-rays etc after each dive. There is a company making deep submersibles using FRC hulls: these are ROVs & are tested, inspection. (One client reportedly is the USN.) As a test pilot and having been in aerospace (?) Rush should’ve known (did know) aviation practice is periodic inspection. Airbus undoubtedly broke many test specimens & preproduction components before using Carbon FRC on its products. (“Broke” is reference to Rush’s comment about breaking things. - so I seem to recall.) So did reputable bicycle manufacturers. OG had one data point for number of cycles until Titan’s design failed. Pressure vessel failures are often explosive/sudden such as aircraft fuselages (UK COMET jet) or implosions (USS Thresher). Sometimes one gets a warning (leaks) in a system (perhaps low pressure boilers) with a **large margin of safety** or minute fatigue cracks are found before reaching critical length. In Titan’s case, what good is a warning of imminent failure within minutes when it may take hours to surface? None.
_CHEESUS_ what a great point, to which, in other viewings of other docs, I didn't give a _nanoseconds_ thought. But the instant you mentioned it, I was forced to admit not only my OWN ignorance of relevant safety issues, but the _MONUMENTAL_ stupidity and _arrogance_ of S. Rush. _NO_ _SEATS_ _OR_ _RESTRAINTS???_ I remember how even _VERY_ _MINOR_ turbulence on airplanes tossed me around _badly!!!_
So on the topic of fire risk, I once spilled a glass of water on a plugged in USB C cable that was laying on my desk. It started smoking and was a moment away from fire when I cut power. Would I like that kind of thing in a DSV? No thanks.
USB C charging always unnerves me because of how much heat is generated, and I never charge anything if I'm not in the same room or at least an adjacent one. Glad to know that's not my devices.
@@Phlosioneer No idea. I've just noticed it. Every charge block heats up like crazy when I charge with USB C. Regardless of outlet, regardless of cable used, regardless of block used, regardless of device charged (yes I have tested it extensively to try and figure out what was going on). The devices heat up a lot too. I wonder if it's the electricity? I'm not an engineer, electrician, or physicist so I dunno.
@@waxwinged_hound I'm not an engineer but I’m pretty sure what is generating the heat is the waste energy as the charge brick converts 220V AC down to 9V or 5V DC for whatever you are charging. If you use a more modern GAN charger (basically modern metals in the converter that are smaller and more efficient) it will produce less heat.
A great video and a very relevant analysis of the shortcomings of the Titan that ultimately cost the lives of six people including Stockton. As I have pointed out in comments on other videos on this matter, carbon fiber is NOT a good material for pressure vessels that are subject to COMPRESSIVE stress. As you have stated, the carbon fiber is a woven material that gets its "stiffness" from the bonding agent, epoxy resin. Carbon fiber, as such, is extremely strong when subjected to expansion stress. It has a very high tensile strength. If, however, you push a piece of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy resin against an immovable object, it will split and crumple because it is the epoxy resin that is bearing the load and NOT the carbon fiber. That said, I would not use epoxy resin alone to bond any two sections of any material, whether or not they are of the same material, if that bond will be subject to significant changes in temperature and/or pressure. Asymmetrical changes of the two sections will not be equally distributed to each other because they are bonded by a different material. That's why pressure vessels are welded together if at all possible. Stockton was a narcissistic con artist that preyed on the rich and ignorant people who were sold on his false assurances that he knew what he was doing. I can't imagine how he was allowed to even operate his swindling scheme at all, the fact that the dive site was outside the areas of control of any country not withstanding. It was clearly a ripoff akin to running a bungee jumping operation using elastic straps meant for securing small items to a motorcycle's seat. Unregulated, untested, unsafe and absolutely unlawful. Stockton's racketeering killed five people along with himself, making him a mass murderer. No one should be allowed to run a scam that risks the lives of paying customers without legal oversight. The disclaimer that his victims had to sign was a huge red flag. The fact that he also killed himself is no consolation to the families of his victims. "I used carbon fiber for the hull of my deep diving submersible because it is lighter and therefore more buoyant." That statement alone is the true measure of the imbecility of the man. Enough said.
Darwin in action for all of them. By climbing aboard that death-trap, they improved all of humanity. (Well, the ones who didn't have kids improved humanity, anyway - the others just got out of the way to make room for someone more worthy of using the oxygen they were wasting)
"Any rational engineer would have returned to the surface and cut the dive short." Unless they were a Boeing engineer working on the first OFT of Starliner, in which case they'd upload the fix to the thruster mapping and hope no one catches them. Yeah, I know it's not quite the same as without the patch Starliner couldn't even have returned, but it still blows my mind that such a fundamental mainline failure slipped through testing.
I haven't followed Starliner in a while, they still had issues? I have fond memories of the first uncrewed demo flight with the mission control representation in the background showing the capsule firing modt of its thrusters in all directions... just saw the headline they actually made it all the way to the ISS. It's so delayed most of the crew had been reassigned to other flights.
This is the best video on the Titan I've seen and I've seen quite a few. While Rush seemed to start the company as an engineer, as expensives sky rocketed, he became a deep sea ocean hobbyist. Using his accreditations to give the illusion of competents and safety. I can't see how Rush wouldn't know the sub would fail.
Honestly worth the rewatch! The minor changes and additions add a lot to video and show your growth as a creator. It's also not a very long video, so nothing is lost on the viewer's part if rewatched
People misunderstand what the military is doing with “x-box” controllers. The logic is that: “hey, our troops are familiar with these - that means it’s easier to train our troops on control applications with them.” So, the military builds a controller with the same control SCHEME, but very much not the same consumer PCB’s and other components. They don’t literally go to Best Buy and snag a 4 pack of X-box controllers before buggering off to Somalia…
@@modernsolutions6631 US: M-SHORD, N64 controller design imitated and built by contractor because system is essential. UK: Challenger tank gunner controls: N64 controller imitated and built by contractor because system is essential. US: Virginia class submarine. *This one is often represented falsely* Off the shelf x-box controller is used to control light mast (I.e periscope) because system is NON-ESSENTIAL (the point/ use case the video maker illustrated)
23:22 "What's this for?" "It keeps the tigers away." "LOL, is it like elephant-repellent rock? Don't be silly, nobody was eaten by a tiger, I'm removing... " /roars and panic screams./
Hey Alex. I just wanted to say that when I stumbled across your channel from that original video I decided to watch more of your stuff because you knew what you were talking about and are comprehensive. Keep up the good work.
I was hoping we would have a preliminary report by now but I also understand the scale and scope of such a thing is not easy and cannot be rushed. I just hope we will get to hear the exact failure mode at some point. Also I think this video is how I found your channel which is awesome because you cover a lot of aerospace stuff which is my jam! Something about silver lining...
I still to this day don't understand how he was allowed to build such a thing when he fired his engineer and yet no one was keeping an eye on it and made sure it was built to standard i mean a game controller to drive it
I'm subbing in the hope that you will make a new Oceangate video, now that the inquiry has started. Please? The full interviews are on UA-cam. Lochridge's testimony on day 2 was especially interesting.
I would've applied the epoxy in abundance, and instead of reaching up and putting it all over the titanium I would've slathered it all over the end of the tube - IN EXCESS, so that it's purging out after combining the parts together - and done it in a big vacuum chamber to hopefully eradicate bubbles and air pockets. Their approach of just hand-applying a random layer of epoxy into the titanium and setting it down on the tube is so janky and goofy. There were probably tons of air pockets trapped in there that would cause the epoxy to slowly yield under pressure, water ingress would shove its way through there.
Not qualified in any way. I would have turned the whole thing upside-down, literally filled the entire trough with the epoxy, then lowered the other component into it, SPLOOCH! And even then, I 'd be testing it heavily before I'd even consider putting a man into it for shallow excursions.
@@7thsealord888 Yeah, that's a great idea too, just flood it, shove the carbon tube in, then put the thing in the vacuum chamber to extract airbubbles out. Flip 180 and repeat with the other cap.
@@CharlesVanNoland Odd insight just now. Ever watch the old 'A Team' TV series? At least half their episodes would have them stuck in a warehouse or construction yard or garage surrounded by heavily-armed baddies. Their only "out" would be to cobble together some kind of armored vehicle from random parts. The Titan was an 'A Team Special'. If some guys in a dire situation had to jury-rig a *single-use* submarine from random bits, it probably would have ended up being a lot like Titan. Just a thought.
You have earned this like and sub, and hopefully many more! I heard some things here others have not mentioned, so well done. I especially liked the point of…paraphrasing: “if you rely for everything on your backup being failsafe, you don’t have a backup and it’s not failsafe”. Kind of akin to the swiss cheese model of risk management you see a lot in aviation. If you cut a whole bunch of BIG holes in all your layers of safety cheese because you believe your last layer catches everything and as no holes, you’re gonna be awfully flustered when your last layer of cheese has even a tiiiiiny little hole in it… (and you’re also gonna let loads more “simple” incidents get to that last layer of defense…)
I'm glad I found this (and by extension your channel) - I'm an engineer, albeit it an electrical one! but I'm fascinated by examples of people who fuck around and find out when it comes to contravening engineering safety, not that I wish any ill on anyone involved, it was a tragedy, but rather the mindset of the people who do. Anyhow, thank you for creating this :) and I'll stick around for other vids.
I'm noticing numerous screw-mounted objects mounted inside the carbon fibre cylinder for screens, lights/handles etc. Dear God, I hope this was a seperate liner inside the CF pressure hull. I cannot imagine driling holes of any kind (even shallow ones) in a pressure hull made of a material that is already non-homogeneous!
Hey Alex, have you considered being a guest on the Well There's your problem podcast? They would love to have you to talk about this or some other engineering disaster
Honestly completely happy to rewatch this over dinner :D was a v big fan of the first and I'm happy to see your channel grow since the OG! greetings from a lab chemist! Love seeing the engineering side of science and RAs
First time of watching this video. When you started on about the blowout preventer my eyebrows started to climb! I thought “this is an SPF nothing can be that reliable and if it was you still wouldn’t rely on it”. Glad it was to prove a point and not literal.
If your are not aware, the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearings are being streamed live as of 16 Sep 2024 on UA-cam and elsewhere. Past hearings are available in full on UA-cam as well. USCG has also published a summary of facts available on the USCG website. Lots of new (and some shocking) information being revealed in the hearings.
Most if your critique is absolutely justified, but a point that should be made is that mass produced consumer products actually have much better quantified risk (because of the massive production volumes) and in many cases higher production tolerances and consistency (because if highly automated production, use of jigs etc, that wouldn't be economically viable on custom/low volume equipment, even built on military budgets.) Consumer products also have levels of testing (literally millions of hours, including red team testing by people using it wrong) that custom products could never get. Mil spec electronic components may be "qualified" and have paper trails as well as a massive price tag, but in most cases are actually just the same thing at the end of the day. I entirely agree with your points about if some products are *suitable* for use in that application, but if a product is suitable, don't be so hard on them for using mass produced consumer items - in some respects they are actually a lower risk path.
Last I knew, Stockton's life support strategy for smoke mitigation in the event something started sparking or overheating was to use airline-style PBE's (Protective Breathing Equipment). It's a sealed hood with O2 canisters that provide 15 minutes of breathable air. 15 MINUTES. No way to vent those fumes of course, but at least you have a quarter of an hour to contemplate your imminent demise.
@@Alexander-the-ok They're great to help you combat a fire with a halon bottle and for short term exposure to smoke and fumes to escape a bad situation, but useless if you're more than 15 minutes away from breathable air. Which also highlights the total futility of having a fire extinguisher in that kind of vehicle when using it will extinguish your life as well.
My gut feeling was that something sounded iffy when you were describing the blowout preventer that would "always work". I guess I should listen to my gut more often. Or at least I should double check suspicious claims when possible.
Thanks for doing this - I will admit to having to leave your previous video because I just could not get over the audio quality. Glad I could watch, I found very informative
I was going to complain about how the audio quality in the "improved audio" version, however, i went back and double checked the original and JESUS CHRIST. i don't remember it being that bad but thank you for re-uploading this
I had seen the latest Triton's submersible design, they are making acrylic ball that will go to the depth of Titanic, it make a lot more sense to use acrylic like that, much easier to machine. And best of all, it's very open with 360 viewing angle.
Yeah that sounds like a great idea, I wonder why most real DSVs aren't built out of acrylic. It's not like it is much weaker than alternative materials, right?
My bet: CO2 and other gasses will diffuse into the acrylic and then expand once decompressed leaving bubbles in the plastic. This is a known issue with acrylic and similar plastics.
@@KnowledgePerformance7 presumably they can lower an acrylic pressure vessel with cameras, sensors, perhaps an artificial human in the form of a CO2 source, see what happens when they winch it down and up again
Over a year later, and I still watch videos on this, ideally from different specialists. Just watched one from a guy with extensive experience with carbon fibre composites, and he said he was abhorred by things just visible in the footage of the assembly. They didn't prep it in a clean room with temperature and humidity cobtrol, and you can even see a guy "degreasing" the titanium part before bonding to the carbon fiber with no gloves, and touching wiped sections with his bare hand. There was also workers talking about additives to the adhesive, namely micro fibres and a thickening agent. The mixing can cause aeration of the adhesive, and it was likely not degassed. There was also a single direction of carbon fiber wrap, instead of criss crosses, etc, for structural integrity. It also appears the surfaces of the titanium ends were not even roughed up/surface prepped before adhesion, and they dont even use enough to begin with (some excess SHOULD come out, but they fit it in the video with nothing extra leaking out). That's why people with different specialties are needed for a full picture.
Carbon fiber, if used properly, can be suitable for this application. After all, Titan had already made successful dives to Titanic's depth. With that said, not all carbon fiber is made equal. The size of the fibers, fiber count, unidirectional, bidirectional cloth, etc. Titan used unidirectional fibers laid at a very shallow angle with no vacuum resin infusion, as far as I'm aware. In addition, I do not know if the part was cured under pressure. From what I gather, it was not. These mistakes alone introduced countless pockets of air all over the part. That's a massive no-no for any high performance carbon fiber part, let alone one which will be subjected to such extreme pressures. Secondly, there was absolutely no thought given to galvanic corrosion. Titanium does not suffer from galvanic corrosion like Aluminium and non-stainless steels do. Nevertheless, the parts recovered did seem to have suffered from galvanic corrosion, as they were operating in a saline environment, under extremely high pressures. Lastly, I have big doubts regarding the bonding agent used to bond the titanium hemispheres to the carbon fiber part. In my view, it is very likely that such bonding agent was the first link to fail, thereby resulting in a catastrophic failure. However, even if the bonding agent had been adequate for its requirements, I strongly believe that the carbon fiber mid-section, as it was designed and constructed, would have eventually and catastrophically failed on its own accord.
I have an engineering degree, computers, doesn’t make me qualified to build a sub. The whole “every engineer should know basics” drives me nuts, you know the fundamentals in your discipline. For example, I can do math in binary in my head and spell my name in ASCII (in hexadecimal) by memory. I’m rather certain a mechanical engineer cannot. For us that’s table stakes, less so if you want to build a sub.
Ive only ever used composites for building model aircraft but you quickly learn that mixing materials can be a problem. For example using carbon fibre to reinforce a wood structure. The youngs modulus (elastic properties) of carbon and wood are very different, so when loaded the carbon carries all the load, the wood carries almost none. So in the case of the oceangate the use of both Titanium and Carbon would need extra care. If they deform at different rates when loaded that puts a lot of stress on the interface between them.
How did the make the manual pump that passes through the Titans hull that releases the massive frame safe for 12,5 00ft deep are 13,000ft ??Are was it like the widow&super glue&5inches of old carbon fibre'????
I really good video to study is the Alexmundo 2021 trip onboard the mothership. Titan had a problematic dive but reached the Titanic debris field. On the ascent the ballast failed to release, and they tried to ascend with thrusters. It had to be abandoned so they went into emergency mode and used a safety system to dump the whole ballast mechanism. What is interesting is a suspicion I had regarding the alleged transcript. I always got the feeling that a junior or intern was on the communication. In the video it clearly shows a very young lady typing in full sentences to the Titan with Stockton's wife occasionally overseeing it. My point is that if the Titan was descending too quickly this could offer a possible reason why it wasn't picked up or challenged much earlier. I am not suggesting that it was incompetence, but maybe an intern didn't feel confident to challenge Stockton on how he was piloting the Titan. Just a theory but one in my mind since the transcript appeared.
That was the trip where he suggested they sleep on the seabed (!!!?) wasn’t it? There is another story, not verified but pretty well corroborated of him getting another sub stuck in the wreckage of the Andres Doria for an hour because he insisted on not handing the controls over to David Lochridge, who actually knew what he was doing.
Perfect coverage! It's always fascinating to hear about stories like this from someone with relevant knowledge. I also appreciate your clarity about the accusations of "woke" or "dei" hiring - it's easy to blame these common scapegoats when the real issue is the one it always is with rich people's vanity projects: cheapness. The problem wasnt the engineers being young or diverse, it was with their inexperience. It's important to call it like you see it.
Very interesting, thank you, now speaking as a layman on the engineering aspect of this tragedy I once read somewhere that if a thing looks wrong then it usually is, I do know that a perfect sphere is the best shape to spread the external pressure, therefore perfect for 'Titanic depths', I also know carbon fiber is brittle, but, just my gut feeling would have stopped me from getting on that 'odd looking' contraption!
Rush placed far too much trust in his acoustic monitoring system. Based on interviews he gave, I believe he knew the carbon fibre would eventually fail, but based on tests he believed it would fail in a predictable way, allowing enough time to return to the surface after a warning from the monitoring system. This of course assumes the rest of the systems are working normally and the sub _can_ return to the surface.
Very good vid, covered the subject well, and your list of credentials is impressive. I have a qualification in the metal trades, we did study some basic Engineering/Materials science. So those graphs are familiar. To me the most gobsmacking thing about the design was that as far as I know, there wasn't enough, or any testing of the design to see if it could withstand the depths it was going to. I don't know if there are facilities to test that kind of bottom of the ocean pressures but would be a start, failing that there is always figuring out a way to get the sub down to those depths with no one inside the thing as many times as it takes to failure. Then you know for sure. Being sealed into the thing with no way of getting out is a non starter for me as well, however arguable it might be. All up this was an accident that should never have happened.
I'm not an engineer, and I don't know much about anything, but I watch a lot of hobbyist craft videos where they use epoxy, and even I knew it often leaves defects/air pockets. They clearly knew too, so it's weird to me that they just didn't care. As if they thought ignoring it would simply make the problem go away.
I am a programmer by training. If, right after I finished my studies, I was given the opportunity to write the controller code on a tight schedule, I most likely would've done it even if it resulted in a heavy code, not properly debugged. That's the pressure that many young people entering the workforce are under in some sectors or companies. Today, I would run a few miles from the thing upon first sight. We are dealing with people's lives. We need all of the time, even if it risks delaying the entire project. That's, obviously, something which Stockton Rush gave very little though to. Blinded by economics, ethics were quickly affected as well.
I may be late to the party here, but test regimes are most certainly available for structures like the Titan, since there are composite pressure vessels all over the place (for internal pressure) and some submersibles have glass fibre pressure hulls and are Lloyds rated (you can see one, the LR3 at the Gosport Submarine Museum). The LR5 submersibles, which were used as rescue submersibles around the world (including the Royal Navy, had a glass fibre pressure hull and steel transfer chamber, but after about 25 years, it was rebuilt in all steel because every 5 years it had to be taken out of the water and rerated; with steel you only need to Xray the welds. With composite, you have to either apply ultrasonic inspection or Infrared imaging of every square inch of the material of the hull itself, so it's not ideal to have your rescue submersible in a shed for weeks being minutely examined if there's ever a disaster. There are 6500m rated ROVs and large UUVs made of Carbon, but they are manufactured with incredibly high precision using automated multiaxial tape lay-up and autoclaving and only carry electronic equipment. The winding process used on the Titan is used on undersea pipes (again using glass, not carbon) and because it's not done in a vacuum, those pipes sometimes fail due to delamination. The pressure hull of the Titan did not seem to undergo testing nor inspection (Rush thought destroying 1/3 scale models in a hydrostatic chamber would do) but there's a submersible in the Gdansk Maritime Museum called the LTS-7 (or Grzes) with a spherical composite pressure hull (once again, glass not carbon) and they went through five full-scale pressure hulls during the development process in order to test the concept; the finished version is super-light but is only rated to 200m with a 10cm / 4 inch thick pressure hull that's a sandwich structure. I believe the 1000m rated Deepflight One (the submersible you see on the opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise) may also have had a core of syntactic foam (although it's not something I've been able to confirm). The Deepflight Challenger was made of carbon fibre, but it was designed for one single dive (and even then, it was fully tested and inspected); Richard Branson actually bought it after Steven Fossett's death and intended to offer tourists the chance to dive in it but the designers and manufactures put a stop to the idea because the intention was to use it one time only, then stick the thing in a museum. There's 1ATM diving suits that go down to 610m made of glass fibre, and back in the 90s, the US Navy had one made of carbon fibre and pressure tested it thinking it would go far deeper. It failed at less than half the operational depth of the Lloyds rated glass fibre versions.
I love how every analysis of Oceangate Titan just shows how it's even more reckless and dangerous than it looked before. This is the first mention I've seen of fire as a risk, and oh *no* a fire at depth sounds *terrifying.*
i almost got whiplash from shaking my head so much at all the ignorant things stockton did making this sub. stockton rush was a walking, talking example of the dunning-kruger effect.
Kind of adorable how you left in the part about trusting that Ocean Gate tested their own claims about air supply. I think we all can tell by now that they did nothing of the sort.
On topic of David Shaw, I would argue that unlike almost everyone involved in Oceangate, he knew the risks and could make. He was an experienced cave diver, using equipment he built/customised himself. On the extreme end of cave diving, there certainly is no redundancy or room for error. If there is a failure, you will die, and I am sure Dave Shaw knew that, and I am sure he had some idea how possible that was.
I wonder if there is a recording of the crunching sounds made during prior dives, like when it got to a certain depth and when it was heading back to the surface. There was one engineer/expert who rode in the sub and was like "that sound is no good, you really shouldn't be using this" and Rush was like "it's fine, chill."
You are correct regarding controllers to control the sub. The Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines use Xbox controllers to operate the submarine's photonic mast. Nothing else.
As my A&P instructor says...(Aircraft mechanic/"Engineer" in UK[Airframe and Powerplant]) "DIY kills and costs cheap, Engineers are expensive but keep you alive. (Us mechanics get paid to listen to Engineers and make sure the maintenance manuals are followed)" Unlike the water, air is sort of inverse. But you enter a stripped down transport category aircraft, its a pressure chamber just like a deep sea vehicle. Literal bulkhead at the tail section. I cant imagine using carbon fiber for that. You would cause decompression and let me tell you, its a long way down. As for Mr Rush, it was so quick he never knew his mistake.
Respect to all engineers who work on deep sea electronics. Either Horowitz or Hill did that work, can't recall, but I remember mentions in ART OF ELECTRONICS
I could tell by looking at the changes in his face between when he building it and when he was getting ready for the dive that he was a man under tremendous financial stress. He showed all the signs that his body was full of Cortisol so he would have been suffering similar symptoms to Cocaine withdrawals.
59 yr old retired aircraft inspector and then airline pilot from age 31 on. There is no way I would work for an outfit with such self declared discrimination! Happier growing veg and taking part in local music performance events. Don't miss Stockton and his ilk...
Watching the build of the vessel reminds me of an amateur building something in their garage. And I’m confident he hired young people because he didn’t want the criticism and reality checks senior engineers would most certainly provide. A clear case of ego and hubris leading to unnecessary deaths.
I might not be an engineer but if i was in charge the development of this things i would have use a new patented test procedure. Tide the thing to a cable and drop it a couple hundred times into a trench to a deeper than intended dept to see if it fails. On a serious note ive seen your other videos on subs and it seems to me that there is a lack of destructive testing.
Something for general application: FMECA (DId this as part of MilSpec tech_docs for in an avionics R&D project.) Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis ... how likely to fail (MTBF), effects of failure, mean time to repair (MTTR) ... _makes for fascinatin' graphs!_ :-)
youtube didn't bother recommending this to me until i had finished the original once, which it had been recommending for days. guess i'll watch it again lol
i saw a marine biologist with 0 qualifications like yours who once rode in a submarine being invited to give 12-min news segments and presentations on mainstream TV. you ARE a leading expert if you choose to present yourself as such! legit - like, go and email TV stations with your qualifications and this documentary you made as the 1 year anniversary comes up. seeing the standard for some of the ‘experts’ speaking on the Titan so far and recently, especially to the general audience, you will absolutely get featured and be able to have a platform to share your thoughts. have confidence!! just because you’re not a submarine engineer doesn’t mean you’re not an expert!
The whole reason I made this video in the first place is I was sick of news outlets reporting on rumours and making baseless assumptions. People like me, and indeed subject matter experts, are rarely aired on mainstream news reports because we would have very little to say that didn’t sound either boring to a viewer or adversarial to a journalist (If you haven’t guessed, I have very little respect for most journalists)
I _knew_ the reasons this wasn't safe were far more numerous than most anyone could even fathom. An instance of not knowing what you don't know. It's such a complex and dangerous situation that there's no way you should even consider trying it unless you have teams of experts weighing in and guiding the project. What a disaster.
Hi everyone. This isn't really intended for everyone who originally saw the video, there is nothing new here. It's just to make sure any new viewers can at least hear what I'm saying - I still get regular comments about the poor audio in that original video.
Joke's on you, I don't like being told I'm not intended to watch something. I'm watching it again! Cheers
Aye, as someone who watched the original, I am still going to watch this one. Your perspective was unique at the time, and remains relevant to this day. I'm glad to see (or rather hear) an audio improvement. Keep up the excellent work, boss 🐻
I enjoyed the updates and the better audio, so there!
no problem. i'll gladly watch another of your videos AGAIN. because they are great!
You're uniquely qualified to explain the incident perfectly, I'll definitely be watching it again 👍
The fact a thruster was installed backwards and nobody even knew until it was at depth is fucking insane.
I remember a prebuilt PC reviewer being shocked that one of a pair of cpu cooler fans was mounted backwards. Basically the CPU was constantly thermal throttling because the 2 fans opposed each other. The builder even tested it and knew it was thermal throttling but didn't think it was a problem. That was inexcusable. It was a $5000 pc btw
It speaks to the carelessness of the build quality: if you can’t put something on the correct way (a concept a 5 yo with a Lego set does flawlessly) how half-assed is your pressure vessel?
Wtf
Lol he swore
yeah, "cowboy engineering", fix it by the seat of your pants. Pathetic.
I've watched it once, I'll watch it again!
Me too!
Same!!
Yep! Definitively worth a rewatch!
Lmao same here, great stuff on this channel.
Same! Worth every second!
The only surprising factor is how many dives it completed before it failed.
Not too surprising. A lot of things endure beatings many times and then suddenly fail without undergoing anything worse than what they'd endured previously. There were plenty of reports of cracking sounds on previous dives. It's just like the FIU bridge collapse where the cracks were forming in the structure after its initial placement, which were growing everyday. If they'd taken the thing back down and set it on the ground the cracks would've stopped growing - like the Titan surfacing - and it was only after it had sat on its pylons for a while that it eventually crumbled. It didn't help that engineers had told the builders to re-tension the bolts as that probably accelerated its collapse seeing as how it collapsed basically while they were re-tensioning them. If they hadn't re-tensioned the bolts it will would've collapsed, just maybe hours or days later than it did. The Titan was the same way though, it endured all kinds of stress damage with each dive and was "worn out". I think that they've at least demonstrated that you can fabricate a carbon fiber sub that is usable a few times, but only if it's treated as disposable and discarded or re-built after 2-3 dives. The window should've been twice as thick as well, and they could've done things like add reinforcement rings inside the carbon tube to improve its compressive strength. I'm sure we're not done seeing carbon fiber used as a structural material for deep sea diving, far from it.
@@CharlesVanNoland The FIU bridge collapse is THE best recent example of the enfeebling of (gestures broadly) American technocratic civilization, just an incredible instance of nobody knowing or checking all the way from top to bottom, start to finish
@@Holabirdsupercluster lmao ok. People like you are why aliens won't talk to us
@@CharlesVanNoland reminds me of that commercial JAL disaster where the rear bulkhead blew after a crappy repair. thing flew like 150x before it went!
@@CharlesVanNoland Fascinating analysis and good comparison. Thanks.
In the photo of Rush holding the game controller, it’s not the game controller that really concerns me. It’s the fact that the monitor mounts appear to be SCREWED INTO THE CARBON FIBRE PRESSURE HULL.
There was an inner sleeve fitted inside the pressure hull they were able to screw into❤
@@brendan5419 haha cheers for the info, I’m glad the designers weren’t quite that idiotic!
@@svenwilson5668 but it wouldnt surprise me if Stockton had used 8 inch framing screws and driven them straight through the hull.
It all looked a lIttle sketchy to me, considering the task it had to perform.
Its was a cylinder in other words Poseidon's Playpen.
Industry: most deep sea accidents are caused by human error, not structural failures or bad engineering.
Stockton Rush: hold my beer.
bad engineering sounds like a sub branch of human error
I don't think Rush hired those younger engineers because of cost cutting.
My bet is that the guy was such a narcissist that he couldn't handle anyone pointing out his flaws, especially after firing his engineer who warned him about the safety of Titan. As you correctly pointed out, a guy in his 50s would have talked back, but younger engineers might not due to a gradient in authority, even if it's percieved authority.
To quote the fictional version of Anatoly Dyatlov from the 2019 miniseries Chernobyl, after a younger engineer refuses to raise reactor power after correctly identifying the reactor be stalled due to an increase in neutron absorbing xenon isotopes:
"Safety first. Always. I've been saying that for 25 years. That's how long I've done this job, 25 years, is that longer than you, Akimov? Is it much longer? So if I say it's safe, it's safe, and if the two of you disgree then you don't have to work here and you won't. [...] Raise the power."
Yeah…definitely not disagreeing with you here.
Safety job contractions take 9 months training certification Philippines but better to add experience u can be government or private with good pay but end we all now safety come price most don't wanted pay .
Young engineers are normally also more optimistic...
@@deth3021 Yap .to pay student loans need good job
Not great, not terrible
I'd forgotten about your little blowout preventer joke at the beginning, and it prompts me to say: now that your channel has really hit its stride, can you please consider making a video about the safety and risk engineering involved with deep water drilling, and perhaps using the Deepwater Horizon as your illustrative example?
I spent decades building SCADA systems for critical infrastructure. My background is more computational that it is anything else. When I first heard about Titan and its controls, my first reaction was “where the heck is the redundancy for controls?”. Bluetooth, for one example, is a single point of failure that doesn’t recover well from interference or other disruptions. Other aspects of the control system design screamed “you didn’t think this through” - in particular the “acoustic monitoring system” - first the concept sounded like utter nonsense to begin with, especially when you have a working understanding of how suddenly any pressure vessel can fail.
It wasn’t just a lack of redundancy that did Titan in, it was a lack of understanding of what redundancy and fail-safe design actually means. Nothing was going to solve the materials problem of choosing a mixed material design, but that same lack of understanding was reflected throughout the design of the control and monitoring systems governing the craft.
Imagine driving real car with laggy, third party Bluetooth controller, lunacy.
The accustic warning system. That warned you a millisecond before you were crushed by the implosion.
They could've at least used a wire control. Those batteries are just another fail point.
Billionaires cutting corners for what? To prove a point? Had he not been in the vessel he would have been charged with negligent homicide.
You don’t become a billionaire by valuing human beings over profit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Had he been a billionaire he could have afforded to do it right, he wasn't and so he skimped... Compare with Victor Vescovo who spent 50 million doing it right.
He must've had plenty of confidence in the design, to go down with the others proves he wasn't worried about it. If he'd stayed on the ship it might've been different.
@@DancingWithLucifer Even their own?
If he had lived he would have avoided jail time, almost certainly. That's how the US Justice system works
I hadn't considered a fire, but absolutely even a small, quickly extinguished would have left the air unbreathable and there were neither respiratory equipment available nor a way to vent the contaminated air.
They had some breathing apparatuses in case of fire/smoke but it looked about as non-standard as the rest of the build...
Gives a new meaning to the phrase 'a Rush job'
more like ‘a crushed job’
"Captain Crunch"
He built that like a 16 year old trying to turn a junkyard '71 Chevy Nova into a tuner using parts he got off of Temu. Absolutely disgusting and arrogant.
I don't know how i missed the original, but this is the most concise explanation of the shit show that was OceanGate. Everyone else focused on the X Box controller without explaining how that was a problem. Those that mentioned the backwards thruster failed to bring up that they only figured it out 4km down.
You had me going with the blowout preventer bit. I was absolutely baffled and terrified that was a thing, glad to hear it's not so lol
6:55 we have that exact stepladder!
and by "we" I mean "the landlord, who lives downstairs, who loaned it so we could decorate"
Oh no, stepladder I'm stuck on the ocean floor!
@@zelda_smile
no
You are remembered by the rules you break..... Stockton Crush.
Words to live by....wait..
Indeed he will be. Sad he took others’ lives with this disaster.
"Captain Crunch"
@@GeoStreber while he was dumb for doing what he did....I don't think THAT is appropriate. Even if it's funny.
Oh, dear
Just seeing them during the lifting and fitting operation of the rim to the carbon body without helmets, high vis or even gloves is enough of an attestation to how safety oriented and experienced they were.
Building, we use concrete for resisting compression and steel rods as the tension members. The Ocean Cemetery, had no compression material, only tension material. Look up, empty fuel trucks, collapse on Utube when the vapour condenses, No compression resistance. I built industrial vacuum cleaning equipment, some using 200 litre industrial PVC drums, reinforced with steel rods for compression resistance, along with pressure resistance valves.
It may be the same video again but I'm still watching it because damn, I can't believe it's been almost an year. Feels like it happened a month or two ago but I already forgot the details.
Saw the original video, clicked on it, saw this video and immediately switched over. Good on you for making an improved version
Thesis well presented & clear: why no mechanical failure before Titan - no cost cutting & serious attention to risk reduction. OGs Titan was the inevitable first.
There is another method for testing the suitability of fiber reinforced composites (FRC) for use in deep submersibles: cyclic testing of models to destruction & nondestructive testing & inspection ultrasonic/x-rays etc after each dive. There is a company making deep submersibles using FRC hulls: these are ROVs & are tested, inspection. (One client reportedly is the USN.) As a test pilot and having been in aerospace (?) Rush should’ve known (did know) aviation practice is periodic inspection. Airbus undoubtedly broke many test specimens & preproduction components before using Carbon FRC on its products. (“Broke” is reference to Rush’s comment about breaking things. - so I seem to recall.) So did reputable bicycle manufacturers. OG had one data point for number of cycles until Titan’s design failed.
Pressure vessel failures are often explosive/sudden such as aircraft fuselages (UK COMET jet) or implosions (USS Thresher). Sometimes one gets a warning (leaks) in a system (perhaps low pressure boilers) with a **large margin of safety** or minute fatigue cracks are found before reaching critical length. In Titan’s case, what good is a warning of imminent failure within minutes when it may take hours to surface? None.
_CHEESUS_ what a great point, to which, in other viewings of other docs, I didn't give a _nanoseconds_ thought.
But the instant you mentioned it, I was forced to admit not only my OWN ignorance of relevant safety issues, but the _MONUMENTAL_ stupidity and _arrogance_ of S. Rush. _NO_ _SEATS_ _OR_ _RESTRAINTS???_
I remember how even _VERY_ _MINOR_ turbulence on airplanes tossed me around _badly!!!_
So on the topic of fire risk, I once spilled a glass of water on a plugged in USB C cable that was laying on my desk. It started smoking and was a moment away from fire when I cut power. Would I like that kind of thing in a DSV? No thanks.
USB C charging always unnerves me because of how much heat is generated, and I never charge anything if I'm not in the same room or at least an adjacent one. Glad to know that's not my devices.
@@waxwinged_houndwait, why does usb c charging specifically generate heat?
@@Phlosioneer No idea. I've just noticed it. Every charge block heats up like crazy when I charge with USB C. Regardless of outlet, regardless of cable used, regardless of block used, regardless of device charged (yes I have tested it extensively to try and figure out what was going on). The devices heat up a lot too.
I wonder if it's the electricity? I'm not an engineer, electrician, or physicist so I dunno.
@@waxwinged_hound I'm not an engineer but I’m pretty sure what is generating the heat is the waste energy as the charge brick converts 220V AC down to 9V or 5V DC for whatever you are charging. If you use a more modern GAN charger (basically modern metals in the converter that are smaller and more efficient) it will produce less heat.
@@ccllvn Oh neat! That's something I'll need to keep in mind, seems like something I should look into.
Hey, Alex, thank you for your comprehensive analysis. Your audio quality was fine on the first video, but I’m more than happy to watch it again!
A great video and a very relevant analysis of the shortcomings of the Titan that ultimately cost the lives of six people including Stockton.
As I have pointed out in comments on other videos on this matter, carbon fiber is NOT a good material for pressure vessels that are subject to COMPRESSIVE stress.
As you have stated, the carbon fiber is a woven material that gets its "stiffness" from the bonding agent, epoxy resin. Carbon fiber, as such, is extremely strong when subjected to expansion stress. It has a very high tensile strength. If, however, you push a piece of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy resin against an immovable object, it will split and crumple because it is the epoxy resin that is bearing the load and NOT the carbon fiber. That said, I would not use epoxy resin alone to bond any two sections of any material, whether or not they are of the same material, if that bond will be subject to significant changes in temperature and/or pressure. Asymmetrical changes of the two sections will not be equally distributed to each other because they are bonded by a different material. That's why pressure vessels are welded together if at all possible.
Stockton was a narcissistic con artist that preyed on the rich and ignorant people who were sold on his false assurances that he knew what he was doing. I can't imagine how he was allowed to even operate his swindling scheme at all, the fact that the dive site was outside the areas of control of any country not withstanding. It was clearly a ripoff akin to running a bungee jumping operation using elastic straps meant for securing small items to a motorcycle's seat.
Unregulated, untested, unsafe and absolutely unlawful. Stockton's racketeering killed five people along with himself, making him a mass murderer. No one should be allowed to run a scam that risks the lives of paying customers without legal oversight. The disclaimer that his victims had to sign was a huge red flag. The fact that he also killed himself is no consolation to the families of his victims.
"I used carbon fiber for the hull of my deep diving submersible because it is lighter and therefore more buoyant." That statement alone is the true measure of the imbecility of the man. Enough said.
I was just rewatching the original while this was uploaded! What are the odds?!
Rush looks like a kid with a toy. Deadly toy for him and four others.
Darwin in action for all of them. By climbing aboard that death-trap, they improved all of humanity. (Well, the ones who didn't have kids improved humanity, anyway - the others just got out of the way to make room for someone more worthy of using the oxygen they were wasting)
Yeah. Like a four year old playing with a loaded gun.
"Any rational engineer would have returned to the surface and cut the dive short."
Unless they were a Boeing engineer working on the first OFT of Starliner, in which case they'd upload the fix to the thruster mapping and hope no one catches them.
Yeah, I know it's not quite the same as without the patch Starliner couldn't even have returned, but it still blows my mind that such a fundamental mainline failure slipped through testing.
I haven't followed Starliner in a while, they still had issues? I have fond memories of the first uncrewed demo flight with the mission control representation in the background showing the capsule firing modt of its thrusters in all directions... just saw the headline they actually made it all the way to the ISS. It's so delayed most of the crew had been reassigned to other flights.
Every one attacks Boeing
But the FAA is the entity that certified the max as safe. No one attacks the FAA
This is the best video on the Titan I've seen and I've seen quite a few. While Rush seemed to start the company as an engineer, as expensives sky rocketed, he became a deep sea ocean hobbyist. Using his accreditations to give the illusion of competents and safety. I can't see how Rush wouldn't know the sub would fail.
Honestly worth the rewatch! The minor changes and additions add a lot to video and show your growth as a creator. It's also not a very long video, so nothing is lost on the viewer's part if rewatched
I just got re-recommended the original
Video and had re-watched it yesterday. I’ll watch this version today.
People misunderstand what the military is doing with “x-box” controllers.
The logic is that: “hey, our troops are familiar with these - that means it’s easier to train our troops on control applications with them.”
So, the military builds a controller with the same control SCHEME, but very much not the same consumer PCB’s and other components.
They don’t literally go to Best Buy and snag a 4 pack of X-box controllers before buggering off to Somalia…
[Citation needed]
@@modernsolutions6631
US: M-SHORD, N64 controller design imitated and built by contractor because system is essential.
UK: Challenger tank gunner controls: N64 controller imitated and built by contractor because system is essential.
US: Virginia class submarine. *This one is often represented falsely* Off the shelf x-box controller is used to control light mast (I.e periscope) because system is NON-ESSENTIAL (the point/ use case the video maker illustrated)
23:22 "What's this for?"
"It keeps the tigers away."
"LOL, is it like elephant-repellent rock? Don't be silly, nobody was eaten by a tiger, I'm removing... " /roars and panic screams./
Stockton Rush’s design philosophy in a nutshell
Hey Alex. I just wanted to say that when I stumbled across your channel from that original video I decided to watch more of your stuff because you knew what you were talking about and are comprehensive.
Keep up the good work.
All that hull monitoring system could ever provide (if it even worked) is a warning of imminent death.
And not even enough time to "bend over, out your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye"
"accidents due to mechanical error are uncommon"
mechanical guidelines that have been preventing accidents: am I a joke to you?
I was hoping we would have a preliminary report by now but I also understand the scale and scope of such a thing is not easy and cannot be rushed. I just hope we will get to hear the exact failure mode at some point. Also I think this video is how I found your channel which is awesome because you cover a lot of aerospace stuff which is my jam! Something about silver lining...
I still to this day don't understand how he was allowed to build such a thing when he fired his engineer and yet no one was keeping an eye on it and made sure it was built to standard i mean a game controller to drive it
It will be fine "*slaps the roof of sub*"
*sub implodes
This bad boy can fit so many critical failures in it
I'm subbing in the hope that you will make a new Oceangate video, now that the inquiry has started. Please? The full interviews are on UA-cam. Lochridge's testimony on day 2 was especially interesting.
Watched the OG version, and watching again, it was and is a fantastic video, well presented.
agree also reconfirms that hubris often times leads to failure.
I would've applied the epoxy in abundance, and instead of reaching up and putting it all over the titanium I would've slathered it all over the end of the tube - IN EXCESS, so that it's purging out after combining the parts together - and done it in a big vacuum chamber to hopefully eradicate bubbles and air pockets. Their approach of just hand-applying a random layer of epoxy into the titanium and setting it down on the tube is so janky and goofy. There were probably tons of air pockets trapped in there that would cause the epoxy to slowly yield under pressure, water ingress would shove its way through there.
'Hopefully' being the operative word here. I wouldn't have trusted my life on that seal for several reasons.
Not qualified in any way. I would have turned the whole thing upside-down, literally filled the entire trough with the epoxy, then lowered the other component into it, SPLOOCH! And even then, I 'd be testing it heavily before I'd even consider putting a man into it for shallow excursions.
@@7thsealord888 Yeah, that's a great idea too, just flood it, shove the carbon tube in, then put the thing in the vacuum chamber to extract airbubbles out. Flip 180 and repeat with the other cap.
@@CharlesVanNoland Odd insight just now. Ever watch the old 'A Team' TV series? At least half their episodes would have them stuck in a warehouse or construction yard or garage surrounded by heavily-armed baddies. Their only "out" would be to cobble together some kind of armored vehicle from random parts.
The Titan was an 'A Team Special'. If some guys in a dire situation had to jury-rig a *single-use* submarine from random bits, it probably would have ended up being a lot like Titan. Just a thought.
You have earned this like and sub, and hopefully many more! I heard some things here others have not mentioned, so well done. I especially liked the point of…paraphrasing: “if you rely for everything on your backup being failsafe, you don’t have a backup and it’s not failsafe”.
Kind of akin to the swiss cheese model of risk management you see a lot in aviation. If you cut a whole bunch of BIG holes in all your layers of safety cheese because you believe your last layer catches everything and as no holes, you’re gonna be awfully flustered when your last layer of cheese has even a tiiiiiny little hole in it… (and you’re also gonna let loads more “simple” incidents get to that last layer of defense…)
I'm glad I found this (and by extension your channel) - I'm an engineer, albeit it an electrical one! but I'm fascinated by examples of people who fuck around and find out when it comes to contravening engineering safety, not that I wish any ill on anyone involved, it was a tragedy, but rather the mindset of the people who do. Anyhow, thank you for creating this :) and I'll stick around for other vids.
I'm noticing numerous screw-mounted objects mounted inside the carbon fibre cylinder for screens, lights/handles etc. Dear God, I hope this was a seperate liner inside the CF pressure hull. I cannot imagine driling holes of any kind (even shallow ones) in a pressure hull made of a material that is already non-homogeneous!
Hey Alex, have you considered being a guest on the Well There's your problem podcast? They would love to have you to talk about this or some other engineering disaster
"My name is Alex and my pronouns are OK. GO!"
I can’t think of a worse guest to appear on there. I’d be incredibly unfunny and boring compared to their usual guests.
@@Alexander-the-okoh, I disagree! if they ask, please say yes :)
@@Alexander-the-okDon't put yourself down like that!
@@Alexander-the-ok I'd watch the podcast if you were on it.
Love it when Alex makes a video, even when it's a re-upload,
Honestly completely happy to rewatch this over dinner :D was a v big fan of the first and I'm happy to see your channel grow since the OG! greetings from a lab chemist! Love seeing the engineering side of science and RAs
I didn't see the first video, but I'm sure glad I watched this one. Great analysis of the Titan failure from your engineering experience.
First time of watching this video. When you started on about the blowout preventer my eyebrows started to climb! I thought “this is an SPF nothing can be that reliable and if it was you still wouldn’t rely on it”. Glad it was to prove a point and not literal.
If your are not aware, the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearings are being streamed live as of 16 Sep 2024 on UA-cam and elsewhere. Past hearings are available in full on UA-cam as well. USCG has also published a summary of facts available on the USCG website. Lots of new (and some shocking) information being revealed in the hearings.
Thanks, I've been checking in every now and then. It's giving me an nice occasional distraction from researching my next video.
Was about to watch the original and was indeed redirected to this one. Thanks!
Most if your critique is absolutely justified, but a point that should be made is that mass produced consumer products actually have much better quantified risk (because of the massive production volumes) and in many cases higher production tolerances and consistency (because if highly automated production, use of jigs etc, that wouldn't be economically viable on custom/low volume equipment, even built on military budgets.) Consumer products also have levels of testing (literally millions of hours, including red team testing by people using it wrong) that custom products could never get. Mil spec electronic components may be "qualified" and have paper trails as well as a massive price tag, but in most cases are actually just the same thing at the end of the day. I entirely agree with your points about if some products are *suitable* for use in that application, but if a product is suitable, don't be so hard on them for using mass produced consumer items - in some respects they are actually a lower risk path.
Last I knew, Stockton's life support strategy for smoke mitigation in the event something started sparking or overheating was to use airline-style PBE's (Protective Breathing Equipment). It's a sealed hood with O2 canisters that provide 15 minutes of breathable air. 15 MINUTES. No way to vent those fumes of course, but at least you have a quarter of an hour to contemplate your imminent demise.
Yeah we had those when I worked offshore. Better than nothing I guess.
@@Alexander-the-ok They're great to help you combat a fire with a halon bottle and for short term exposure to smoke and fumes to escape a bad situation, but useless if you're more than 15 minutes away from breathable air. Which also highlights the total futility of having a fire extinguisher in that kind of vehicle when using it will extinguish your life as well.
My gut feeling was that something sounded iffy when you were describing the blowout preventer that would "always work". I guess I should listen to my gut more often. Or at least I should double check suspicious claims when possible.
I thought he was going to say it was installed and lead to an oil spill.
I've watched quite a number of videos about this tragedy. However, this was one of the more informative videos. I'll gladly watch it again.
Man, I'd hate to be those guys smearing that epoxy adhesive on to the ends of the carbon fiber cylinder !
Thanks for doing this - I will admit to having to leave your previous video because I just could not get over the audio quality. Glad I could watch, I found very informative
Thanks. I appreciate the audio is now just ‘bad but louder’ but at least it’s audible without having to turn the volume to 11 now I guess.
I was going to complain about how the audio quality in the "improved audio" version, however, i went back and double checked the original and JESUS CHRIST. i don't remember it being that bad but thank you for re-uploading this
23:16 "Move fast and break things" doesn't even work for software.
I had seen the latest Triton's submersible design, they are making acrylic ball that will go to the depth of Titanic, it make a lot more sense to use acrylic like that, much easier to machine.
And best of all, it's very open with 360 viewing angle.
Yeah that sounds like a great idea, I wonder why most real DSVs aren't built out of acrylic. It's not like it is much weaker than alternative materials, right?
Also it provides better isolation - much better then a metal hull, so it would be not as cold inside on depth.
My bet: CO2 and other gasses will diffuse into the acrylic and then expand once decompressed leaving bubbles in the plastic. This is a known issue with acrylic and similar plastics.
@@KnowledgePerformance7 presumably they can lower an acrylic pressure vessel with cameras, sensors, perhaps an artificial human in the form of a CO2 source, see what happens when they winch it down and up again
@@KnowledgePerformance7 this could be solved easily with a second layer made out of something else on the inside right?
Over a year later, and I still watch videos on this, ideally from different specialists.
Just watched one from a guy with extensive experience with carbon fibre composites, and he said he was abhorred by things just visible in the footage of the assembly.
They didn't prep it in a clean room with temperature and humidity cobtrol, and you can even see a guy "degreasing" the titanium part before bonding to the carbon fiber with no gloves, and touching wiped sections with his bare hand.
There was also workers talking about additives to the adhesive, namely micro fibres and a thickening agent. The mixing can cause aeration of the adhesive, and it was likely not degassed.
There was also a single direction of carbon fiber wrap, instead of criss crosses, etc, for structural integrity.
It also appears the surfaces of the titanium ends were not even roughed up/surface prepped before adhesion, and they dont even use enough to begin with (some excess SHOULD come out, but they fit it in the video with nothing extra leaking out).
That's why people with different specialties are needed for a full picture.
Carbon fiber, if used properly, can be suitable for this application. After all, Titan had already made successful dives to Titanic's depth.
With that said, not all carbon fiber is made equal. The size of the fibers, fiber count, unidirectional, bidirectional cloth, etc. Titan used unidirectional fibers laid at a very shallow angle with no vacuum resin infusion, as far as I'm aware. In addition, I do not know if the part was cured under pressure. From what I gather, it was not.
These mistakes alone introduced countless pockets of air all over the part. That's a massive no-no for any high performance carbon fiber part, let alone one which will be subjected to such extreme pressures.
Secondly, there was absolutely no thought given to galvanic corrosion. Titanium does not suffer from galvanic corrosion like Aluminium and non-stainless steels do. Nevertheless, the parts recovered did seem to have suffered from galvanic corrosion, as they were operating in a saline environment, under extremely high pressures.
Lastly, I have big doubts regarding the bonding agent used to bond the titanium hemispheres to the carbon fiber part. In my view, it is very likely that such bonding agent was the first link to fail, thereby resulting in a catastrophic failure. However, even if the bonding agent had been adequate for its requirements, I strongly believe that the carbon fiber mid-section, as it was designed and constructed, would have eventually and catastrophically failed on its own accord.
I have an engineering degree, computers, doesn’t make me qualified to build a sub. The whole “every engineer should know basics” drives me nuts, you know the fundamentals in your discipline. For example, I can do math in binary in my head and spell my name in ASCII (in hexadecimal) by memory. I’m rather certain a mechanical engineer cannot. For us that’s table stakes, less so if you want to build a sub.
Ive only ever used composites for building model aircraft but you quickly learn that mixing materials can be a problem. For example using carbon fibre to reinforce a wood structure. The youngs modulus (elastic properties) of carbon and wood are very different, so when loaded the carbon carries all the load, the wood carries almost none.
So in the case of the oceangate the use of both Titanium and Carbon would need extra care. If they deform at different rates when loaded that puts a lot of stress on the interface between them.
Cool video! Thank you! Make one about Starship!
Sorry.
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How did the make the manual pump that passes through the Titans hull that releases the massive frame safe for 12,5 00ft deep are 13,000ft ??Are was it like the widow&super glue&5inches of old carbon fibre'????
I really good video to study is the Alexmundo 2021 trip onboard the mothership. Titan had a problematic dive but reached the Titanic debris field. On the ascent the ballast failed to release, and they tried to ascend with thrusters. It had to be abandoned so they went into emergency mode and used a safety system to dump the whole ballast mechanism. What is interesting is a suspicion I had regarding the alleged transcript. I always got the feeling that a junior or intern was on the communication. In the video it clearly shows a very young lady typing in full sentences to the Titan with Stockton's wife occasionally overseeing it. My point is that if the Titan was descending too quickly this could offer a possible reason why it wasn't picked up or challenged much earlier. I am not suggesting that it was incompetence, but maybe an intern didn't feel confident to challenge Stockton on how he was piloting the Titan. Just a theory but one in my mind since the transcript appeared.
That was the trip where he suggested they sleep on the seabed (!!!?) wasn’t it?
There is another story, not verified but pretty well corroborated of him getting another sub stuck in the wreckage of the Andres Doria for an hour because he insisted on not handing the controls over to David Lochridge, who actually knew what he was doing.
Perfect coverage! It's always fascinating to hear about stories like this from someone with relevant knowledge. I also appreciate your clarity about the accusations of "woke" or "dei" hiring - it's easy to blame these common scapegoats when the real issue is the one it always is with rich people's vanity projects: cheapness. The problem wasnt the engineers being young or diverse, it was with their inexperience. It's important to call it like you see it.
Very interesting, thank you, now speaking as a layman on the engineering aspect of this tragedy I once read somewhere that if a thing looks wrong then it usually is, I do know that a perfect sphere is the best shape to spread the external pressure, therefore perfect for 'Titanic depths', I also know carbon fiber is brittle, but, just my gut feeling would have stopped me from getting on that 'odd looking' contraption!
Rush placed far too much trust in his acoustic monitoring system. Based on interviews he gave, I believe he knew the carbon fibre would eventually fail, but based on tests he believed it would fail in a predictable way, allowing enough time to return to the surface after a warning from the monitoring system. This of course assumes the rest of the systems are working normally and the sub _can_ return to the surface.
Very good vid, covered the subject well, and your list of credentials is impressive. I have a qualification in the metal trades, we did study some basic Engineering/Materials science. So those graphs are familiar. To me the most gobsmacking thing about the design was that as far as I know, there wasn't enough, or any testing of the design to see if it could withstand the depths it was going to.
I don't know if there are facilities to test that kind of bottom of the ocean pressures but would be a start, failing that there is always figuring out a way to get the sub down to those depths with no one inside the thing as many times as it takes to failure. Then you know for sure. Being sealed into the thing with no way of getting out is a non starter for me as well, however arguable it might be.
All up this was an accident that should never have happened.
I'm not an engineer, and I don't know much about anything, but I watch a lot of hobbyist craft videos where they use epoxy, and even I knew it often leaves defects/air pockets. They clearly knew too, so it's weird to me that they just didn't care. As if they thought ignoring it would simply make the problem go away.
I am a programmer by training. If, right after I finished my studies, I was given the opportunity to write the controller code on a tight schedule, I most likely would've done it even if it resulted in a heavy code, not properly debugged. That's the pressure that many young people entering the workforce are under in some sectors or companies.
Today, I would run a few miles from the thing upon first sight. We are dealing with people's lives. We need all of the time, even if it risks delaying the entire project.
That's, obviously, something which Stockton Rush gave very little though to. Blinded by economics, ethics were quickly affected as well.
Damn second time watching it and you do such a good job of explaining technical risk management it’s fantastic
I may be late to the party here, but test regimes are most certainly available for structures like the Titan, since there are composite pressure vessels all over the place (for internal pressure) and some submersibles have glass fibre pressure hulls and are Lloyds rated (you can see one, the LR3 at the Gosport Submarine Museum). The LR5 submersibles, which were used as rescue submersibles around the world (including the Royal Navy, had a glass fibre pressure hull and steel transfer chamber, but after about 25 years, it was rebuilt in all steel because every 5 years it had to be taken out of the water and rerated; with steel you only need to Xray the welds. With composite, you have to either apply ultrasonic inspection or Infrared imaging of every square inch of the material of the hull itself, so it's not ideal to have your rescue submersible in a shed for weeks being minutely examined if there's ever a disaster. There are 6500m rated ROVs and large UUVs made of Carbon, but they are manufactured with incredibly high precision using automated multiaxial tape lay-up and autoclaving and only carry electronic equipment. The winding process used on the Titan is used on undersea pipes (again using glass, not carbon) and because it's not done in a vacuum, those pipes sometimes fail due to delamination. The pressure hull of the Titan did not seem to undergo testing nor inspection (Rush thought destroying 1/3 scale models in a hydrostatic chamber would do) but there's a submersible in the Gdansk Maritime Museum called the LTS-7 (or Grzes) with a spherical composite pressure hull (once again, glass not carbon) and they went through five full-scale pressure hulls during the development process in order to test the concept; the finished version is super-light but is only rated to 200m with a 10cm / 4 inch thick pressure hull that's a sandwich structure. I believe the 1000m rated Deepflight One (the submersible you see on the opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise) may also have had a core of syntactic foam (although it's not something I've been able to confirm). The Deepflight Challenger was made of carbon fibre, but it was designed for one single dive (and even then, it was fully tested and inspected); Richard Branson actually bought it after Steven Fossett's death and intended to offer tourists the chance to dive in it but the designers and manufactures put a stop to the idea because the intention was to use it one time only, then stick the thing in a museum. There's 1ATM diving suits that go down to 610m made of glass fibre, and back in the 90s, the US Navy had one made of carbon fibre and pressure tested it thinking it would go far deeper. It failed at less than half the operational depth of the Lloyds rated glass fibre versions.
Hey, if you want to talk about _Alvin_ , I'd be delighted to listen. Science and facts are just delightful.
Hope you enjoy it. It’s a lot more ‘rough and ready’ than my more recent videos:
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I love how every analysis of Oceangate Titan just shows how it's even more reckless and dangerous than it looked before. This is the first mention I've seen of fire as a risk, and oh *no* a fire at depth sounds *terrifying.*
i watched it once, i watched it twice, well maybe 3 times. I will watch it again
i almost got whiplash from shaking my head so much at all the ignorant things stockton did making this sub. stockton rush was a walking, talking example of the dunning-kruger effect.
Thank you for reuploading this.
4:28 “I will not be including any dark humor or memes”
Kind of adorable how you left in the part about trusting that Ocean Gate tested their own claims about air supply. I think we all can tell by now that they did nothing of the sort.
On topic of David Shaw, I would argue that unlike almost everyone involved in Oceangate, he knew the risks and could make.
He was an experienced cave diver, using equipment he built/customised himself. On the extreme end of cave diving, there certainly is no redundancy or room for error. If there is a failure, you will die, and I am sure Dave Shaw knew that, and I am sure he had some idea how possible that was.
The cracks in my screen line up with your graph just before middle!
I wonder if there is a recording of the crunching sounds made during prior dives, like when it got to a certain depth and when it was heading back to the surface. There was one engineer/expert who rode in the sub and was like "that sound is no good, you really shouldn't be using this" and Rush was like "it's fine, chill."
You are correct regarding controllers to control the sub. The Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines use Xbox controllers to operate the submarine's photonic mast. Nothing else.
As my A&P instructor says...(Aircraft mechanic/"Engineer" in UK[Airframe and Powerplant])
"DIY kills and costs cheap, Engineers are expensive but keep you alive. (Us mechanics get paid to listen to Engineers and make sure the maintenance manuals are followed)"
Unlike the water, air is sort of inverse. But you enter a stripped down transport category aircraft, its a pressure chamber just like a deep sea vehicle. Literal bulkhead at the tail section. I cant imagine using carbon fiber for that. You would cause decompression and let me tell you, its a long way down. As for Mr Rush, it was so quick he never knew his mistake.
Respect to all engineers who work on deep sea electronics. Either Horowitz or Hill did that work, can't recall, but I remember mentions in ART OF ELECTRONICS
I could tell by looking at the changes in his face between when he building it and when he was getting ready for the dive that he was a man under tremendous financial stress. He showed all the signs that his body was full of Cortisol so he would have been suffering similar symptoms to Cocaine withdrawals.
59 yr old retired aircraft inspector and then airline pilot from age 31 on. There is no way I would work for an outfit with such self declared discrimination! Happier growing veg and taking part in local music performance events.
Don't miss Stockton and his ilk...
Watching the build of the vessel reminds me of an amateur building something in their garage. And I’m confident he hired young people because he didn’t want the criticism and reality checks senior engineers would most certainly provide.
A clear case of ego and hubris leading to unnecessary deaths.
I might not be an engineer but if i was in charge the development of this things i would have use a new patented test procedure. Tide the thing to a cable and drop it a couple hundred times into a trench to a deeper than intended dept to see if it fails. On a serious note ive seen your other videos on subs and it seems to me that there is a lack of destructive testing.
Your concluding remark raises a great point about survivorship bias.
Something for general application: FMECA (DId this as part of MilSpec tech_docs for in an avionics R&D project.)
Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis ... how likely to fail (MTBF), effects of failure, mean time to repair (MTTR) ... _makes for fascinatin' graphs!_ :-)
youtube didn't bother recommending this to me until i had finished the original once, which it had been recommending for days. guess i'll watch it again lol
i saw a marine biologist with 0 qualifications like yours who once rode in a submarine being invited to give 12-min news segments and presentations on mainstream TV.
you ARE a leading expert if you choose to present yourself as such! legit - like, go and email TV stations with your qualifications and this documentary you made as the 1 year anniversary comes up.
seeing the standard for some of the ‘experts’ speaking on the Titan so far and recently, especially to the general audience, you will absolutely get featured and be able to have a platform to share your thoughts.
have confidence!! just because you’re not a submarine engineer doesn’t mean you’re not an expert!
The whole reason I made this video in the first place is I was sick of news outlets reporting on rumours and making baseless assumptions.
People like me, and indeed subject matter experts, are rarely aired on mainstream news reports because we would have very little to say that didn’t sound either boring to a viewer or adversarial to a journalist (If you haven’t guessed, I have very little respect for most journalists)
I _knew_ the reasons this wasn't safe were far more numerous than most anyone could even fathom. An instance of not knowing what you don't know. It's such a complex and dangerous situation that there's no way you should even consider trying it unless you have teams of experts weighing in and guiding the project. What a disaster.
Thanks! You're right. The audio for this is great.
I literally do not care. I will watch this another 100 times again.