[post_break]

The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive, he could have made another hull, and he could be taking more trips down there for better of for worse. The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

[Ralfp]

It didn't implode on next dive, it was much worse.

On dive 80 during surfacing people heard a "loud bang" from the submersible (according to a witness it sounded like a gunfire).

They looked at their "RTMS" system and found recording of loud noise from the hull. But only three days later they did the dive 81 (with customers). After this dive their tension sensors shown that their carbon hull no longer compresses under pressure like it used to. They then made plan to inspect the hull after dive 83. But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper.

During summer they hauled it for a dive 88 (I don't know why they jumped from 81 to 88, prolly cancelled dives because of the weather?). During hauling it become loose and started knocking against the hauling platform (LARS) because of the waves. Day later they did a dive where it imploded.

On side note, they had no way to access and inspect the carbon hull without having to completely dissemble vehicle, and that too was considered too pricy to do.

This was a disaster of organization with messianic CEO dismissing all concerns with bravado and legal treats that got what was coming to them. If you want to, here's transcript of him scolding and then laying out one of engineers because they took safety concerns outside of the company:

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...

[dogleash]

"Not at all, because carbon fiber is better compression then tension. And that's what nobody understands. It's completely opposite of what everyone else says. Everyone's, oh, carbon fiber can't handle compression. They're full of shit, and I've proven they're full of shit."

- Man crushed by custom carbon fiber submersible

[lesuorac]

> But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper.

This came up in the hearings. It's standard practice to do this but it's probably different leaving say the metallic Antipodes [1] outside than carbon fiber.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_(submersible)

[iJohnDoe]

Some real gems here and learned some things I wasn't aware of.

> "Now, if it fails, then you have to stop, and it's -- again, this is not something that just happens all of a sudden. It doesn't just implode. It screams like a mother before it implodes."

> On dive 80 during surfacing people heard a "loud bang" from the submersible (according to a witness it sounded like a gunfire)

Well, there you go.

> But instead they left Titan <during the> winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper.

> During hauling it become loose and started knocking against the hauling platform (LARS) because of the waves. Day later they did a dive where it imploded.

Early on, it was made clear that carbon fiber hulls could not easily be inspected for integrity issues like metal hulls can be. I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing sensitive instruments have been around for a while for the purpose of inspection. Having a hull you cannot easily inspect would/should make most people/companies nervous.

[js2]

This transcript is of CEO Stockton Rush interviewing redacted "Director of Marine Operations"? Do I have that right?

Why is there a transcript of the CEO interviewing one of his own employees, apparently in front of the NTSB, from 2018?

Edit: the transcript is between Stockton Rush and his former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, plus three other staff. [...] Lochridge: "That meeting turned out to be a two-hour, 10-minute discussion… on my termination and how my disagreements with the organisation, with regards to safety, didn't matter." [...] The 2018 meeting was recorded.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7819kx4498o

[Noumenon72]

Has anyone written up a narrative of this, presented that transcript in context, and so forth? If not, thank you for presenting it.

[joshstrange]

> They then made plan to inspect the hull after dive 83. But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper.

The things I'm working on have a much lower (zero?) chance of death but this is a tale as old as time. _Looks longingly into the backlog..._

[throw9394944]

> This was a disaster of organization with messianic CEO dismissing all concerns with bravado

While I love this list, I do not like that you are blaming everything on CEO.

This company followed current ethical policies, and used them to exclude actual experts and skilled people. CEO operated in environment that supports this behaviour, and only cares about irelevant metrics!

[dwheeler]

> The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive...

I disagree. In fact, I think that's quite unlikely.

First, unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect. Then, when they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically. So "this hull worked before" isn't evidence of success in this case, as it normally would be, it's evidence that you're getting closer & closer to the disaster.

Second, I think Stockton would have just kept diving, even if this event hadn't failed. He might have even gotten more reckless (though per the report he was already extremely reckless). If you keep playing Russian Roulette, and occasionally add another bullet, eventually the game will end. There is no evidence he was going to stop until he was killed by his own decisions.

None of this takes away the tragedy of it. It's sad, and will remain so.

[WalterBright]

> unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect

All metals suffer from that, too. It's called fatigue damage. It bedeviled the aviation industry for a long time because there was no reliable way to detect the fatigue damage.

Eventually, an ad hoc formula was developed to calculate the fatigue damage, and then replace parts that were getting close to the limits.

That's why airliners are scrapped after something like 62,000 flight cycles.

[chowells]

I think you missed the thrust of OP. The submersible had instruments in it to report on the hull condition. They all were reporting it had previously experienced severe strain before the last dive, and they were designed as tripwires. If they tripped, the hull should have been considered unsafe and not used again. They were ignored.

It is a shock that they actually worked and reported the hull was unsafe before it failed. Given everything else, it's not a surprise in the slightest that they were ignored.

[lesuorac]

I'm not sure he had the money to make another hull. I think that's the crux of the issue, he didn't have a usable system and he didn't want to give up his ambition.

[lupusreal]

Money was a big part of the problem. The whole point of making it out of carbon fiber was to make it light and therefore cheap to operate. He could have made a long DSV with plenty of room for passengers out of metal, the Aluminaut DSV was such a craft with proven performance, but then he would have needed to buy or rent a more expensive ship to operate it with.

[shortrounddev2]

Other than the finances of it, he was a total narcissist who refused to believe anyone else knew more about anything than he did. Even when presented with hard data he chose to ignore it and killed himself as a result.

[jordanb]

It didn't do a lot of dives before it failed. The dive number was the number of "dives" oceangate did using any hull. Additionally most of those dives were 20 feet down in a marina for testing.

[petsfed]

>The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

Emphasis mine.

Everybody hammers on the controller like using a gaming controller was somehow more indicative of the unseriousness of the endeavor than, you know, the firing of the guy who said the hull was unsafe. Based on what I've read, that was one of the few authentically competent design decisions of the whole bloody thing. Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US?

The US Navy has been using off-the-shelf game controllers for years now[0], because they work. And as a bonus, the submarine designers can be confident that if Stockton Rush or Seaman Manchild or whoever throws his controller in a fit of rage when his submarine doesn't work right, the controller will still work afterwards.

Absolutely, there were problems with the control scheme (reportedly, the motors were wired into the control board wrong, so the x- and y-axes were reversed). But that's not the fault of some usb controller communicating with the control box. That's the fault of the people working on the actually bespoke portions of the submarine.

0. https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-mane...

[rcxdude]

>Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US?

That's fine, but you would think they would buy a high quality one (like $70), use a wired one, and maybe have a spare? I think that's a lot of where the ire comes from. It's the cheapest and easiest part of the system and still they skimped out (and it's memable for gamers, given how common the experience of 'third party controller the little brother/least favored friend has to use' is). I worked on a self-funded student project making an autonomous underwater vehicle and we still used a better controller than they did (the xbox 360 controller is the obvious choice for such things. It's ubiquitously understood, trivial to interface to, reasonably priced, and pretty damn solid)

[trenchpilgrim]

It's not just that they used a game controller, they used a super cheap crappy controller instead of something backed my a major company with millions of R&D funding or a modern device with better sensors (hall effect/TMR) better suited for controlling vehicles in something other than an arcade game.

Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.

[shortrounddev2]

There's a documentary about it on Netflix and the impression I came away with is that, while there are fundamental engineering problems associated with a carbon fiber design, they could have probably overcome them in one way or another.

The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them. It was a company with absolutely no culture of safety and a cult of personality where people were punished for being honest. The CEO knew about the problems and still somehow believed, to his core, that everyone else (including hard data!) was wrong. He believed in his own infallibility so deeply that it killed him

[hajile]

I've heard both assertions. I tend to believe that Carbon Fiber is a fine material to use.

This submersible used untested techniques. They didn't adhere the layers together properly and apparently never bothered to X-ray the tube as that would have shown at least some of the defects. It also seems like there were other design issues with how the tube was paired to the ends.

Most importantly, the deaths were caused by negligence during operation and maintenance. They had the data showing when the hull was damaged on the previous expedition, but either never did their due diligence and analyze it or ignored the results. Even during their last expedition, they may well have avoided death if the alarms had been heeded.

EDIT: to answer the people who seem skeptical, there are companies making carbon fiber vessels that have successfully gone much deeper than those Titanic dives. We're still in the learning stages with the technology, but we'll eventually find the combinations and standards that can make it safe to use (at which point, it may become better than our current solutions). Until then, maybe we shouldn't be shoving people into damaged experimental vessels to see what happens.

https://www.compositeenergytechnologies.com/underwater-carbo...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376273321_Carbon_Fi...

[Ralfp]

You don't need to watch Netflix series. There is a transcript of entire conversation between Stockthon and David Lochridge where the former scolds the latter for taking his safety concerns outside of company and firing him:

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...

[6SixTy]

Carbon Fiber just isn't suited for submarine type of loads. It really doesn't like being compressed, and it tends to give you no warning before snapping.

[loudmax]

There's been a vibe shift. A cult of personality around an arrogant narcissist who fires people for publishing hard data when it contradicts him is apparently what a lot of people seem to want right now.

[throw0101c]

> The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them. It was a company with absolutely no culture of safety and a cult of personality where people were punished for being honest.

Sounds like someone else that's been in the news these last few months.

[Twirrim]

> The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them.

There has to be a point at which you go "fuck it" and stop working for such a guy, even if you haven't been the target of his temper. I lasted 9 months at a company that had a CEO who wasn't explosive, but toxic in so many ways. His company had a 90% staff turnover over any given 18 month period, primarily everyone outside of senior leadership. If senior leadership had stopped propping him up, and quit that company would have been dead and buried far quicker. Thankfully that company wasn't involved in anything that could endanger anyone's lives.

[morpheos137]

Stockton Rush would have fit right in in Silicon Valley. Rush and stock on.