Missing submersible near wreck of Titanic

[Lucan]

I don't understand why they need to search an area "the size of Connecticut" as the US Coastguard said, which is about 5000 square miles. Surely the mother ship, the Polar Prince, knows where they descended from and the sub goes down more-or-less vertically. So it is either stuck or wrecked on the bottom around where it was going for (and they did allow for any current on the descent, no?), or it is buoyant and on the surface moving along with well-known currents. In the latter case it could be in a much wider area but also much easier to spot, but I understand that the clowns who designed this thing did not consider an emergency radio beacon or even a radar reflector to be necessary.

So we have the worlds best resources to hunt for a few super rich people who knew what risks they were taking

The interest is in the circumstances and the long running nature of the suspense, not in how much money they have. There was similar world-wide interest in the Thailand cave rescue drama and I don't think those boys were super rich.

 

[43066]

I remember, at the tender age of ten, seeing Kenneth Moore in "A night to Remember" .

Funnily enough my mum was also interested in the Titanic because of seeing that film (hence buying me a book on it).

or it is buoyant and on the surface moving along with well-known currents. In the latter case it could be in a much wider area but also much easier to spot, but I understand that the clowns who designed this thing did not consider an emergency radio beacon or even a radar reflector to be necessary.

And the saddest thing is that, even if it’s bobbing around on the surface, they will still suffocate if they aren’t found imminently because there’s no way to open the hatch from the inside…

 

[AlterEgo]

And the saddest thing is that, even if it’s bobbing around on the surface, they will still suffocate if they aren’t found imminently because there’s no way to happen the hatch from the inside…

Absolutely criminal to design a craft in that way.

 

[Iskra]

I don't understand why they need to search an area "the size of Connecticut" as the US Coastguard said, which is about 5000 square miles. Surely the mother ship, the Polar Prince, knows where they descended from and the sub goes down more-or-less vertically. So it is either stuck or wrecked on the bottom around where it was going for (and they did allow for any current on the descent, no?), or it is buoyant and on the surface moving along with well-known currents. In the latter case it could be in a much wider area but also much easier to spot, but I understand that the clowns who designed this thing did not consider an emergency radio beacon or even a radar reflector to be necessary.


The interest is in the circumstances and the long running nature of the suspense, not in how much money they have. There was similar world-wide interest in the Thailand cave rescue drama and I don't think those boys were super rich.

Spotting a small white craft that sits half below the surface in the Atlantic, which is full of white waves breaking is not an easy task from the air.

A beacon would have to be pressure proof, which is presumably not easy or possible. A beacon inside the craft would be useless because I doubt it would penetrate the hull due to the shape and density of it and of course they can’t unseal themselves to put one outside of the craft.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Jun 2023 ==

Absolutely criminal to design a craft in that way.

Presumably it’s the safest way for an entry/exit point to survive such pressures. Even the smallest gap could become fatal at those depths.

 

[AlterEgo]

Spotting a small white craft that sits half below the surface in the Atlantic, which is full of white waves breaking is not an easy task from the air.

A beacon would have to be pressure proof, which is presumably not easy or possible. A beacon inside the craft would be useless because I doubt it would penetrate the hull due to the shape and density of it and of course they can’t unseal themselves to put one outside of the craft.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Jun 2023 ==


Presumably it’s the safest way for an entry/exit point to survive such pressures. Even the smallest gap could become fatal at those depths.

No, it's the cheapest way.

Submersibles - designed properly, and with people's lives in mind - do usually have some sort of emergency escape mechanism which works at the surface.

 

[Iskra]

No, it's the cheapest way.

Submersibles - designed properly, and with people's lives in mind - do usually have some sort of emergency escape mechanism which works at the surface.

Agree, cheapness is a big factor in this entire incident

 

[AlterEgo]

Agree, cheapness is a big factor in this entire incident

I also think time is a factor - the CEO wanted to do stuff quickly, which is why there were no external safety inspections or approvals.

I really do get the Victorian-style thrust of explorers and innovators; most of the industrial inventions we use today - like trains - were refined by the blood of people who were killed making or using them in the early days.

But this submersible is not really exploring anything new - the main purpose is taking wealthy fools down to a mass gravesite to gawp at it. There is no moral reason to have cut corners. Submersibles are established technology; this isn't the first one to try and go to the Titanic.

 

[DelW]

This event does shed an unflattering light on the strange ways that ridiculously wealthy people find, to squander the money that they (or their families) have made. It has been suggested that "research" was the motivation, but it's hard to think of any useful task that can be done by five pairs of untrained eyes peering through a thick glass window, that couldn't be done better from high-res images or scans produced by an unmanned submersible.

The history of the Titanic is well established, the wreck was located decades ago and has been visited and surveyed many times since. Essentially the motive of those making this trip is little different from people who slow down on motorways to rubberneck at a collision on the other carriageway.

I realise that there's almost certainly a human tragedy developing, and that it must be unimaginably painful, not just for those in the sub but probably more so for their families. However, they chose to make the trip in the knowledge of the risks, for their own motives, making a free choice. Perhaps their super-rich families might like to recognise the publicly funded rescue efforts by making suitably large donations to marine rescue services world wide, either as a celebration of their rescue or (sadly more likely) a memorial to their deaths.

 

[Lucan]

Spotting a small white craft that sits half below the surface in the Atlantic, which is full of white waves breaking is not an easy task from the air.

Tell me about it. I was previously a ship's officer and have seen man-overboard excercises, and even at less than a mile away it is hard to see a fluorescent orange marker from the bridge. However I didn't say it would be easy to spot this sub on the surface from the air, just much easier than spotting it on the seabed. They should have painted it orange anyway.

 

[Iskra]

Tell me about it. I was previously a ship's officer and have seen man-overboard excercises, and even at less than a mile away it is hard to see a fluorescent orange marker from the bridge. However I didn't say it would be easy to spot this sub on the surface from the air, just much easier than spotting it on the seabed. They should have painted it orange anyway.

Yes, would seem to be a fairly obvious precaution to paint it a bright colour that doesn’t occur naturally in an ocean environment. But, I guess white may be easier to spot in the dark of the ocean floor?

Do you think powerful radar could detect it?

 

[ainsworth74]

Do you think powerful radar could detect it?

Probably. Radars that can pick targets out of background clutter (like say waves or trees/hills when you're over land) certainly exist it's just tricky and does depend on the size of the object being searched for, the strength of the radar, it's physical characteristics (I believe you need a narrow beam) and the power of the processing equipment behind it. It's why radar reflectors are a common addition to objects that are small, likely to be a cluttered radar environment (waves!) and therefore difficult to detect such as small submersibles that are bobbing on the surface! I believe more reputable organisations do equip their submarines with radar reflectors for exactly the situation that they're on the surface but unable to communicate making them easier to find.

 

[Lucan]

Perhaps their super-rich families might like to recognise the publicly funded rescue efforts by making suitably large donations to marine rescue services world wide

This incident does raise the serious moral question of how much public money should be spent rescuing adventurers stranded on recklessly planned expeditions, and who have made the choice to go and in this case recognised the dangers in the waivers that they signed. The owner of the sub company, Stockton Rush, has shown himself to be reckless - I have done some research, not hard to find, and some of Rush's past comments about safety are quite shocking.

 

[ainsworth74]

This incident does raise the serious moral question of how much public money should be spent rescuing adventurers stranded on recklessly planned expeditions, and who have made the choice to go and in this case recognised the dangers in the waivers that they signed. The owner of the sub company, Stockton Rush, has shown himself to be reckless - I have done some research, not hard to find, and some of Rush's past comments about safety are quite shocking.

It is an interesting question. But I'm not sure we want to start drawing lines as that might start to invite creep in terms of "well if we're not going to spend public money on saving people in situation X why should we help people in situation Z?". That being said once there's no hope of rescue and it does just comes to recovery (which basically in this case means in the next few hours, lets say by the end of day to play it safe) I would have no objection to the withdrawal of publicly funded search efforts. Obviously if someone wants to pay for the USCG or whoever to keep up the search for longer then that's another matter. But I don't see why anyone's tax payers should be funding the effort to locate what has become a tomb rather than a possible life saving mission.

 

[dosxuk]

Yes, would seem to be a fairly obvious precaution to paint it a bright colour that doesn’t occur naturally in an ocean environment. But, I guess white may be easier to spot in the dark of the ocean floor?

Do you think powerful radar could detect it?

As one of the spokespeople put it, using radar to scan the ocean floor is a bit like trying to find a mine in a minefield - there is a large debris field down there already, spotting the new bit from the old is extremely difficult. If they were on a clear bit of the ocean floor then finding it using radar would be relatively easy - but the clear seabed is a bit less interesting for tourists.

 

[ainsworth74]

As one of the spokespeople put it, using radar to scan the ocean floor is a bit like trying to find a mine in a minefield - there is a large debris field down there already, spotting the new bit from the old is extremely difficult. If they were on a clear bit of the ocean floor then finding it using radar would be relatively easy - but the clear seabed is a bit less interesting for tourists.

Though that would presumably be sonar rather than radar?

 

[Iskra]

As one of the spokespeople put it, using radar to scan the ocean floor is a bit like trying to find a mine in a minefield - there is a large debris field down there already, spotting the new bit from the old is extremely difficult. If they were on a clear bit of the ocean floor then finding it using radar would be relatively easy - but the clear seabed is a bit less interesting for tourists.

I was meaning on the surface

 

[Ediswan]

And the saddest thing is that, even if it’s bobbing around on the surface, they will still suffocate if they aren’t found imminently because there’s no way to open the hatch from the inside…

Even if the hatch could be opened from the inside, it would not help. When floating at the surface, the hatch is mostly submerged. Attempting to open the hatch would immediately flood the cabin. The design is such that the submersibe has to be lifted out of the water before the hatch can be opened. As best as I can tell, the only 'official' way to do that is the custom sled. I don't see any designated lifting points which other ships could use.

 

[Iskra]

Even if the hatch could be opened from the inside, it would not help. When floating at the surface, the hatch is mostly submerged. Attempting to open the hatch would immediately flood the cabin. The design is such that the submersibe has to be lifted out of the water before the hatch can be opened. As best as I can tell, the only 'official' way to do that is the custom sled. I don't see any designated lifting points which other ships could use.

Presumably, if the occupants redistributed their weight on the surface they could get the hatch to a position where it is mainly lifted out of the water. Although the shape and indeed entire design of the vessel seem to be sub-optimal in many ways.

 

[43066]

Even if the hatch could be opened from the inside, it would not help. When floating at the surface, the hatch is mostly submerged. Attempting to open the hatch would immediately flood the cabin. The design is such that the submersibe has to be lifted out of the water before the hatch can be opened. As best as I can tell, the only 'official' way to do that is the custom sled. I don't see any designated lifting points which other ships could use.

It isn’t unforeseeable that the sub could end up on the surface for a long period, though, due to a failure of recovery equipment for example, or even the sea being too rough to recover it. Therefore not having some ability for the crew to egress and perhaps deploy a life raft (or at least ventilate the interior) seems like madness.

Given that the CEO of the company is one of the passengers, I imagine some “tense” conversations about the design philosophy of the sub might have taken place amongst the occupants over the past few hours. Let’s just hope for the sake of those aboard that it instantly imploded on the way down.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I don't understand why they need to search an area "the size of Connecticut" as the US Coastguard said, which is about 5000 square miles. Surely the mother ship, the Polar Prince, knows where they descended from and the sub goes down more-or-less vertically. So it is either stuck or wrecked on the bottom around where it was going for (and they did allow for any current on the descent, no?), or it is buoyant and on the surface moving along with well-known currents. In the latter case it could be in a much wider area but also much easier to spot, but I understand that the clowns who designed this thing did not consider an emergency radio beacon or even a radar reflector to be necessary.

It's clearly vastly more complicated than that given they don't know what has happened and it's in a deep section of the ocean, there was a search for a nuclear bomb dropped in the water by a B-52 that collided with its tanker:

1966 Palomares B-52 crash - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Although the bomb was smaller than submersible it was still a reasonable size, they know where it had entered the water and its likely behaviour and it was only at a depth of 2,550 feet it was exceptionally difficult to find while this search for the submersible in much deeper water and unknown what's happened is going to be much more complex.

 

[duncan788]

Unfortunately, I doubt they will be able to locate that submersible. It reminds me of the tragic case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a much larger plane equipped with a black box that emits a signal for up to 30 days, aiding its underwater retrieval. Despite these advantages, the aircraft remains unfound as of 2023.

 

[Gloster]

A bit of surfing the net shows that the sharks, sorry, lawyers are already circling. No doubt we will see anybody and everybody involved, except the deceased (possibly), suing anybody and everybody else involved, including (possibly) the deceased, for astronomical sums. And you can bet that none of it will go to those who have paid for the rescue attempts. Cynical, me?

 

[Iskra]

A bit of surfing the net shows that the sharks, sorry, lawyers are already circling. No doubt we will see anybody and everybody involved, except the deceased (possibly), suing anybody and everybody else involved, including (possibly) the deceased, for astronomical sums. And you can bet that none of it will go to those who have paid for the rescue attempts. Cynical, me?

Seems a bit pointless when the person mostly responsible is at the bottom and the company was only scraping by financially and you can imagine bankruptcy isn’t far away with the owner and principal asset lost. Don’t those waivers mean anything too?

 

[Towers]

Regarding the cost aspect, there is a flip side in that this tragic event has provided a real life opportunity for the gathering and deployment of pretty much the world’s combined deep sea search and rescue resources to come together and do what they doubtless often practise to do but probably very rarely if ever actually have to do in anger. I wonder if the cost of this is anywhere near the price of the ‘wargames’ exercises that armed forces do periodically, for example.

 

[kristiang85]

Apparently a "debris field" has been discovered by an ROV. Not much more detail than that.

(prersumably they mean unexpected debris, not the Titanic's).

Although not the result we wanted, at least the end was very, very quick for them if that was the case.

 

[AlterEgo]

US Coast Guard say they have located a debris field near the Titanic, and it is being evaluated.

 

[Iskra]

US Coast Guard say they have located a debris field near the Titanic, and it is being evaluated.

At least it will have likely been over pretty quickly for them then. Of course, the whole area was already a debris field, but you think they’d be fairly confident before announcing something.

 

[AlterEgo]

At least it will have likely been over pretty quickly for them then. Of course, the whole area was already a debris field, but you think they’d be fairly confident before announcing something.

I'm surprised there would be much of a "field" from an implosion, would that not just crush the small craft like a Coke can? It's not like it's a high impact collision akin to a plane hitting the water.

 

[Iskra]

I'm surprised there would be much of a "field" from an implosion, would that not just crush the small craft like a Coke can? It's not like it's a high impact collision akin to a plane hitting the water.

I think once it’s breached and all voids are instantly filled with essentially very heavy water, then the separate metal parts remain fairly okay, hence why the Titanic wreck is still relatively okay.

 

[kristiang85]

I'm surprised there would be much of a "field" from an implosion, would that not just crush the small craft like a Coke can? It's not like it's a high impact collision akin to a plane hitting the water.

I guess pressurised air would 'explode' outwards too, plus the shell was made from carbon fibre bind, which tends to shatter under pressure quite violently once its reached its limit.

Anyway, no point speculating until we know for sure. But my optimism is quickly fading.