A submersible that is used to take paying guests to view the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing in the North Atlantic during an expedition.
On Monday, OceanGate Expeditions, the company who takes guests to explore the famous ship wreck which killed more than 1,500 guests onboard on April 15th, 1912, revealed that one of their vessels went missing during a trip to visit the shipwreck. OceanGate’s submersible, The Titan, is the only five-person sub in the world that is capable of reaching the Titanic wreck, which sits 2.4 miles below the sea surface. more here
SORRY FOR THESE FOLKS, BUT ALWAYS PREFERRED VISITING SHIPS ABOVE SURFACE
^^^^^^ Yup, and further more if I’m a parent of one of the search and rescue crew I’m thinking you should be on your own. WTF? You built this submersible, Does it work or not? Apparently not. And now my kids life is at stake.
…to follow on Benito’s comment, while we should pray that they may yet be safe, it is the worst sort of hubris, of trust in Man, to believe that the bottom of the ocean is a fit tourist destination. To believe that the elemental forces of water and gravity have been sufficiently tamed by engineers that they can be casually visited by the untrained and unskilled is to put a faith in Man’s craftiness on par with believing that the Titanic itself was so well wrought by Man’s hand that it could be considered unsinkable.
Sorry, but it is and ever SHALL be STUPID dangerous to go two and a half miles down to a depth where a nearly invisible stream of water from a popped rivet could cut a man in half from the pressure, and never SHOULD have been considered a fit subject for what was essentially a Disneyland ride to the bottom. There is an irony in the fact that a commercial enterprise would risk the lives of the rich for no reason other than to view the wreckage of a different commercial enterprise that lost the lives of the rich.
It sank.
Get over it.
Look at pictures, watch the movie, whatever if thats what, eh, floats your boat, but don’t go down to depths that would crush a bus into a subcompact just to poorly view the sane through a crowded, bleary porthole.
Life is risk, but risk is always a cost/benefit analysis. It may in this case cost all those people all they have or ever could have had simply to become latter day victims of an antique tragedy.
The game is not worth the candle.
…the only reason anyone cares about Titanic is that it sank. Had it simply completed its journey it would have been retired and gone to the ship breakers eventually like its sister Olympic, and no one today would have ever heard the name.
And no one would ever have gone 13000 feet down and become lost in a pointless attempt to view its broken hull today.
They got the full Titanic experience for only %250,000.
I used to scuba dive in nice, warm clear water to see all the pretty fish. The deepest of all of the dives was 90′. That was enough.
Sounds as if those people met with a horrible, terrifying death. There are very good quality images and videos of the wreck; kind of silly to take that kind of chance.
I want to be the first on theOcengate’ next submersible to go see the Titanic and the dead Oceangate’s coepse next to it, but I’m only willing to pay a buck fitty….
Let the tales of vengeful Titanic ghosts begin!
And now for eternity they will dance in the ball room
with the full orchestra dressed in tuxedos to the soft glow of early electric lamps………
Too bad Bill Gates wasn’t on it.
384 atmospheres to the bottom.
At that depth, a pinhole in the hull would drill right through you.
Hope it was quick.
How ironic! They thought the Titanic was unsinkable, too.
These people craved adventure and now they are getting it in spades.
They could not even come up fast. That in and of itself would kill them.
G-d bless.
Superiority complex. The elite always need to prove they have access to opportunities and privileges the average person may never have ever in life.
Risk is something elites are proud to experience and get a rush from despite possible deadly consequences. Truth – the progressive elitists risky behavior is a fool’s folly. They don’t seem to really care about the odds.
@ SNS
Alex McCandless, The Into the Wild guy, who went to Alaska to starve to death in a bus. A few years ago they helicoptered that bus out of the Wild and set it up as a shrine somewhere. I don’t know where they took it. It would be easy enough to find out but I don’t care. It might be right here in Fairbanks. Not really a reason to come here IMO but if it is here, I’m sure some fools are coming to see it. It may have lost some of its wilderness alure now that you can drive to it.
@ Thirdtwin
“Too bad Bill Gates wasn’t on it.”
They would have needed a much bigger sub to take all the people I’d like to have been on board!!
…if YOU were running a business with a multimillion dollar tube full of high profile billionares to a very well known watery gravesite, wouldn’t YOU consider it important to know where that tube is and what its doing at ALL TIMES? Maybe watch it with a camera or something, perhaps even drop another ROV to watch it, SOMETHING? Don’t know how practical a 2.5 mile physical tether would be but were I responsible for a tube full of high profile billionares I’d at least figure out how to TALK to it at all times, maybe put one of those Black Box beepers on it that you can track through the ocean, not simply drop it down and hope for the best…
Gates, Schwab, Joey B., Rancid Nan, Buffett, Wray, Clapper, Brennan, Austin, Waters, Mittens, McConnell, McCarthy … uhh … maybe we could take up a collection for these maggots for the next trip?
“We’re gonna need a bigger summerine!”
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
That’s all bad, but was their ESG and DEI scores up to scale?
Was there a tranny on board?
This iz gonna beat Gilligan’s three hour tour…
Wow, dem billionaires and millionaires on board that sub paid for an expensive casket – one that they have to share with the others. Oh the irony. It was the only song that popped into my head that fit.
The Thrill Is Gone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgXSomPE_FY
This will be the last tourist event to the Titanic, maybe it had to come to this so that sounder minds prevail.
Here was a couple of comments after the article:
It is about 0.43 psi per foot of depth, so, at 12500 feet, the pressure is about 2.5 tons per square inch. People don’t grasp how fast the total force builds up on even a small window or door when pressure per square inch is used. That’s almost 18 tons on a 6 inch diameter window. If the hull structure had not been tested for that amount of pressure at that depth for at least hundreds of times, then once the hull was at that depth, the pressure would have completely collapsed the submersible’s walls and crushed everyone inside instantly in a split second. They would never have known what was happening.
Another commenter with a morbid humor perspective:
To be fair, OceanGate has reduced their fee from $250,000 per person to $200,000 per person. For that price, not only do you get to see the Titanic wreckage, but also the sub that was previously used to see the Titanic wreckage.
@SNS: Apparently GPS doesn’t work underwater. They might be able to get a text message, but even those didn’t get through. Your post made me laugh, we think too logically. There were 5 different ways in case of emergency/power failure to raise the sub back to the surface. Only hope is is that they did that and are floating around on the ocean somewhere with no electronic devices onboard showing their location. How dumb is that? I bet their heirs already dusted off the Will. $250,000 for a casket that’s shared with 4 others. Ironic. No Uhauls behind the sub either.
While on a Caribbean cruise about 15 years ago my family went on a submarine tour of the reefs and shipwrecks. I think the max depth we went was about 100 ft. That was enough for me.
Idiot lawmaker (redundant I know) wants to send a multi billion dollar nucler sub to “rescue” the multi billion dollar people stupid enough to take a vessel piloted by an Xbox controller 2 miles down.
Even though they are now just jelly and paste on the ocean’s floor far below the crush depth of any but 2 other small subs on earth.
Reminds me of how Teddy used millions of our money and the Navy to “rescue” his kid who wasn’t even instrument rated to fly.
Talk about the elites sense of entitlement. The hubris of these morons is amazing.
That watery grave should have already been left alone instead of attempting to turn it into a millionaires theme park!
They “Dropped suddenly”
I hope that eventually the voice recordings, if any, can be recovered. It would be very interesting to hear what these rich ass-hats had to say to one another as they faced certain doom.
It’s something like 6000 lbs/sq-inch at the Titanic’s depth. One of the article’s I read said the sub was built from titanium sphere’s wound in carbon fiber for added strength. I received basic SCBA training 30 or so years ago, and remembered the instructor mentioning that SCBA and SCUBA tanks used internationally non-interchangeable threads. The SCUBA tanks were heavy steel, capable of 3000+ psi, the SCBA tanks were lighter steel wound in fiberglass to contain the same pressure without the weight. If you tried to use an SCBA tank for SCUBA, the fiberglass would de-laminate under pressure, and the tank would explode while strapped to your back underwater… Kind of makes me wonder why they’d build a submarine that way.
KR
Kali Refugee in Texas AT 1:33 PM
…Back in the day we used two different SCBA tanks. One was all steel and “low pressure”, with a storage pressure I recall as being ~2000 PSI. The other was steel wrapped in fiberglass and was “high pressure”, which I remember as being in the neighborhood of 4000 PSI. The main difference other than the tanks themselves was that the lower pressure tanks were considered “Half-Hour” tanks as that was the time you could reasonably expect from them, while the higher pressure tanks were “Hour” tanks as they held more by compression that was regulated to the user at the same lower pressure.
The hour tanks were paradoxically lighter, probably because of the fiberglass wrap design you wrote of, but I never personally liked them. Not sure if it was a regulator issue or a psychological issue or just an endurance issue or what, but the high pressure bottles always left me with a headache that the lower pressure bottles did not.
I only served a time or two as the informal “Air Officer”, meaning I brought the giant, awkward utility/rescue truck to the scene that had the compressor for that purpose in it and also had the jaws and other rescue items. It wasn’t super popular to drive OR to crew, because it had two hard stainless bench seats that could sit 8 in profound discomfort on the inside, with no real seatbelts so if you braked hard or two-footed there was an octet of guys who were going to be very pissed at you later. I mostly tried to avoid it for those reasons, and also because it meant that a) you couldn’t go into the fire at all, you had to stay out with the truck the whole time, b) you had to stay LONGER on scene than many others because you had to refill all the bottles, and c) you had the responsibility of having to sometimes be a dick and tell a guy to sit down if he looked like shit instead of just giving him a fresh bottle, which was necessary sometimes but didn’t make you any friends. The thing had the handling of a garbage truck but had a pretty great stage presence so people usually stayed far enough away that you didn’t have to do much maneuvering, even at Code 3 speeds.
Except for auto entrapments, you didn’t want this thing to be first in anyway. The trucks, ladders, and even squads had sufficient bottles to run a couple of attacks with unsupported, plus you wanted to be sure you didn’t block anything in or out during the early stages, and you also had to be aware which way the wind was blowing or you’d fill people’s tanks with the very same smoke from the fire that the tanks were meant to avoid via the roof mounted intakes. This thing had steel pigeonholes in it that you were supposed to fill the tanks in for the stated reason that it was said they could explode during filling. Never had that happen but they got pretty pissy if you filled a tank on a guy’s back, which I personally never did but some seemed to be fond of doing. But only the low pressure ones. The high and low pressure had different nipples so they couldn’t be confused at filling, and this manual condensate drain system that you had to remember to MANUALLY tap every 15 minutes or so if you wanted to fill air instead of water.
We did have sport divers but no dive team because we didn’t have bodies of water to justify it. The divers mostly laughed at the SCBA bottles and made it pretty clear they thought theirs were superior, but without buoyancy to help hold it and with the regulator in the wrong place they would not be well suited for interior firefighting just for those things alone, although it was funny to watch when they would sometimes forget which kind they had on and reach for the wrong end of the tank.
Not sure how the kids do it now but that’s how it was then. We did once train to fall in water at the local pool using full SCBA and turnouts just to see how fast we’d sink and such and never had a tank unravel, but we WERE told to divest the tank quickly because the regulator immediatly went haywire after immersion so it wasn’t usable anyway, but we also didn’t go more than a couple of feet deep so external pressure on the tank wasn’t really an issue. Never had any issues with water spray so only immersion was ever a problem.
…but I never looked at one and thought it would be fun if it were big enough to climb inside of. Bubblheads are definintely a breed apart and God bless ’em for doing what they do, but as for me, I don’t care WHAT the things made out of, if you can’t swim to it, I ain’t interested.
Seems to me there was some question regarding the hull strength on these things a couple years back. The name Oceangate sounds familiar.
The Titanic, it’s just to die for.
@ SNS
” important to know where that tube is and what its doing at ALL TIMES?”
I think they did know where and what it was doing right up to when they didn’t. That implies a catastrophic failure of some sort. If they were communicating by some sort of physical tether, what happened to that tehter would give some idea of what happened. I’ve heard no mention of a tether so it probably didn’t exist.
The most likely explanation is a hull implosion which I think should have been able to be picked up by sonar. I haven’t any mention of sonar either. I wonder why? Does a sub imploding when no ones around make a sound?
Those people are dead. RIP
Doesn’t sound very seaworthy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12214617/Titanic-sub-like-kit-car-built-Amazon-parts.html
Oceangate (an appropriate name that makes me think of a gate entry to a graveyard) is going to be sued back to the Stone Age by the families of those wealthy risk takers.
^^^^ Bet those families are already talking to some expensive Ambulance Chasing lawyers.
At this time they have 40 hours of oxygen left.
I believe they’re doomed.
I’ll bet some expensive ambulance chasing lawyers have already contacted the families.
They have all the oxygen they are ever going to need.
It may be a few weeks before the CG and Navy find it. Good bet they’ll find a hole in its hull.
My guess is that before it got too far down, it was attacked and punctured by an irate Narwhal who thought it was an alien monster invading his territory.