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Titan sub: crew have died after catastrophic loss of pressure chamber, US Coast Guard confirms
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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It sucks that 4 other people were killed by the CEOs own hubris. But at least they don't appear to have suffocated to death. At that depth, it would have been instantaneous.
Yeah, that was my concern when we got reports of regular banging noises.
Is the general thought that the banging noises was the vessel imploding...?
Unlikely, implosion makes a very different sound. It could be almost anything. Might have been parts of the wreckage getting moved around by currents and knocking together, might have been some undersea life bumping into the wreck of the Titanic, might have been completely unrelated.
Wonder what made the banging noises...?
The phrase "red herring" originated because the u.s. navy mistook fish noises for incredibly stealthy russia submarines for years :P
Could be anything
"Red herring" as a term originates from the early 1800s. Although you're absolutely right on the larger point; the ocean is noisy and sound carries, there's no telling what it was.
What if the banging was them trying to crack the window to avoid suffocating?
Implosions require a lot of pressure, so whatever took them out did it while they were still deep.
My guess is it happened as they approached extreme depths. Metal fatigue and poor design aren't always instantly apparent, but they stack up exponentially. The same way the CEO had piloted it down before he did again, then BANG and done. Would have been practically instant and without warning.
Worth pointing out that only the end caps were metal (and titanium at that, which is already brittle), while the bulk of the hull was carbon fiber, which doesn't ~~gradually fatigue~~ bend and buckle, it fails catastrophically.
Also, they lost signal at 1 hour and 45 minutes into a ~2 hour dive. I don't know how much their dive rate varied, but if we assume it was effectively constant, that puts them at ~3500 meters at LOS.
Combining those two points, two to three years after building the ship, they identified cyclic fatigue in the carbon fiber that reduced their calculated rating to 3000 meters. Since that's not enough to get to Titanic, they completely rebuilt the ship, two years ago.
So yeah, I think you're right. With the public facts available, I think the most likely scenario is the carbon fiber hull was fatiguing again, they decided to trust their acoustic/strain monitoring system that they believed would give them enough warning to resurface (which the guy they fired in 2018 said might only give them warnings milliseconds before there was a problem), and it failed somewhere below 3000 meters.
Definitely not. For one, the banging was heard a couple days ago, when there would still have been hope of rescue. Two, if 375 atmospheres of pressure hasn't broken it, you're not going to break it with whatever random stuff you can find. And three, although we don't know that the implosion happened at loss of signal, it's more likely than them losing signal and then imploding at some later point.
Edit: Should also add that if the sonar buoys that the search team dropped were able to hear them banging on the hull, they would almost certainly have also heard the implosion. Given that it imploded, it's much more likely that it happened before the buoys were deployed.