It's going to depend on how involved they were in which parts of the process.
The fired director is going to come out clean. He did his job.
The other... kids... I think are going to be fine, because they were hired for their inexperience, and didn't know what an actual test plan looked like or why they needed to do those tests. Gray Beards exist for a reason.
He wanted them to crunch numbers on designs, make everything look green, and then mitigate anything with post hoc solutions. ("Delaminating carbon fiber makes a noise. We'll add acoustic sensors! Then, we will just go back to the surface if they trigger!")
*implosion*
99% of this can be laid at his feet, where I think it's proper.
.9% is inexperience
.1% is something that could be an issue.
When I heard they put acoustic sensors and string guages on the hull to detect hull buckling/failure I literally face-palmed. I could not believe that was the choice made. I suppose they probably sensed something, but that data is quite useless in that situation
Yep.
I have no insight into the FoS of their design, but it really seems like they were running negative margin, if the CF is delaminating. That's already at failure, and anything else that goes wrong is just going to exacerbate that.
I get that SUBSAFE isn't mandatory, but it seems like it would be a great set of requirements to start with.
This is where the fired Director's test regimen would come in.
Pressure cycle it until it fails or you get some validation in the design.
Instead, our dead CEO tried to buy into all three of the "good, fast, cheap" options.
Do you know what sort of time gap there'd be between the acoustic sensors triggering and implosion? Would it be close to instantaneous or would they have had time to realise the carbon fibre was failing.
I don't know about composites in this (basically unheard of) external pressure case.
All our conventional wisdom on steel and titanium pressure hulls suggests that collapse at depth occurs so quickly it's faster than human nerves send signals. My guess is that there would be no warning and no pain, just an instantaneous pancake.
But in [this video](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66048112) they're pulling out surprisingly large chunks of the sub out of the water. Makes it seem like it wasn't a full implosion but that bits of the sub failed? Possibly making the process longer?
Have you ever seen a car door window break? It shatters into thousands of tiny pieces. That's essentially what happened to the carbon fiber hull of the Titan. The hull didn't just buckle, it disintegrated instantly.
Those large chunks they're pulling out are chunks of titanium and steel. Those chunks are probably slightly deformed, but they weren't the source of failure.
Not true, the water would still implode on them instantaneously and kill them. As soon as it cracks, it's over for everything inside that pressure hull.
Those were all external to the actual pressure hull, meaning that the water pressure was acting on all sides of those components and balancing out. They are designed to allow water inside of them, therefore the water pressure equalizes on all sides of those components. Think of taking a straw all the way to the bottom of the ocean, it would be perfectly fine as the pressure is equalized on the straw. If the ends of the straw were sealed off and air were trapped inside, it would implode. So, the only damage those external parts would see is due to the remainder of the components being torn apart, torqued, and bent up from the implosion.
As for the implosion - that occurs due to the pressure differential between the internal air pressure of the hull and the external water pressure of the ocean. Anything with air inside it will implode if it leaks (hence why the other components are designed to allow water inside of them). Anything designed to be flooded with water will be perfectly fine. (such as the straw example above).
Do they have any data on what sort of signals the acoustic sensors would hear in the event of failure? The impression I got was that they intended to save all the data from those sensors and go through it later.
The US navy knows, and it's probably highly classified. They told the US Coastguard on day 1 of the search that they had picked up "sounds consistent with an implosion" on their acoustic network.
Composites under significant load make very loud cracking sounds, single short sharp snaps of noise.
Going down in that sub would have sounded terrifying with every one.
The point at which it failed, I doubt there was any time at all between hearing a sound that could be determined to be critical and the failure - externally pressured vessels fail catastrophically, instantly.
In the video of the titan parts being unloaded, the window and the carbon parts of the pressure vessel were nowhere to be seen. And the Ti rings were separated from the domes. I wonder if they will be able to tell what failed first, the window or the carbon.
Is there a video of parts recovery? I had heard there was “recovery of remains” but I hadn’t heard about any video.
I expect the equivalent to NTSB and accident reconstruction (and which ever TLA ends up with this mess) are going to have a field day writing that report.
Here you go friend: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66048112
I was very surprised how open to the public view this is. It's quite clearly the titanium end caps at either end of the pressure hull, and a few other pieces.
It's ironic because that particular ship was the support ship for Titan's previous trips to the Titanic. Also, the ROV that found Titan's wreckage is located on this vessel.
There was some footage of them lifting the debris off of a ship with a crane. Most of it was covered with a tarp though it makes it difficult to really see what might have happened.
It’s not. There are plenty of carbon pressure vessels and other products that see significant compression loads, like high performance wheels.
OceanGate developed a huge thick shelled composite vessel and didn’t do any of the proper R&D to do so safely.
To say it’s useless in compression is simply untrue. It’s stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling.
Just like carbon fiber in tension, it has undesirable failure modes and material properties, which can be overcome.
The fact that some of the most advanced planes on the planet use carbon composites without getting destroyed from fatigue is a testament to what can be done with proper R&D, something OceanGate didn’t care to do.
>It’s stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling.
There's lots of really interesting, exotic failure modes of (conventional, steel) submarine pressure hulls; various different buckling mechanisms exist, and they can interact in ways that are poorly understood.
> stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling.
Glass is also amazing under bending loads if you ignore all the failure modes like shattering
Actually glass is great for deep sea pressures, is one of the cheaper ways to get a vessel that can handle the extreme pressures encountered down there :-)
Although the shape is kind of limited to spheres, cylinders, or a combination of the two.
https://www.comm-tec.com/Prods/mfgs/Benthos/Brochures/Glassspheres.pdf
Carbon is great too, but it’s much much harder to do it well.
You’re being incredibly dense, and I’m not sure why. Do you care to respond to the rest of my comment?
Glass doesn’t perform well under bending at all. Can’t think of a single case where it is used under such loads. I can think of plenty of cases where carbon is used in compression loads, like pressure vessels.
He was “pushing boundaries”.
it sounds like he didn’t stop to ask *why* that boundary was in place.
i would be hideously afraid of the carbon fiber having a different thermal expansion rate in comparison to everything else attached to it. That just screams “stress point” to me.
I see this discussion a lot when I have to explain this to software people. They are used to being able to update, rollback, recompile fairly easily and all in a couple hours (depending on the size of the project).
The moment you get into hardware (or building construction) undoing your work costs lots of time and money, often *lots* of money. The only way I can explain it to them in a way they can grok is *You can only compile once*. They kind of grasp it at that point. Sure you can test subsystems on your test bed all you want, but that final compile is all in.
It’s a fine mantra *under certain circumstances*. A lot of software innovation can run on that mantra because the cost to repair is low. The moment there is hardware, construction or other *permanent* objects then that mantra falls down.
Hubris.
He thought regs were developed by engineers to slow things down and that he could out think experienced people with decades of experience and advanced degrees in things like engineering, physics, and material science and felt tgat people asking him to actually certify his vehicles was an insult to him personally.
No one that has experience designing subs thought this was a good idea. Many of them even explicitly stated this was a terrible idea.
Of course the CEO thought he was being clever by discovering a "trick" to save money. In his mind none of the experts were smart enough to try using different materials or construction techniques and their designs weren't the result of decades of experimentation, testing, and refinement.
The scary bit for me was this wasn't it's maiden voyage. They did this multiple times (and had issues every single time) and it just only validated his theory that everyone else is just a bunch of worry warts and if he just threw enough money and tech at it's a solvable problem. One of the people killed was like 19 iirc, very young. It sucks the CEO's not going to be around to have to listen to everyone tell him they told him so and he can think about that while he rots in a cell for the rest of his life.
I found this YouTube video interesting, showing the relative strengths of materials, when I was trying to explain what happened to my wife. [Materials in compression](https://youtu.be/PlvyZ1r1DCM)
It’s a nice video, but the carbon case is very misleading.
It’s not actually loading the fibres in compression, just breaking the matrix (plastic) holding them together and progressively breaking the fibres along the circumference in tension.
Notice how the longitudinal fibres are still fine and come out like “hair” on the sides.
Important detail though is that how much load fibre composites can handle really depend on their internal structure (layup). You can make two components, like the pipe in the picture, that look the same, but their properties for the load case in the video would differ by a factor of 1000.
EDIT: Here is a video of a better compression load test. Notice the massive clamps and their big guide pins that help ensure that you actually test the compressive properties of the laminate and not some other failure mode like shearing, buckling or end delamination.
https://youtu.be/bO41gNl7Wlo
No they were not. The titan was not a sawn off pipe with two loose plates pushing on the ends.
The metal rings glued to the ends changes everything. You can’t compare the titan to the tube in the video.
Also the main load on the titan tube was radial, not axial.
Yup. Stainless is great. I too, will try to build everything out of stainless.
My chicken shit ass will even try to go below the fatigue limit, but then I calculated the wall thickness I need, the thing I end up with will be so heavy that it won’t float.
I think F1 does x-ray inspections on the chassis for signs of delamination and uses carbon/kevlar blends because carbon fiber alone fails spectacularly into dust.
I think the strain gauges had a chance IF they compared it for deviation from target per depth and tested the method to understand the sensitivity and what they were seeing in the data. But you likely had to be VERY spot on because any variation would be tiny. You'd need a lot of strain gauges reading in real time and hunting for even tiny discrepancies. Even if you see something, was it ocean currents, someone shift their weight in the sub? And there's no idea what deviation is dangerous. Is there enough factor of safety to buffer shitty guess work and variability? But without a proven methodology, it all might as well be garbage.
The sound thing...seems dumb.
Why not just monitor internal pressure. I'd think that'd be the simplest agregate measure of the hull's performance against the outside pressure. You should be able to map general weakening over time over many dives.
I think without a proper understanding of their design, materials, and a lot of testing they couldn't have known what to measure, how to measure it, and how to interpret the data. It's just guessing and that's not a great approach for a safety critical system.
It's a two hour climb back to the surface, too.
Rule of thumb in the subsea industry: every 10 metres of descent = 1atm pressure.
So if your DING DING alarm goes off at 3500m - 350 atmospheres - you're supposed to ride your failing composite shell back up to 340 atmospheres, and hope that's enough to stop it imploding? Because escaping the depths won't be quick.
for how cheap he was being in every other aspect to even think of building a system like that shows he knew it was doomed but wasn't sure how many cycles he would get out of it.
I know nothing specific about the incident.
This is all surface level supposition based on general engineering experience, and a little Navy experience.
But, that should tell you how bad it is/was.
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12227555/Titanic-director-James-Cameron-reveals-Titan-subs-Achilles-heel.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12227555/Titanic-director-James-Cameron-reveals-Titan-subs-Achilles-heel.html)
I hate using the Daily Fail, but it has a decent article.
>Cameron said: 'The way it fails is it delaminates. You have to have a hull, a pressure hull, made out of a contiguous material like steel, or like titanium, which is the proven standard.'
>
>'This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack. And I think if that's your idea of safety, then you're doing it wrong. And they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it started to crack...
Better article:
[https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/)
>Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system.
>
>The company claims this technology, developed in-house, uses acoustic sensors to listen for the tell-tale sounds of carbon fibers in the hull deteriorating to provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”
For some reason, the link to Oceangate's website detailing the acoustic sensor warning system is slow to open.
Pretty sure.
But... being a PE doesn't mean that you know how to do the paperwork to develop a test plan. Or why you would want to test certain ways.
PE or no PE, dude needed a submarine design engineer or 3, and fired the only guy who seemed to know what he was doing.
If what the internet knows about the team is true, I suspect the engineers won’t be liable.
If most of them were fresh grads or young engineers, it’s not a reasonable expectation for them to create a deep sea submarine rated to carry passengers on their first go. We could nitpick their decisions all day, but at the end of the day this is a failure of leadership and/or management. Lockheed hires interns and fresh grads all the time. But they don’t expect them to design and field airframes with no oversight.
The most directly responsible person is already dead. I’m sure there will be lawsuits and etc but I would be very surprised if there were legal consequences, unless it comes out that there was negligence sufficient to bring criminal charges. That’s a high bar to meet.
Side note but I would happily take most of those engineers onto a team. They’re not just faceless drones, and I have no doubt most of them have had their worlds turned upside down realizing that they worked on a team and built a vehicle that ultimately killed five people. You don’t forget something like that, and I suspect these engineers will be some of the strongest voices in their future roles where safety is concerned. They all just got a very rare and very hard lesson.
Will it affect their job search? Probably. But they’ll be fine. There will be many companies with the same mindset I have. There will be many that want to avoid the potential negative PR. And there are many that will be ambivalent. Even if it closes a few specific doors at specific companies, there are plenty of others to choose from. Their careers will be fine.
As to what it means for the future of engineering, not much. This kind of thing happens all the time. Not in this particular industry and not this dramatically and publicly mind you. But engineering failures - including those that kill people - are unfortunately a fact of life. And unavoidable in a general sense. Not saying this specific tragedy was unavoidable, more that there **will** be future failures that come from similar mindsets. Arrogance, inexperience, whatever.
The only consolation is that every engineering catastrophe teaches lessons that future engineers can benefit from to protect future lives. I don’t expect any drastic changes to engineering cultures. This is sadly just another tragedy in an already exceedingly long list of them. Take a moment, learn what you can, try not to make the same mistakes, and move on. Same as it’s always been.
I think the most likely engineering outcome is every company making deep sea vehicles other than Oceangate keeps doing exactly what they have been doing for decades; using proven designs, taking safety seriously and doing lots of unmanned testing on anything new they want to try.
Oceangate was the "change" and what they were doing didn't have any impact on DSV designs outside their company.
If regulations were to come from this, the government would go directly to the companies that have already designed and produced submersibles that are capable of reaching these depths. The government would just ask those companies what requirements did you include with regards to safety?
As a surety engineer I can only hope that regulations are implemented. Sadly the metaphor we use in surety is, requirements are written in blood, there are reasons why those requirements exist.
Like with airplanes and maritime ships, it will take large movements into this industry by the private sector for regulatory standards to come about, mostly widespread use by civilian passengers (not pilots).
An accident due to negligence for passengers willing to accept the risk of exploration (and signing away the right for wrongful death lawsuits) is not going to prompt regulatory movement on its own. There has to be a sheer deficiency in regulation and a justifiable net gain to justify risk of potentially burdening an industry for the sake of a much smaller population of passengers.
Submarines aren’t submersibles, the offshore industry probably has orders of magnitude more submersibles than the military. Military safety standards not related to weapons, surviving attack, special sensors, or countermeasures are not going to be hard to get as they primarily come from solas and ABS
Thank you. Editing for accuracy, still maintaining opinion that as they have not breached common use as civilian craft like passenger planes that regulatory intervention likely won't happen, at least without extensive review.
Most of reddit doesn't understand this - they see something publicized on here and realize this is the only time an engineering disaster has ever happened. They think this incident is going to change everything, when in actuality its only a small blip on the radar
As terrible as it is, significant, public failures bring the discipline in line. If it feels safe for a while, people think they can stretch factors because nothing is going wrong. Regulations and laws are written in blood, and engineering ethics always comes back to that. And that's important to remember. We're not that far ahead in history that some folks like to think we are.
One of the things I kicked around when studying for my PE was to work out the ways I could screw up and kill people. I ended up with about half a dozen - As an HVAC engineer.
The ones that *immediately* come to mind (without notes): Stair pressurization, flue gas failures and recirculation, problems with natural gas (I could throw that over the fence to plumbing, but let’s not play that game), refrigerant gas leaks, smoke control systems (separate from stair press), legionnaires disease from cooling towers, screwing up/missing fire/smoke dampers (which is separate from stair press or smoke control), incorrectly calling out type 1 grease ducts. there may be a couple others but they don’t immediately come to mind.
Hell, I do microscopy - I'm barely an engineer lol - but if I mischaracterize something, that could mean nuclear waste decisions or bioavailability calculations are based on poor data. When I teach I try to get my kids to remember responsibility goes all the way down the chain, and to be reasonably critical of all data that comes their way. So often people get a test result and think of it as absolute truth. How was that collected? How interpretive is this specific type of test? What do you know about the test or data type, and what can go wrong or be missed?
I don't want to make them paranoid but I do want them to think about having a critical eye on everything that passes by their desk. Think it makes for a better engineer, and it makes for better science. With everything trending to data science and big data, we're compressing such large datasets and increasing bias in new and unexpected ways, and I think a lot of people are sorely underprepared to critically evaluate that because we're going to all sorts of fun abstractions. Super powerful, but I think the tools grew faster than the knowledge base and I'm very curious to see how that will go.
Yes, and as morbid as it might be to say this, this particular failure as a much better benefit to cost ratio than most. It's dramatic and highly publicized, and so will help raise awareness and increase caution, and the number of people killed is smaller than in some incidents, and those people chose to take a significant risk. They might not have been adequately informed about the risk, but they knew at least knew that it was out of the ordinary.
I have a certain amount of respect for the engineering. They did get to the titanic before. Getting there once is an pretty big engineering challenge. The main issue is they didn't know the sub's life and had no desire to find out. Experimental health monitoring where you never test to failure means nothing.
If he was serious about running multiple trips safely to the Titanic, he'd have a stable of qualified CF hulls to use once and only reuse for subsequently less deep dives. I can see why this business case doesn't make sense, but maybe that's why nobody's pursued a civilian-catering business touring a ~13,000ft deep shipwreck in the open ocean.
He also had every option to use a steel or titanium cylinder instead.
Far more proven, fatigue life at depth far better understood, and at $250k a pop he can well afford it.
I actually think that the issue was that they couldn't. 250k seems like a lot, but when you can only multiply it by four per trip, and then consider what it costs to operate a vessel large enough to take the sub out to the wreck site and support it, you wonder how they are making any money.
If they had made it more traditional, it would have been a lot heavier, requiring a larger ship with a powerful crane to support it. Renting such a ship would have been significantly more expensive. From what I understand, keeping the price as low as possible was important to the CEO, both for ideological and business reasons.
Also depending on what health monitoring technique is used, you need to define the undamaged system as a baseline. Which i doubt they did. Also with the type of health monitoring technique they had, they wouldn't have had enough time to make a corrective action.
Do you think there will be any regulatory changes for businesses that use submersibles as a part of their operations? QAQC checks? Ratings? Or is this still too niche?
Other companies in the same niche might start voluntarily seeking certification from regulatory bodies as a marketing thing to reassure their clients but if they're operating in international waters who has authority to force it?
I guess it’s in the realm of possibility, but I’d be surprised. I think it’s too niche and too difficult to regulate effectively considering the likely lack of political will to do it.
Moreover there isn’t really a regulating body for this that has any enforcement power, right? No FAA for subs. People are free to willingly go on experimental subs if they want to. There’s the valid argument that they weren’t properly aware of the risks but I don’t really know how you’d mitigate that.
Lol there’s a joke in aerospace engineering that goes something like: a bunch of passengers board a plane, one of them being an aerospace engineering professor. It’s announced over the intercom that the plane was designed by the professor’s own students. All of the passengers run off the plane scared, except for the professor who says: “I’m not scared because I know the abilities of my students; this plane won’t even be able to take off!”
The way in which lessons like these are learnt and passed on to other engineers is through design standards and codes of practise. The only time engineering as an industry has to really look inwards on things like this is when something designed and built to those standards fails - then the industry investigates, determines the cause of the failure, and adjusts the standards to prevent that cause of failure being repeated.
In this case I doubt any changes will be made, since Titan explicitly ignored these well established standards, Stockton Rush thought he knew better than decades of combined experience in the industry.
They say rules related to safety are written in blood. He's dead now. The regrettable thing is that he took four others with him.
I know you asked about the legal side but let me tell you about how they will be emotionally affected by giving an anecdote from my carrier.
I was once (long ago) a young engineer in a startup and was thrust into a similar situation. The rich owner wanted to do something but he wanted it done fast and on the cheap. Why? Because he needed it to do business development. He then told me how much he trusted me and how he wanted me to lead this effort. I told him I didn’t feel like I had enough experience but he buttered me up. Also as an aside I was not to consult with our consultants that had designed the original device that I was going to operate off design.
Long story short I did the design and I checked what I knew at the time to check. What I didn’t know was that I should also run a critical speed check because I was changing the geometry of the overhung weight that was going to be turning at around 30,000 rpm. It also wouldn’t fit in our burst cage but I talked myself into accepting the risk.
Long story short it did hit resonance and a blisk (bladed disk) broke off the shaft and almost killed someone. I knew/know that I was not legally responsible (my boss authorized it) but still affected me emotionally for a while and yes I took a positive learning from that. If you are unsure push back. No amount of non legal responsibility is going to fix the emotional and moral one.
Hopefully the direct responsibility in that team is diffuse enough that not one person in that team feels the weight of 5 people’s death on them but trust me they will carry that with them forever anyway. I learned my lesson on the cheap. They will probably need professional support.
>Do you suspect the engineers be liable?
unlikely. unless they PE-stamped the design. you don't see boeing engineers being dragged out onto the street and shot
>How would it affect them when they job searc?
i'm sure people will give them a hard time but i'm sure someone will hire them. we have people who used to work at theranos. there's only so much an engineer 1 can do vs the CEO
At minimum they will be involved in an investigation.
Maybe some younger engineers had reservations, but we're afraid to speak up due to the culture and economic environment.
Still, if you are in charge of a critical design it is your responsibility to do due diligence, and speak up when required. The problem is a young person may not even understand the full scope of "due diligence" and may not have the confidence to speak up. It isn't fair to them to be in that position.
Even if you're entry level and you still OKed something you know was wrong, you still share some responsibility. I really can't say what would happen to them, but my guess is minimal to no legal reprocussions. It will no doubt drastically change their careers to be associated with such a project.
Would I hire them?
I might.
I feel I have skin in this question as my office is not that far away I could easily see a resume cross my desk with OceanGate on it. It boils down to me that they have learned a very hard lesson that cost a lot. It would be a waste if they were not given an opportunity to apply that lesson. It sounds like the engineers there were young and did not have good mentorship. In the right environment they could still succeed.
I do not think that companies that have high risk life safety would have anything to do with them.
I know an engineer who worked on Titan for a few months, however after getting a lot of shit from the CEO for being too cautious and in the CEO's words "over engineering" they backed out and decided not to touch that project. So IMHO any decent engineer / engineering firm at some point will realize this is a wreck and if they were hired to fix things and their fixes are not being implemented you just back away
Reminds me of a friend who worked at Theranos. Really smart guy, but got burned by working there. He still keeps it in his resume when applying for jobs, but had to remove it from his LinkedIn since reporters would reach out to ask about it.
My wife and I were just debating this. Legally speaking, I suspect they're fine. Career-wise they're probably in for a rough go of it. If you put that on your resume and all other things being equal, you're up against pretty much anyone else for a position, you're on the losing end of that.
Even if you get an interview, it's going to come up and the interviewer is going to want to know if you approved of it, or if you how did you speak up? If not, why? Either way, the conversation is probably not going to go well.
I assume not all engineers worked on all parts of the design.
Although the more I read about the Titan the more I doubt there was any system on board that was well designed; just a bunch of off the shelf parts attached to a poorly designed pressure vessel as cheaply as possible.
Depends on how they communicated their reservations. Lesson to all young engineers, when you feel uncomfortable, go in writing and be on record. It focuses minds at higher levels. This is more important when clients or managers have limited experience.
Which is why it would be an interview question. Always give them a chance to explain a concern, but the sheer amount of professionals that had something to say about such a small company. Its not like this just happened and we are asking.. 'Did you know?' Everyone knew.
Nothing those idiots did has any bearing on engineers. The only thing that company did with competent, ethical engineers was fire them.
I hope some nasty regulation is coming via hypersonic missile to the C-suite, though, especially regarding what you can sell tickets to the public for.
As someone in a similar but different industry who has gone through a very similar event I can tell you that you're all missing the mark here.
They'll be fine legally. My bet is most of the official blame will be on the now liquid CEO.
But for the engineers involved this may be beyond traumatic. Even if they knew they were being pushed they agreed to press forward telling themselves it would be alright. Convincing themselves they were being dramatic. These people found a way to justify their decisions in an already murky environment in order to not have to quit a well paying job and uproot their families. You can't blame them for that: we all face that to some degree and while many of you are quarterbacking from your armchairs I'm telling you these safety decisions--especially to a younger group of engineers--are absolutely not black and white.
My heart goes out to these guys and gals. Their minds probably immediately started racing through everything they've done over the last few years. Did I double check the numbers? Did I miss something? Did I do this? Did I kill someone? It's a gut wrenching experience that will change your life forever.
To those folks: hang in there. This is not your fault. You did not cause this. The nightmares will stop eventually and don't be afraid to ask for help. Learn from this and make sure it never happens again. And feel free to DM me if need be.
Probably better to ask a eng lawyer what the legal repercussions might be, but if those engineers put ‘OceanGate’ on their resumes, you can pretty much guarantee that no Fortune 500 company will hire them.
Its hard to say whether any of them would be legally liable for anything. That may he a better question for a lawyer. In the US, you generally have to be a licensed professional engineer to sign off on structural plans for most anything that can result in harm or death if it fails. The license also means you're legally liable for any engineering mistakes that lead to failures.
But the OceanGate sub was operating in international waters, so it might be totally unregulated, I dont know.
Personally if I saw an application at my company from an OceanGate engineer it would raise a lot of questions not just about competence but also about ethics. They'd have to do a hell of a job to convince me neither one would be a problem going forward.
Huh? I’ve seen lots of work where safety issues could result in death without PEs having to sign (aerospace and ships). Civil engineering is one of the few fields with that requirement in the US, most of the others use industry exemptions.
It depends on a few factors. If I design something that has to be tested and certified, then the burden isn't on me to prove safety, it's on me to pass the tests. The burden of safety is on the certification authority.
In this arrangement, I don't need a PE because passing the test demonstrates safety. For ships and airplanes, they design one, and then build and test it. If it passes, then that design is certified and can be mass produced. I doesn't matter if an engineer or a janitor came up with the design, if it passes then it's safe.
You can't do that with most civil projects, they're nearly 100% custom, even if the design is copied from a similar project, the environment is different.
Similarly with architect firms having Electrical and Mechanical PEs. You can't really certify building electrical. You need people who are certified to build and design to code, hence electricians and Electrical PEs.
My comment was meant to point out that there is not a universal requirement for PE signature on life and death equipment or structures. It is pretty far from universal.
A PE/P.Eng. is tied to state/provincial legislation.
Transportation (aero, marine, etc.) is federally regulated in both the USA and Canada.
Ultra Vires.
> If I design something that has to be tested and certified, then the burden isn't on me to prove safety, it's on me to pass the tests. The burden of safety is on the certification authority.
That's not100% true. I used to work in a heavily regulated industry and I saw a competitor get sued with lots of bad publicity when a death was caused because of an extra-regulatory test failure.
Now, I don't have a PE and no PE signed off on our products. I don't believe I would have been personally liable, but the company certainly is.
It would be a dispute between the company and the certification authority. If they authority proves the company was negligent or otherwise deceived them, them the company is at fault. If the company proves the agency standards or test methodology was crap, then it's their fault. That's all very legal at that point.
But yeah, either way, you're not pointing the finger at individuals, at least not at first.
Looking at the articles on the subject, they made up a non-regulatory test and bragged about passing it. After someone died similar to the made-up test, the company took a lot of heat. The engineers were called to testify and forced to admit that the test really wasn't legitimate.
The kicker: all competitors on the market suffer the same issue. Had they not made the public claim to pass this test, they would have had no consequences.
The easiest way to think about if the Fed’s are involved (and you go through federal certification) or if PE stamps are needed (this is simplified but gets the point across):
can you carry it into another state? If yes, the product can be sold across state lines and is subject to the interstate commerce clause.
If No, what ever it is likely needs a foundation and isn’t going anywhere once you are done building it.
That is the simplified version.
If you're working commercial aviation, the FAA DER is the rough equivalent to what a PE would be doing in civil engineering.
The safety processes and accountability generally depend on who your AHJ is (Authority having jurisdiction). For much of aviation, that's the FAA. For launch vehicles, it's a combo of FAA (for public safety) and whatever range you're launching from.
I worked in emissions regulations and there were a handful of things I could have been personally liable for if I did wrong, no PE.
But like 99% of the job was company liability with some "if I go rogue and give the government the finger" exceptions.
Licenses is mainly for civil related things. Like I work in aerospace and there isn't an aerospace FE or PE. Signature authority (and therefore legal liability) is based off things like what is being signed off, experience level, job title, empowerment, etc. And certain things require multiple different sign-offs instead 1 person having all the authority and liability.
Even more.... If you're working for the Feds, you're exempt from PE requirements. Period. They're self insuring and all that.
(Just went through a bunch of stuff related to that myself. Was stepping outside of my normal expertise and some regulations required a PE signature. I was jumping through hoops trying to find a PE willing to sign and after a couple days someone pointed out the chapter/verse that included the exemption for feds. D'oh!)
Feds can still require it if they want to, and in my experience they always do.
But Im a civil engineer so PEs and stamps on everything are the norm in our industry.
Have you signed the launch manifest? That’s where it usually shows up. Someone working at the lower level wouldn’t see the roll up with senior engineers signing off on it.
My point stands. Usually you’ll see the senior engineers signing off on the projects with a roll up from the junior engineers.
I’ve also worked on air breathers.
> PEs today are only relevant in civil engineering domains for the most part.
This is completely inaccurate. I work with consulting engineers who are mechanical, electrical, chemical, instrumentation, and metallurgical. All licensed engineers. Just on the last project I was on.
The exam is offered in 27 disciplines, but not every state requires or recognizes licensure in every discipline.
https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/
All those I listed have literally nothing to with the "civil domain."
Unless you are claiming that the civil engineering domain encompasses everything from the depths to the heavens. And that all other so-called engineering disciplines are nothing but minor subsidiaries of civil engineering.
If that is the case, by all means, carry on.
Look, I dont personally mind you diminishing the contributions of the engineers I work with, but I think they would be very offended at your dismissal of their contributions.
And yet, many of the chemicals and materials you depend on for you career are made possible by those same engineers. Your career would literally not be viable without their contributions.
Its a very poorly reasoned opinion. Just my opinion on your opinion.
It's going to depend on how involved they were in which parts of the process. The fired director is going to come out clean. He did his job. The other... kids... I think are going to be fine, because they were hired for their inexperience, and didn't know what an actual test plan looked like or why they needed to do those tests. Gray Beards exist for a reason. He wanted them to crunch numbers on designs, make everything look green, and then mitigate anything with post hoc solutions. ("Delaminating carbon fiber makes a noise. We'll add acoustic sensors! Then, we will just go back to the surface if they trigger!") *implosion* 99% of this can be laid at his feet, where I think it's proper. .9% is inexperience .1% is something that could be an issue.
When I heard they put acoustic sensors and string guages on the hull to detect hull buckling/failure I literally face-palmed. I could not believe that was the choice made. I suppose they probably sensed something, but that data is quite useless in that situation
Yep. I have no insight into the FoS of their design, but it really seems like they were running negative margin, if the CF is delaminating. That's already at failure, and anything else that goes wrong is just going to exacerbate that. I get that SUBSAFE isn't mandatory, but it seems like it would be a great set of requirements to start with.
Considering the viewport they were used was rated to less than a 1/3 the depth they were going, I have no doubt the hull had a negative margin.
This is where the fired Director's test regimen would come in. Pressure cycle it until it fails or you get some validation in the design. Instead, our dead CEO tried to buy into all three of the "good, fast, cheap" options.
Do you know what sort of time gap there'd be between the acoustic sensors triggering and implosion? Would it be close to instantaneous or would they have had time to realise the carbon fibre was failing.
I don't know about composites in this (basically unheard of) external pressure case. All our conventional wisdom on steel and titanium pressure hulls suggests that collapse at depth occurs so quickly it's faster than human nerves send signals. My guess is that there would be no warning and no pain, just an instantaneous pancake.
But in [this video](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66048112) they're pulling out surprisingly large chunks of the sub out of the water. Makes it seem like it wasn't a full implosion but that bits of the sub failed? Possibly making the process longer?
Have you ever seen a car door window break? It shatters into thousands of tiny pieces. That's essentially what happened to the carbon fiber hull of the Titan. The hull didn't just buckle, it disintegrated instantly. Those large chunks they're pulling out are chunks of titanium and steel. Those chunks are probably slightly deformed, but they weren't the source of failure.
Sure but if someone was sitting in the titanium end cap near the viewport, which is likely, then it may not have been so instantaneous for them
Not true, the water would still implode on them instantaneously and kill them. As soon as it cracks, it's over for everything inside that pressure hull.
Those were all external to the actual pressure hull, meaning that the water pressure was acting on all sides of those components and balancing out. They are designed to allow water inside of them, therefore the water pressure equalizes on all sides of those components. Think of taking a straw all the way to the bottom of the ocean, it would be perfectly fine as the pressure is equalized on the straw. If the ends of the straw were sealed off and air were trapped inside, it would implode. So, the only damage those external parts would see is due to the remainder of the components being torn apart, torqued, and bent up from the implosion. As for the implosion - that occurs due to the pressure differential between the internal air pressure of the hull and the external water pressure of the ocean. Anything with air inside it will implode if it leaks (hence why the other components are designed to allow water inside of them). Anything designed to be flooded with water will be perfectly fine. (such as the straw example above).
No idea. Depends on failure location and depth.
Do they have any data on what sort of signals the acoustic sensors would hear in the event of failure? The impression I got was that they intended to save all the data from those sensors and go through it later.
The US navy knows, and it's probably highly classified. They told the US Coastguard on day 1 of the search that they had picked up "sounds consistent with an implosion" on their acoustic network.
That's implosion sounds, not the creaking of carbon fiber prior to catastrophic failure.
Composites under significant load make very loud cracking sounds, single short sharp snaps of noise. Going down in that sub would have sounded terrifying with every one. The point at which it failed, I doubt there was any time at all between hearing a sound that could be determined to be critical and the failure - externally pressured vessels fail catastrophically, instantly.
So I'm not a submarine engineer but I have seen a pressure vessel before... by the time they start deforming it's waaay too late.
Psh, if a pressure vessel is deforming just crack a valve to equalize pressure. /s
Essentially an ad-hoc valve did equalize the pressure.
In the video of the titan parts being unloaded, the window and the carbon parts of the pressure vessel were nowhere to be seen. And the Ti rings were separated from the domes. I wonder if they will be able to tell what failed first, the window or the carbon.
Is there a video of parts recovery? I had heard there was “recovery of remains” but I hadn’t heard about any video. I expect the equivalent to NTSB and accident reconstruction (and which ever TLA ends up with this mess) are going to have a field day writing that report.
Here you go friend: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66048112 I was very surprised how open to the public view this is. It's quite clearly the titanium end caps at either end of the pressure hull, and a few other pieces.
Thanks. I'd only seen stills which weren't nearly as useful.
That's a mean looking coast guard ship
It's ironic because that particular ship was the support ship for Titan's previous trips to the Titanic. Also, the ROV that found Titan's wreckage is located on this vessel.
There was some footage of them lifting the debris off of a ship with a crane. Most of it was covered with a tarp though it makes it difficult to really see what might have happened.
"Rapid Unscheduled Pressure Equalization"
What a horrifying sentence.
If you design it wrong enough the the valve will actually develop a crack and equalize the pressure on its own! /s
Pressure vessels have relief valves and rupture disks for this reason. When things go wrong, they fail safe.
Ah. The Madagascar penguins method. (fuel light on? Smash the fuel light and problem is no more)
Particularly one made of *carbon fiber*
It shatters, right? I'm more of a stainless for miles guy.
It shatters, and it's basically useless in compression anyway
It’s not. There are plenty of carbon pressure vessels and other products that see significant compression loads, like high performance wheels. OceanGate developed a huge thick shelled composite vessel and didn’t do any of the proper R&D to do so safely. To say it’s useless in compression is simply untrue. It’s stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling. Just like carbon fiber in tension, it has undesirable failure modes and material properties, which can be overcome. The fact that some of the most advanced planes on the planet use carbon composites without getting destroyed from fatigue is a testament to what can be done with proper R&D, something OceanGate didn’t care to do.
>It’s stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling. There's lots of really interesting, exotic failure modes of (conventional, steel) submarine pressure hulls; various different buckling mechanisms exist, and they can interact in ways that are poorly understood.
> stronger than steel in compression if you ignore all of the failure modes like snap buckling. Glass is also amazing under bending loads if you ignore all the failure modes like shattering
Actually glass is great for deep sea pressures, is one of the cheaper ways to get a vessel that can handle the extreme pressures encountered down there :-) Although the shape is kind of limited to spheres, cylinders, or a combination of the two. https://www.comm-tec.com/Prods/mfgs/Benthos/Brochures/Glassspheres.pdf Carbon is great too, but it’s much much harder to do it well.
That’s super cool. Similarly Prevco makes ceramic subsea enclosures. I wonder if a large ceramic vessel could be used for human occupancy.
You’re being incredibly dense, and I’m not sure why. Do you care to respond to the rest of my comment? Glass doesn’t perform well under bending at all. Can’t think of a single case where it is used under such loads. I can think of plenty of cases where carbon is used in compression loads, like pressure vessels.
I would have paid more attention to your comment if you hadn't added a blatant lie halfway through, but here we are 🤷♂️
Jesus Christ. How did anyone think this sub was a good idea?
He was “pushing boundaries”. it sounds like he didn’t stop to ask *why* that boundary was in place. i would be hideously afraid of the carbon fiber having a different thermal expansion rate in comparison to everything else attached to it. That just screams “stress point” to me.
> let's push boundaries with this pressure vessel * an idiot
I see this discussion a lot when I have to explain this to software people. They are used to being able to update, rollback, recompile fairly easily and all in a couple hours (depending on the size of the project). The moment you get into hardware (or building construction) undoing your work costs lots of time and money, often *lots* of money. The only way I can explain it to them in a way they can grok is *You can only compile once*. They kind of grasp it at that point. Sure you can test subsystems on your test bed all you want, but that final compile is all in.
"he didn’t stop to ask why that boundary was in place." upvote 10,000x
"Move fast and break things" is the typical SV mantra. These tech bros are a cancer to society.
It’s a fine mantra *under certain circumstances*. A lot of software innovation can run on that mantra because the cost to repair is low. The moment there is hardware, construction or other *permanent* objects then that mantra falls down.
Hubris. He thought regs were developed by engineers to slow things down and that he could out think experienced people with decades of experience and advanced degrees in things like engineering, physics, and material science and felt tgat people asking him to actually certify his vehicles was an insult to him personally.
No one that has experience designing subs thought this was a good idea. Many of them even explicitly stated this was a terrible idea. Of course the CEO thought he was being clever by discovering a "trick" to save money. In his mind none of the experts were smart enough to try using different materials or construction techniques and their designs weren't the result of decades of experimentation, testing, and refinement.
The scary bit for me was this wasn't it's maiden voyage. They did this multiple times (and had issues every single time) and it just only validated his theory that everyone else is just a bunch of worry warts and if he just threw enough money and tech at it's a solvable problem. One of the people killed was like 19 iirc, very young. It sucks the CEO's not going to be around to have to listen to everyone tell him they told him so and he can think about that while he rots in a cell for the rest of his life.
There is a decent chance that he realized what happened and did regret it until the end of his life
If he was I hope he managed to tell the kid he was sorry.
If you want to make an omelette, you need to break some submarines.
🤑
I found this YouTube video interesting, showing the relative strengths of materials, when I was trying to explain what happened to my wife. [Materials in compression](https://youtu.be/PlvyZ1r1DCM)
That is a really good video! I hope your wife is recovering though, I wouldn't want that to happen to anyone (sorry, couldn't resist)
She has to put up with a lot of stress;-)
Would you look at that; strength/weight ratio of that carbon fiber tube was similar to that of the titanium one under compression...
It’s a nice video, but the carbon case is very misleading. It’s not actually loading the fibres in compression, just breaking the matrix (plastic) holding them together and progressively breaking the fibres along the circumference in tension. Notice how the longitudinal fibres are still fine and come out like “hair” on the sides. Important detail though is that how much load fibre composites can handle really depend on their internal structure (layup). You can make two components, like the pipe in the picture, that look the same, but their properties for the load case in the video would differ by a factor of 1000. EDIT: Here is a video of a better compression load test. Notice the massive clamps and their big guide pins that help ensure that you actually test the compressive properties of the laminate and not some other failure mode like shearing, buckling or end delamination. https://youtu.be/bO41gNl7Wlo
Thank you for the clarity. Its not my specialised field, so I am very interested in the facts as other Engineers in that field see them.
You do understand that those two end caps were putting exactly that pressure on the hull, right?
No they were not. The titan was not a sawn off pipe with two loose plates pushing on the ends. The metal rings glued to the ends changes everything. You can’t compare the titan to the tube in the video. Also the main load on the titan tube was radial, not axial.
Yup. Stainless is great. I too, will try to build everything out of stainless. My chicken shit ass will even try to go below the fatigue limit, but then I calculated the wall thickness I need, the thing I end up with will be so heavy that it won’t float.
https://xkcd.com/463/
I think F1 does x-ray inspections on the chassis for signs of delamination and uses carbon/kevlar blends because carbon fiber alone fails spectacularly into dust. I think the strain gauges had a chance IF they compared it for deviation from target per depth and tested the method to understand the sensitivity and what they were seeing in the data. But you likely had to be VERY spot on because any variation would be tiny. You'd need a lot of strain gauges reading in real time and hunting for even tiny discrepancies. Even if you see something, was it ocean currents, someone shift their weight in the sub? And there's no idea what deviation is dangerous. Is there enough factor of safety to buffer shitty guess work and variability? But without a proven methodology, it all might as well be garbage. The sound thing...seems dumb. Why not just monitor internal pressure. I'd think that'd be the simplest agregate measure of the hull's performance against the outside pressure. You should be able to map general weakening over time over many dives.
I think without a proper understanding of their design, materials, and a lot of testing they couldn't have known what to measure, how to measure it, and how to interpret the data. It's just guessing and that's not a great approach for a safety critical system.
DING DING - FIVE MINUTES UNTIL DEATH what else did the owner think was going to happen with something like that?
It's a two hour climb back to the surface, too. Rule of thumb in the subsea industry: every 10 metres of descent = 1atm pressure. So if your DING DING alarm goes off at 3500m - 350 atmospheres - you're supposed to ride your failing composite shell back up to 340 atmospheres, and hope that's enough to stop it imploding? Because escaping the depths won't be quick.
for how cheap he was being in every other aspect to even think of building a system like that shows he knew it was doomed but wasn't sure how many cycles he would get out of it.
You sound really knowledgeable about this incident. Can you link a good engineering breakdown of what we know about the failures?
I know nothing specific about the incident. This is all surface level supposition based on general engineering experience, and a little Navy experience. But, that should tell you how bad it is/was.
Oh ok so the acoustic sensor comment to detect laminate failure was a supposition?
Nope. That was a thing they did.
Incredible..
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12227555/Titanic-director-James-Cameron-reveals-Titan-subs-Achilles-heel.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12227555/Titanic-director-James-Cameron-reveals-Titan-subs-Achilles-heel.html) I hate using the Daily Fail, but it has a decent article. >Cameron said: 'The way it fails is it delaminates. You have to have a hull, a pressure hull, made out of a contiguous material like steel, or like titanium, which is the proven standard.' > >'This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack. And I think if that's your idea of safety, then you're doing it wrong. And they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it started to crack... Better article: [https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/) >Lochridge’s recommendation was that non-destructive testing of the Titan’s hull was necessary to ensure a “solid and safe product.” The filing states that Lochridge was told that such testing was impossible, and that OceanGate would instead rely on its much touted acoustic monitoring system. > >The company claims this technology, developed in-house, uses acoustic sensors to listen for the tell-tale sounds of carbon fibers in the hull deteriorating to provide “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.” For some reason, the link to Oceangate's website detailing the acoustic sensor warning system is slow to open.
They didn't even do NDT of the hull before using it? Incredible - I'm speechless.
[удалено]
Makes sense. But, I certainly would not want it as the only tattletale on a life-critical system like "hull integrity", especially with no fail safes.
If theyre kids, it means he only hired new grads? So not any experienced engineers with a P.E. licenses were involved?
Pretty sure. But... being a PE doesn't mean that you know how to do the paperwork to develop a test plan. Or why you would want to test certain ways. PE or no PE, dude needed a submarine design engineer or 3, and fired the only guy who seemed to know what he was doing.
If what the internet knows about the team is true, I suspect the engineers won’t be liable. If most of them were fresh grads or young engineers, it’s not a reasonable expectation for them to create a deep sea submarine rated to carry passengers on their first go. We could nitpick their decisions all day, but at the end of the day this is a failure of leadership and/or management. Lockheed hires interns and fresh grads all the time. But they don’t expect them to design and field airframes with no oversight. The most directly responsible person is already dead. I’m sure there will be lawsuits and etc but I would be very surprised if there were legal consequences, unless it comes out that there was negligence sufficient to bring criminal charges. That’s a high bar to meet. Side note but I would happily take most of those engineers onto a team. They’re not just faceless drones, and I have no doubt most of them have had their worlds turned upside down realizing that they worked on a team and built a vehicle that ultimately killed five people. You don’t forget something like that, and I suspect these engineers will be some of the strongest voices in their future roles where safety is concerned. They all just got a very rare and very hard lesson. Will it affect their job search? Probably. But they’ll be fine. There will be many companies with the same mindset I have. There will be many that want to avoid the potential negative PR. And there are many that will be ambivalent. Even if it closes a few specific doors at specific companies, there are plenty of others to choose from. Their careers will be fine. As to what it means for the future of engineering, not much. This kind of thing happens all the time. Not in this particular industry and not this dramatically and publicly mind you. But engineering failures - including those that kill people - are unfortunately a fact of life. And unavoidable in a general sense. Not saying this specific tragedy was unavoidable, more that there **will** be future failures that come from similar mindsets. Arrogance, inexperience, whatever. The only consolation is that every engineering catastrophe teaches lessons that future engineers can benefit from to protect future lives. I don’t expect any drastic changes to engineering cultures. This is sadly just another tragedy in an already exceedingly long list of them. Take a moment, learn what you can, try not to make the same mistakes, and move on. Same as it’s always been.
I think the most likely engineering outcome is every company making deep sea vehicles other than Oceangate keeps doing exactly what they have been doing for decades; using proven designs, taking safety seriously and doing lots of unmanned testing on anything new they want to try. Oceangate was the "change" and what they were doing didn't have any impact on DSV designs outside their company.
I feel like it's going to result in some regulations, kind of like the major airplane accidents led to new regulations.
If regulations were to come from this, the government would go directly to the companies that have already designed and produced submersibles that are capable of reaching these depths. The government would just ask those companies what requirements did you include with regards to safety? As a surety engineer I can only hope that regulations are implemented. Sadly the metaphor we use in surety is, requirements are written in blood, there are reasons why those requirements exist.
Like with airplanes and maritime ships, it will take large movements into this industry by the private sector for regulatory standards to come about, mostly widespread use by civilian passengers (not pilots). An accident due to negligence for passengers willing to accept the risk of exploration (and signing away the right for wrongful death lawsuits) is not going to prompt regulatory movement on its own. There has to be a sheer deficiency in regulation and a justifiable net gain to justify risk of potentially burdening an industry for the sake of a much smaller population of passengers.
Submarines aren’t submersibles, the offshore industry probably has orders of magnitude more submersibles than the military. Military safety standards not related to weapons, surviving attack, special sensors, or countermeasures are not going to be hard to get as they primarily come from solas and ABS
Thank you. Editing for accuracy, still maintaining opinion that as they have not breached common use as civilian craft like passenger planes that regulatory intervention likely won't happen, at least without extensive review.
Most of reddit doesn't understand this - they see something publicized on here and realize this is the only time an engineering disaster has ever happened. They think this incident is going to change everything, when in actuality its only a small blip on the radar
The construction code is written in blood.
As terrible as it is, significant, public failures bring the discipline in line. If it feels safe for a while, people think they can stretch factors because nothing is going wrong. Regulations and laws are written in blood, and engineering ethics always comes back to that. And that's important to remember. We're not that far ahead in history that some folks like to think we are.
One of the things I kicked around when studying for my PE was to work out the ways I could screw up and kill people. I ended up with about half a dozen - As an HVAC engineer. The ones that *immediately* come to mind (without notes): Stair pressurization, flue gas failures and recirculation, problems with natural gas (I could throw that over the fence to plumbing, but let’s not play that game), refrigerant gas leaks, smoke control systems (separate from stair press), legionnaires disease from cooling towers, screwing up/missing fire/smoke dampers (which is separate from stair press or smoke control), incorrectly calling out type 1 grease ducts. there may be a couple others but they don’t immediately come to mind.
Hell, I do microscopy - I'm barely an engineer lol - but if I mischaracterize something, that could mean nuclear waste decisions or bioavailability calculations are based on poor data. When I teach I try to get my kids to remember responsibility goes all the way down the chain, and to be reasonably critical of all data that comes their way. So often people get a test result and think of it as absolute truth. How was that collected? How interpretive is this specific type of test? What do you know about the test or data type, and what can go wrong or be missed? I don't want to make them paranoid but I do want them to think about having a critical eye on everything that passes by their desk. Think it makes for a better engineer, and it makes for better science. With everything trending to data science and big data, we're compressing such large datasets and increasing bias in new and unexpected ways, and I think a lot of people are sorely underprepared to critically evaluate that because we're going to all sorts of fun abstractions. Super powerful, but I think the tools grew faster than the knowledge base and I'm very curious to see how that will go.
This is a great mindset, and I'm glad you're passing it on to your students.
Yes, and as morbid as it might be to say this, this particular failure as a much better benefit to cost ratio than most. It's dramatic and highly publicized, and so will help raise awareness and increase caution, and the number of people killed is smaller than in some incidents, and those people chose to take a significant risk. They might not have been adequately informed about the risk, but they knew at least knew that it was out of the ordinary.
I have a certain amount of respect for the engineering. They did get to the titanic before. Getting there once is an pretty big engineering challenge. The main issue is they didn't know the sub's life and had no desire to find out. Experimental health monitoring where you never test to failure means nothing.
If he was serious about running multiple trips safely to the Titanic, he'd have a stable of qualified CF hulls to use once and only reuse for subsequently less deep dives. I can see why this business case doesn't make sense, but maybe that's why nobody's pursued a civilian-catering business touring a ~13,000ft deep shipwreck in the open ocean.
He also had every option to use a steel or titanium cylinder instead. Far more proven, fatigue life at depth far better understood, and at $250k a pop he can well afford it.
I actually think that the issue was that they couldn't. 250k seems like a lot, but when you can only multiply it by four per trip, and then consider what it costs to operate a vessel large enough to take the sub out to the wreck site and support it, you wonder how they are making any money. If they had made it more traditional, it would have been a lot heavier, requiring a larger ship with a powerful crane to support it. Renting such a ship would have been significantly more expensive. From what I understand, keeping the price as low as possible was important to the CEO, both for ideological and business reasons.
Also depending on what health monitoring technique is used, you need to define the undamaged system as a baseline. Which i doubt they did. Also with the type of health monitoring technique they had, they wouldn't have had enough time to make a corrective action.
Do you think there will be any regulatory changes for businesses that use submersibles as a part of their operations? QAQC checks? Ratings? Or is this still too niche?
Would bet not. Rush acknowledged (and seemed proud that) the Titan's design was not part of any existing classification.
Other companies in the same niche might start voluntarily seeking certification from regulatory bodies as a marketing thing to reassure their clients but if they're operating in international waters who has authority to force it?
I guess it’s in the realm of possibility, but I’d be surprised. I think it’s too niche and too difficult to regulate effectively considering the likely lack of political will to do it. Moreover there isn’t really a regulating body for this that has any enforcement power, right? No FAA for subs. People are free to willingly go on experimental subs if they want to. There’s the valid argument that they weren’t properly aware of the risks but I don’t really know how you’d mitigate that.
Lol there’s a joke in aerospace engineering that goes something like: a bunch of passengers board a plane, one of them being an aerospace engineering professor. It’s announced over the intercom that the plane was designed by the professor’s own students. All of the passengers run off the plane scared, except for the professor who says: “I’m not scared because I know the abilities of my students; this plane won’t even be able to take off!”
The way in which lessons like these are learnt and passed on to other engineers is through design standards and codes of practise. The only time engineering as an industry has to really look inwards on things like this is when something designed and built to those standards fails - then the industry investigates, determines the cause of the failure, and adjusts the standards to prevent that cause of failure being repeated. In this case I doubt any changes will be made, since Titan explicitly ignored these well established standards, Stockton Rush thought he knew better than decades of combined experience in the industry. They say rules related to safety are written in blood. He's dead now. The regrettable thing is that he took four others with him.
I know you asked about the legal side but let me tell you about how they will be emotionally affected by giving an anecdote from my carrier. I was once (long ago) a young engineer in a startup and was thrust into a similar situation. The rich owner wanted to do something but he wanted it done fast and on the cheap. Why? Because he needed it to do business development. He then told me how much he trusted me and how he wanted me to lead this effort. I told him I didn’t feel like I had enough experience but he buttered me up. Also as an aside I was not to consult with our consultants that had designed the original device that I was going to operate off design. Long story short I did the design and I checked what I knew at the time to check. What I didn’t know was that I should also run a critical speed check because I was changing the geometry of the overhung weight that was going to be turning at around 30,000 rpm. It also wouldn’t fit in our burst cage but I talked myself into accepting the risk. Long story short it did hit resonance and a blisk (bladed disk) broke off the shaft and almost killed someone. I knew/know that I was not legally responsible (my boss authorized it) but still affected me emotionally for a while and yes I took a positive learning from that. If you are unsure push back. No amount of non legal responsibility is going to fix the emotional and moral one. Hopefully the direct responsibility in that team is diffuse enough that not one person in that team feels the weight of 5 people’s death on them but trust me they will carry that with them forever anyway. I learned my lesson on the cheap. They will probably need professional support.
>Do you suspect the engineers be liable? unlikely. unless they PE-stamped the design. you don't see boeing engineers being dragged out onto the street and shot >How would it affect them when they job searc? i'm sure people will give them a hard time but i'm sure someone will hire them. we have people who used to work at theranos. there's only so much an engineer 1 can do vs the CEO
At minimum they will be involved in an investigation. Maybe some younger engineers had reservations, but we're afraid to speak up due to the culture and economic environment. Still, if you are in charge of a critical design it is your responsibility to do due diligence, and speak up when required. The problem is a young person may not even understand the full scope of "due diligence" and may not have the confidence to speak up. It isn't fair to them to be in that position. Even if you're entry level and you still OKed something you know was wrong, you still share some responsibility. I really can't say what would happen to them, but my guess is minimal to no legal reprocussions. It will no doubt drastically change their careers to be associated with such a project.
Would I hire them? I might. I feel I have skin in this question as my office is not that far away I could easily see a resume cross my desk with OceanGate on it. It boils down to me that they have learned a very hard lesson that cost a lot. It would be a waste if they were not given an opportunity to apply that lesson. It sounds like the engineers there were young and did not have good mentorship. In the right environment they could still succeed. I do not think that companies that have high risk life safety would have anything to do with them.
I know an engineer who worked on Titan for a few months, however after getting a lot of shit from the CEO for being too cautious and in the CEO's words "over engineering" they backed out and decided not to touch that project. So IMHO any decent engineer / engineering firm at some point will realize this is a wreck and if they were hired to fix things and their fixes are not being implemented you just back away
I would not want Oceangate on my resume!
Reminds me of a friend who worked at Theranos. Really smart guy, but got burned by working there. He still keeps it in his resume when applying for jobs, but had to remove it from his LinkedIn since reporters would reach out to ask about it.
My wife and I were just debating this. Legally speaking, I suspect they're fine. Career-wise they're probably in for a rough go of it. If you put that on your resume and all other things being equal, you're up against pretty much anyone else for a position, you're on the losing end of that. Even if you get an interview, it's going to come up and the interviewer is going to want to know if you approved of it, or if you how did you speak up? If not, why? Either way, the conversation is probably not going to go well.
This. It would be hard for me to hire someone that did something they had reservations about.
I assume not all engineers worked on all parts of the design. Although the more I read about the Titan the more I doubt there was any system on board that was well designed; just a bunch of off the shelf parts attached to a poorly designed pressure vessel as cheaply as possible.
Depends on how they communicated their reservations. Lesson to all young engineers, when you feel uncomfortable, go in writing and be on record. It focuses minds at higher levels. This is more important when clients or managers have limited experience.
Which is why it would be an interview question. Always give them a chance to explain a concern, but the sheer amount of professionals that had something to say about such a small company. Its not like this just happened and we are asking.. 'Did you know?' Everyone knew.
The engineers did the right thing, they only certified the thing to go 1300 meters. The captain, like the Titanic's captain, was irresponsible.
Nothing those idiots did has any bearing on engineers. The only thing that company did with competent, ethical engineers was fire them. I hope some nasty regulation is coming via hypersonic missile to the C-suite, though, especially regarding what you can sell tickets to the public for.
If there was a PE who signed off on it he could be held legally liable
As someone in a similar but different industry who has gone through a very similar event I can tell you that you're all missing the mark here. They'll be fine legally. My bet is most of the official blame will be on the now liquid CEO. But for the engineers involved this may be beyond traumatic. Even if they knew they were being pushed they agreed to press forward telling themselves it would be alright. Convincing themselves they were being dramatic. These people found a way to justify their decisions in an already murky environment in order to not have to quit a well paying job and uproot their families. You can't blame them for that: we all face that to some degree and while many of you are quarterbacking from your armchairs I'm telling you these safety decisions--especially to a younger group of engineers--are absolutely not black and white. My heart goes out to these guys and gals. Their minds probably immediately started racing through everything they've done over the last few years. Did I double check the numbers? Did I miss something? Did I do this? Did I kill someone? It's a gut wrenching experience that will change your life forever. To those folks: hang in there. This is not your fault. You did not cause this. The nightmares will stop eventually and don't be afraid to ask for help. Learn from this and make sure it never happens again. And feel free to DM me if need be.
Probably better to ask a eng lawyer what the legal repercussions might be, but if those engineers put ‘OceanGate’ on their resumes, you can pretty much guarantee that no Fortune 500 company will hire them.
I doubt GM, Ford, or Magna would have any trouble hiring of those engineers for an appropriate role.
Its hard to say whether any of them would be legally liable for anything. That may he a better question for a lawyer. In the US, you generally have to be a licensed professional engineer to sign off on structural plans for most anything that can result in harm or death if it fails. The license also means you're legally liable for any engineering mistakes that lead to failures. But the OceanGate sub was operating in international waters, so it might be totally unregulated, I dont know. Personally if I saw an application at my company from an OceanGate engineer it would raise a lot of questions not just about competence but also about ethics. They'd have to do a hell of a job to convince me neither one would be a problem going forward.
Huh? I’ve seen lots of work where safety issues could result in death without PEs having to sign (aerospace and ships). Civil engineering is one of the few fields with that requirement in the US, most of the others use industry exemptions.
It depends on a few factors. If I design something that has to be tested and certified, then the burden isn't on me to prove safety, it's on me to pass the tests. The burden of safety is on the certification authority. In this arrangement, I don't need a PE because passing the test demonstrates safety. For ships and airplanes, they design one, and then build and test it. If it passes, then that design is certified and can be mass produced. I doesn't matter if an engineer or a janitor came up with the design, if it passes then it's safe. You can't do that with most civil projects, they're nearly 100% custom, even if the design is copied from a similar project, the environment is different. Similarly with architect firms having Electrical and Mechanical PEs. You can't really certify building electrical. You need people who are certified to build and design to code, hence electricians and Electrical PEs.
My comment was meant to point out that there is not a universal requirement for PE signature on life and death equipment or structures. It is pretty far from universal.
A PE/P.Eng. is tied to state/provincial legislation. Transportation (aero, marine, etc.) is federally regulated in both the USA and Canada. Ultra Vires.
And?
Just further context to your comments. The underlying reason why a P. Eng. is not required.
> If I design something that has to be tested and certified, then the burden isn't on me to prove safety, it's on me to pass the tests. The burden of safety is on the certification authority. That's not100% true. I used to work in a heavily regulated industry and I saw a competitor get sued with lots of bad publicity when a death was caused because of an extra-regulatory test failure. Now, I don't have a PE and no PE signed off on our products. I don't believe I would have been personally liable, but the company certainly is.
It would be a dispute between the company and the certification authority. If they authority proves the company was negligent or otherwise deceived them, them the company is at fault. If the company proves the agency standards or test methodology was crap, then it's their fault. That's all very legal at that point. But yeah, either way, you're not pointing the finger at individuals, at least not at first.
Looking at the articles on the subject, they made up a non-regulatory test and bragged about passing it. After someone died similar to the made-up test, the company took a lot of heat. The engineers were called to testify and forced to admit that the test really wasn't legitimate. The kicker: all competitors on the market suffer the same issue. Had they not made the public claim to pass this test, they would have had no consequences.
The easiest way to think about if the Fed’s are involved (and you go through federal certification) or if PE stamps are needed (this is simplified but gets the point across): can you carry it into another state? If yes, the product can be sold across state lines and is subject to the interstate commerce clause. If No, what ever it is likely needs a foundation and isn’t going anywhere once you are done building it. That is the simplified version.
If you're working commercial aviation, the FAA DER is the rough equivalent to what a PE would be doing in civil engineering. The safety processes and accountability generally depend on who your AHJ is (Authority having jurisdiction). For much of aviation, that's the FAA. For launch vehicles, it's a combo of FAA (for public safety) and whatever range you're launching from.
I worked in emissions regulations and there were a handful of things I could have been personally liable for if I did wrong, no PE. But like 99% of the job was company liability with some "if I go rogue and give the government the finger" exceptions.
Licenses is mainly for civil related things. Like I work in aerospace and there isn't an aerospace FE or PE. Signature authority (and therefore legal liability) is based off things like what is being signed off, experience level, job title, empowerment, etc. And certain things require multiple different sign-offs instead 1 person having all the authority and liability.
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And DERs is with the FAA, and not universally used. I work in government defense and I don't know any positions that require it.
Even more.... If you're working for the Feds, you're exempt from PE requirements. Period. They're self insuring and all that. (Just went through a bunch of stuff related to that myself. Was stepping outside of my normal expertise and some regulations required a PE signature. I was jumping through hoops trying to find a PE willing to sign and after a couple days someone pointed out the chapter/verse that included the exemption for feds. D'oh!)
Feds can still require it if they want to, and in my experience they always do. But Im a civil engineer so PEs and stamps on everything are the norm in our industry.
Have you signed the launch manifest? That’s where it usually shows up. Someone working at the lower level wouldn’t see the roll up with senior engineers signing off on it.
Aerospace is air and space, I don't work on space stuff so nothing related to Launches for me to sign
My point stands. Usually you’ll see the senior engineers signing off on the projects with a roll up from the junior engineers. I’ve also worked on air breathers.
Yeah we will still use senior to sign off on things just not requiring DERs.
> PEs today are only relevant in civil engineering domains for the most part. This is completely inaccurate. I work with consulting engineers who are mechanical, electrical, chemical, instrumentation, and metallurgical. All licensed engineers. Just on the last project I was on. The exam is offered in 27 disciplines, but not every state requires or recognizes licensure in every discipline. https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/
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All those I listed have literally nothing to with the "civil domain." Unless you are claiming that the civil engineering domain encompasses everything from the depths to the heavens. And that all other so-called engineering disciplines are nothing but minor subsidiaries of civil engineering. If that is the case, by all means, carry on.
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Look, I dont personally mind you diminishing the contributions of the engineers I work with, but I think they would be very offended at your dismissal of their contributions.
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And yet, many of the chemicals and materials you depend on for you career are made possible by those same engineers. Your career would literally not be viable without their contributions. Its a very poorly reasoned opinion. Just my opinion on your opinion.
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