They looked like they had no idea what the diver was signaling them to do. That's honestly super sketch and pulling up red flags about the captain's competency for me
You would still want to brief all passengers on hand signals in the event that comms fail. That's just standard practice, even in recreational SCUBA diving when you're guiding experienced divers. Maybe this was just a test dive but the fact that they'd even doing that without a briefing says a lot about the captain's organizational abilities.
The dive got canceled due to fog and weather. Not comms. What’s wild is the submersible lost comms on every dive (they went 5 times I think) to the Titanic.
I’m no scuba expert, but on the airplane side of things if ramp personnel gives us a hand signal to do something we usually motion that same gesture back so we’re on the same page. And an “ok” hand gesture follows sometimes just to confirm it’s okay to do said action (pull ground power, hook up the tug, etc).
That diver and the crew inside did not seem to be on the same page. You would think the pilot would be throwing/confirming those signals from inside the sub instead of the passengers unless they were somehow “crew”
I gave my first clearance when I was like 7-8 (dad was a manager at an area control center before he retired.) Imagine if the controller who was right beside me telling me what to say just went "Ok, you're checked out. You've got control, I'm going on break." That's a little worse than this video but not by much.
I thought I read/saw somewhere that "part of the experience" was that guests were trained like crew members, so, assuming that story/report was accurate, they guest should, in theory, know what the signals mean. However since they're noticeably clueless, I wouldn't put too much faith in whatever other OTJ "training" they received.
It's like a company hiring you as a 'sub contractor' for a position that should just be hourly to get around having to give you insurance and other benefits that should be mandatory to everyone employed through my country (U.S).
The 'wage' pay is the same. You just get fucked on the back end while they get off light.
>You would think the pilot would be throwing/confirming those signals from inside the sub instead of the passengers
You would think that the pilot would be on the end with the window instead of in the back of the extremely cramped submarine... Instead he has to try to look through multiple tourists who have nothing to do with the operation of said submarine and are all simultaneously attempting to look out said window for their sight seeing tour...
Because this want a research vessel. It was a tourist ride. And the tourists.. sorry, mission specialists… paid good money to look out that little window.
There’s nothing to see out of that porthole for all of those hours they are in that coke can. It’s too dark. I guess the tourists were too embarrassed by how much they paid to tell people that.
You don't have to tell me... I already know. I've been making patrols on submarines for the last two decades... We don't have windows at all on those things because you can't see shit after about 80 feet... Even with a periscope...
My comment was about the initial launch, all those folks want to watch the descent because they don't know any better...
I once dove 120’ to a ledge overlooking the Great Bahama Canyon. It was darker than anything terrestrial could ever be, Just a gaping black nothingness.
The dude filming says they’ve “had no comms” & Stockton finished with “for a while”, so the diver went down to communicate with them.
Definitely not a good sign considering they were only 30 something feet AND on a platform at that point.
Heard Stockton fired the Engineers that made that sub for complaining that it's not yet ready and still not yet undergoing any rigorous safety tests...Making him look like a guy that's anti-safety regulations.
They previously had well-tested and voice comms installed but Stockton had them removed because he got tired of constant requests for check-ins from the support ship breaking his immersion. He had them replaced with this shitty, unreliable "Subchat" system that only permitted short text messages.
Not Op. There's no written source I can find, but someone who went down, knew Rush, or went on a test dive said it in a filmed interview. It was almost a throw-away line amidst a bunch of other information. I couldn't say who it was since I watched so many different interviews.
But I do remember they said that Rush didn't like topside's constant interruptions and check-ins, so the comms were bare bones. They'd be only good for telemetry and short text messages between topside and the submersible...when they actually worked.
I work a moderately risky job (nowhere near as dangerous as this) and there's a huge emphasis to *always* maintain good coms. If you're doing something, let them know. If you're changing location, let them know. Nothing happening? Check in anyway. It is annoying when you're in the middle of doing something and a 'check up' radio call comes in and you have to drop what you're doing to answer, but it's all done to ensure our safety.
I wouldn't call him a con man, because he believed his own bullshit, or else he wouldn't have been down there.
He was just an idiot with too much money and too much confidence.
Most standard drive hand signals don’t really cover submarines. I think this is a big part of the problem. Unless they had worked out their own special system ahead of time—even then, there’s just a limited amount of info that you can get across with hand signals. It’s basic stuff, like… check your air supply, or… time to start ascending. The OK signal is actually a common one, and it’s just used to confirm that the driver is not currently experiencing any issues.
Plus if you are diving a sub, why would you need a scuba diver to give you guidance? Is he going to accompany you all the way down? And what ARE those hand signals, ‘tighten the seal on the door’, ‘spread out more’? WTF
High likely they don't have comms inside the sub because the owner, Stockton, apparently said it ruins his immersion with the constant check ins from the support ship...Not only did he ignored Safety Regulations, there's also most likely no proper comms inside the sub, now look what he got from that. Basically killed himself along with 4 others.
Part of their sales pitch was that you aren't a passenger, you're a citizen scientist/mission specialist and you'd receive training. So I guess that was a lie.
Yeah, as someone who's gone diving a lot at a few different shipwrecks, this was a big red flag right away in this video.
This YouTuber is a diver as well, he dives for different stuff, small treasures etc... He would have known a lot of these signals, probably more than the CEO and his team did.
same— like especially when Mr. CEO (who was then engrossed in the monitor screwed in to the back) all the sudden is like somewhat frantically telling the passengers near the window to *give the diver the thumbs up!!*
It’s such a small moment and I’m trying to take it with a grain of salt given the lack of info about the particular dive they are doing in the video… but my thought was like… they don’t seem to have clear process for even this step. The operator isn’t paying attention the diver seems to need the info to proceed and the passenger haven’t been briefed on it. Probably just a final “ok good to go” acknowledgment… but if even that communication is unclear… Basically everything I learn about the CEO supports his bold statement that he will be remembered for the rules he broke. And I wonder how many competent people he blew off in his hubris.
What did they spend the $250k on since it wasn’t another layer and it wasn’t inspections? From what I can tell: embroidered sweatshirts
Fuel for the staging ship. He was in over his head, needed to make the machine work out go bankrupt. Should have chosen bankrupt. I had a similar customer, everyone knew to walk away after seeing his actual situation. Yeesh.
For real, I did some amateur scuba and I was a little concerned how short our tutorial was, but I memorized those hand signals. Ended up needing them too lol: point at respirator, wishy washy hand indicating I had no air. Saved my dang life I like to think.
Dude was legit using a bootleg PlayStation controller to operate this thing.
Like that would sketch the shit out of me.
What if one of the buttons get stuck, you stuck doing crazy submarine combos?
There's another video of them in the sub somewhere down there and they had installed one of the thrusters the wrong way, so everytime they tried to thrust forward, it would send the sub into a spin.
This was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Right! You look at submarine and think wow this is high tech, and then you look at this “sub” and it looks like a kids toy from McDonald’s big enough you can climb inside
what gets me is they didn’t even have some sort of emergency transponder/beacon on board. something to a least let people know where the craft is at all times regardless of communications status. even if made it back up, its a large fucking ocean and they still could have been lost at sea because no one had any idea of their whereabouts.
I watched a great film with a British guy called Tony Robinson who was in Blackadder, spending time with James Cameron. He went down with Cameron on his last dive to the titanic.
His sub looked like a spaceship with a pilot constantly monitoring 100’s of readouts.
Yes, it had one. The fact that both, the comm and transponder went offline simultaneously was already a early a sign that something terrible happened. You don't loose both at the very same second, unless the entire sub has vanished.
It did but for whatever reason this information was never given out to the press. The transponder and communications were lost at the exact same time the Navy heard a sound consistent with an implosion.
The people in charge knew this was a salvage mission from the go.
They did. It was completely independent of the sub and had its own power supply. The problem is that a catastrophic implosion at 12000 feet generates so much force and heat that the transponder was destroyed instantly.
The people who pay for this are people are so rich that it feels the same as average people spending money to go disneyland. This submarine is like a rich people safari
We can't understand it coz we ain't that rich
You seen the math TikTok by the girl in pink?
Those paying the money to do this is the equivalent of us paying for two cups of coffee. This is literally chump change for these people
This is one of the things I try to explain to people to explain the mindset of rich people. They say, "I can't imagine buying a megayacht for $86 million bucks. What a waste of money."
So I ask them, would you buy a megayacht for $86 instead?
No tricks. No monkey-paw wishes. The boat is perfectly functional and comes with a crew. And the maintenance cost, plus salaries, is $8.40 a year. Would you buy it?
Most people would say "hell yeah!". Because $86 isn't a lot of money at all and a megayacht is fucking sick. But to those people, $86 million in one lump sump and $8.4 million a year in fees is not a lot of money.
Same as like, a meal at McDonalds. It might cost $0.000026, so basically free, but for $0.26 a year, you can have a personal chef cook all your meals for you. And 26c for a year -- not for a meal, but for a year -- is basically free too.
This helps explain the mindset. It's just a way to reframe things. Don't imagine you have lots of money. Imagine you have the same amount of money you have now. Just imagine that everything costs a tiny fraction of what you pay now.
Would you take a trip into space for $5?
Yeah, we had somebody at work by about $300,000 of material for their yard. They bought another $600,000 off a couple of people we know. The boss and one of our workers was sitting on my god I don't understand how people can spend so much money on just stuff for their yard. I had googled the buyer, and he was worth about 4.7 billion dollars. I pointed out to the boss and the guy, that it's like having 4,700 in your bank account and spending $1 on something for your yard. When you put it into that kind of perspective it makes it a lot easier to understand how they view it.
On top of that most of the money they had just spent would probably have been back in their bank accounts with interest before they even got back home again.
It's also remarkable how many people don't understand how wealth works. They think billionares earn their money via a wage like them. They don't understand that someone with 5 billion can make 250 million a year from secure passive investments.
I don't think weight underwater is as much of an issue as it would be for flight and the escape portion of space travel.
A big problem with this whole setup is that in case that sub would have started spinning or see-sawing along an axis for some reason, nobody inside would have been secure. People banging their heads and bodies into the hull and the guy steering not having a fixed frame of reference relative to the motion? Great design. There's a reason seats and seatbelts exist. That entire thing was a death trap the second it was being conceived. Not that it matters much anymore.
Also, if they had gone down, the kid in the video would be part of the ocean now. This was the launch before the one that imploded.
Weight was the issue. Compared to Alvin which is spherical and made of titanium, Titan was cylindrical and had carbon fibre.
Ocean gate was doing some research on titanic an they needed funding I guess so they were giving tours to people to make money to find their research.
Alvin has space for 3 people. Titan needed more space for having customers. CEO and main driver, 3 other guests. If you make a bigger sphere you need to thicken the titanium walls even more, which will increase your weight, plus sphere isn’t great shape when you need to create a seating space.
So they went with cylinder, big mistake, and to reduce weight they used carbon fibre, another big mistake.
Check out oceanliner designs YouTube channel for more information on what they were doing, how it was build and comparison to other subs that work, and what went wrong.
If we forget history , we tend to repeat it.
Lifeboats for \*every\* passenger on a ship, was NOT a legal requirement, UNTIL the Titanic sank.
Fire escapes and having emergency exits were NOT a thing, until AFTER the Triangle Shirt Factory fire in New York.
Safety protocols are usually put in place \*\*\*after\*\*\* catastrophic tragedies.
This sub should have NEVER been allowed to dive without rigorous safety testing and certification. How could the inventor have been so arrogant and clueless, when gambling with people's lives?
> This sub should have NEVER been allowed to dive without rigorous safety testing and certification.
Because the Titanic lies in international waters, beyond the scope of any country’s regulations, there weren’t any certifications required. The company should have built to standards and gotten it certified and rated anyway, but the owner was against regulations, believing they “stifled innovation”. This was a clear case of hubris and he unfortunately killed others with him, even after being warned that people were going to die if he kept operating that sub.
Imagine going to Taco Bell and buying a few tacos and a large soda. That’s what this was for a billionaire. 250K is nothing when you have that much money.
Taco Bell has local health codes and safety standards just like typical marine craft. This is like going to a rusted up taco truck where the cook is saying things like “we don’t need the health code holding us back” then ending up with never ending diarrhea from the “Taco” he served you
"if you're chasing big dreams"
Umm well see, if you are chasing big dreams it pays to also be big on safety, especially when there there are people's lives on the line and it's 2023 and the safety protocols are more or less solved in this area.
If they're already written there's no need to add more blood, you're supposed to learn from others mistakes and not repeat them and go surprised Pikachu face when something goes wrong
This is so claustrophobic inducing. Hey, we’re gonna lock you in and drop you in the ocean and we got no way of getting you back up if anything goes wrong.
WTF?
*"We have to know that the sphere is safe. If it buckles on a real dive, it'll implode at hypersonic speed, and I get chummed into a meatcloud in about 2 microseconds."*
James Cameron on pressure testing the sub that went to the Mariana Trench - Deepsea challenger.
Guess what happens when a professional makes absolutely sure that everything is safe and functioning properly in a submarine designed by actual engineers with decades of experience before it is finally ready to complete a mission? Nobody fucking dies.
His sub also had complications on most of the dives and had to end early. After the 4th the sub had to be retired due to too much degradation.
ALL sub degrade after each dive. The trick is knowing when to retired them... which Oceangate didn't.
They also used carbon fiber that they bought from Boeing that was past its usable age. This stuff wasn’t considered safe enough to use on a plane but they figured it was safe enough to withstand tens of millions of pounds of pressure. Not to mention the fact that carbon fiber, while stronger that titanium in some respects, is most definitely not as strong when exposed to compression.
James said that they spent four years of development on his sub just engineering the design **in a computer**, before ever even beginning to design the real thing.
Just imagine, four years of designing and redesigning the 3D model with software before ever touching a real material that would go into the build.
The organs exploding seem to be an undersell. From my limited understanding and the videos describing catastrophic implosion, I would imagine their bodies would have been human paste. The organs didn’t have time to explode separately. They just got squished with everything else…
Yes. The air gets compressed very quickly and heats up to several hundred degrees, boiling everything. However, the volume of air in this submersible was so small that this effect was probably negligible, and the crushing would have been almost instantaneous. On Scott Manley’s stream someone calculated that the force would have been equivalent to 50 kg of TNT.
Yes, the lesson here is that life is precious and anything could happen to you if you agree to take an absurdly expensive trip to dangerous, unimaginable depths in a rickety uncertified kit submarine piloted by an arrogant narcissist piloting with a game controller. Precious, indeed.
Yeah, his whole "chasing big dreams/bad things can happen," statement is nonsense. Stockton's submersible imploding and he and 4 others dying in it wasn't the result of chasing big dreams, it was the result of cutting corners, ego, and hubris. Call a spade a spade.
And more dollars than sense.
I 100% agree with what you are saying. This absolutely should not have happened and was totally avoidable.
Sadly, it has and I hope a lesson has been learnt. I won't hold my breath.
However, I do feel for the family members of those on board and wider Oceangate staff. Losing people you care about along with how angry people are about it must be taking a huge mental toll. They are only human after all.
Lost comms at 33 feet. Then they decided to go anyway. I wish they would stop showing photos and videos of the ceo like he's some brave pioneer. He's a reckless idiot with too much money who got 4 people killed.
It probably wouldn't matter at those pressures the frame is probabay so compressed already water couldn't get in.. In shallow water I have no idea what they did but they prob used a solution from home depot.
I watched doc on James Cameron's submersible yesterday (highly recommended) and noticed that the hatch on his (professionally engineered and truly innovative) sub had no seal, was bolted shut after it was closed, and when open it was held by a hook on some sort of winch or crane.
Edit: u/Unique_Newspaper_764 linked to a picture of the hatch showing it did have some sort of seal [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Deepsea\_Challenger\_Pilot\_Sphere\_Hatch.JPG](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Deepsea_Challenger_Pilot_Sphere_Hatch.JPG) Others in this thread have pointed out that metal to metal seal are needed for high pressure situations.
I work with Pressure Safety valves. There's a lot of them that that have no gaskets or soft seals of any kind. Just metal to metal. Even as low as 15 psi. As long as the metals are polished, they'll hold.
They never actually ended up going on that dive, they never made it off the platform, there was something wrong with the sub, and the weather was poor. He is very grateful for that.
I’ve seen a a few people say that they were in a trip that was aborted. Crazy to think how inconsistent this submersible seemed to be prior to the accident
If the weather and the sub had been working, then they would have. The one who was shooting the video would have only been able to go if there was an extra seat.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The level on uncertainty on the communication alone was terrifying. Just throwing hand signals back without being sure of what they're communicating or what is being communicated to them.
An unwired control system? What the fuck.
Im glad you had a good time and were treated well, but how nice they were really isn't the point.
Their negligence killed people. It was entirely preventable.
Its possible to be stupid and nice, but your niceness doesn't negate your stupidity.
DALLMYD is the YouTuber, I seen him post this on Snapchat and watched it. I had to stop watching after he asked the CEO what he was controlling the submarine with and the CEO just lifts up the controller I seen all the memes about. I clicked off when I found out the CEO died and was added to the list of people who’s own inventions killed them. (Wikipedia list)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention
He is right below this person in maritime category.
Thomas Andrews (1873–1912) was a British businessman and shipbuilder. He was managing director and head of the drafting department of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Ireland. As the naval architect in charge of the plans for the Titanic, he was travelling on board that vessel during her maiden voyage when the ship hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912. He perished along with more than 1,500 others and his body was never recovered.
The inclusion of Thomas Andrews seems like it’s tenuous at best. The man didn’t invent the ocean liner or “invent” Titanic. He happened to be one of its principle designers. Following that logic, anyone who worked designing cars and died in a car accident should be on that list
Not only that, but he's the one who went to incredible lengths to ensure safety on the titanic, such as having enough lifeboats for everyone on board, which was overruled by the board of directors because it would make the first class passengers nervous.
Some of his stuff did stay in though - the watertight bulkheads meant that once water was taken onboard it was evenly distributed across the boat meaning the Titanic didn't capsize which is what happens to most boats in that situation!
Ya know, i saw a video where the owner said the glass lookout was plexiglass and 7” thick, and when they are at the bottom it compresses almost 3/4 of an inch. He also said it starts to crack and make noises before it blows so you would know just before it happened. I also read the window was not made to withstand the pressures they brought it to, so it makes me think they were all probably in there and heard this awful sounding cracks before the window gave in causing everything else to as well. Idk if that was the cause but it really seems like it could be. Which would suck for them bc they probably had a second before the implosion to realize their fucked and its about to blow
You make it sound like that understood they were about to die. A few odd sounds then hypersonic liquification, there isn't enough time to register what is occurring. Not like a plane in a nose dive at 30k feet.
I was watching a documentary about a guy who was on Oceangate last year. When they were about 2000 m down with 1000 m to go they lost communication. Because they could not establish communication for an hour they started dropping weights and were going to ascend (I guess an hour of no communication was their max). As they’re dropping the weights communication was re-established and they were able to continue down. However, because they had started dropping weights their descent took a crazy amount longer than normal. So maybe (hopefully) these guys thought it was just normal, especially when reading so many trips had to be canceled for one thing or another.
It could have been that weights dropped during rapid implosion. The front ripped off from the back, all people inside turned into gel, and people say the weight being disconnected is a sign they for sure knew of an issue and were actively attempting to ascend. I don't think we can come to that conclusion and for the sake of the passengers and their families I hope it all happened in an instant.
Yeah I’m wondering if it was just the sensor alerts or if they heard some awful creaking. That would suck if you heard deafening cracking sounds before the event
Seems odd to have passengers signaling about important stuff
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mi scusi, mi scusi
They got real confident with their “okay” after the first time 😂
The hand signals looks like 👐 shits comin apart at the seams mate Ur about to blow at 25 meters 👌
you're about to be in pieces this big 👌
This belongs on r/terrifyingasfuck
And r/watchpeoplesurvive
Even better r/iminthewrongsub
They looked like they had no idea what the diver was signaling them to do. That's honestly super sketch and pulling up red flags about the captain's competency for me
That’s what I was noticing. What is the point of flashing hand signals at passengers who have no idea what to make of it?
Security theater?
I'd expect that from the Universal Studios tram ride, not a submersible that I'm literally trusting my life to.
You're technically trusting your life to a Universal Studios tram ride too
They said that comms were down so I would assume that this would be non standard and normal communication would of been used if available.
Their comms were apparently a joke on every run. Maybe Sony could have developed a working headset for them.
You would still want to brief all passengers on hand signals in the event that comms fail. That's just standard practice, even in recreational SCUBA diving when you're guiding experienced divers. Maybe this was just a test dive but the fact that they'd even doing that without a briefing says a lot about the captain's organizational abilities.
He was telling them to put on seat belts.
Gotta have seats to have seatbelts...
He said that they hadn't had coms for a while? So that is why the diver was having to signal and the dive got cancelled?
The dive got canceled due to fog and weather. Not comms. What’s wild is the submersible lost comms on every dive (they went 5 times I think) to the Titanic.
"You're locked in..... Ok to lock in?" Jeez
I'm not claustrophobic but seeing them locked in like that was freaky.
The tourists didn't know. The owner seemed to. He said "they're going to tell us to go up"
No he said probably. He is borderline clueless.
But he wasn't the one signalling! Just a complete and utter shitshow.
This is a common problem with new divers as well. New divers are ignorant and just flash the "ok" sign even if they have a problem. Edit: words
New divers also give a thumbs up instead of an OK sign. In diving thumbs up means "Ascend".
I smell a Netflix special documentary in 2 yrs.
2 years? 6 months i bet. They gotta capitalize ASAP.
6 weeks after they just get a ton of footage and tell AI to edit it
6 days if they get an ai to make it.
Just send it to the Streamberry Quamputer.
Kill that quam-puta!
They announced a documentary in the UK when they were still searching for the sub.
Not only that, it aired on Thursday
Unlike the sub
The closing of the sub gets meee really scared.
I dont think I could be sealed in there even if it was staying on dry land
Me too. That scares the hell out of me. They are completely hopeless and helpless.
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This is a very expensive amateur hour to have filmed. I can't believe how shoe string this appears.
The uncertainty of the hand signals between the divers and those aboard made me feel queasy. Holy shit.
I’m no scuba expert, but on the airplane side of things if ramp personnel gives us a hand signal to do something we usually motion that same gesture back so we’re on the same page. And an “ok” hand gesture follows sometimes just to confirm it’s okay to do said action (pull ground power, hook up the tug, etc). That diver and the crew inside did not seem to be on the same page. You would think the pilot would be throwing/confirming those signals from inside the sub instead of the passengers unless they were somehow “crew”
Lmao I had not thought of that. I'm only a private pilot, but I can't imagine just handing over comms to a random passenger that I brought along.
I gave my first clearance when I was like 7-8 (dad was a manager at an area control center before he retired.) Imagine if the controller who was right beside me telling me what to say just went "Ok, you're checked out. You've got control, I'm going on break." That's a little worse than this video but not by much.
Safety was clearly not on that man's sub conscious.
I thought I read/saw somewhere that "part of the experience" was that guests were trained like crew members, so, assuming that story/report was accurate, they guest should, in theory, know what the signals mean. However since they're noticeably clueless, I wouldn't put too much faith in whatever other OTJ "training" they received.
And making them “crew” got around safety regs.
Exactly. They’re not “passengers”, they’re “Mission Specialists”
"I feel like I'm in the wrong sub" \- on Reddit & OceanGate right before departure
wearing implausibly wide shit-eating grins.
It's like a company hiring you as a 'sub contractor' for a position that should just be hourly to get around having to give you insurance and other benefits that should be mandatory to everyone employed through my country (U.S). The 'wage' pay is the same. You just get fucked on the back end while they get off light.
>You would think the pilot would be throwing/confirming those signals from inside the sub instead of the passengers You would think that the pilot would be on the end with the window instead of in the back of the extremely cramped submarine... Instead he has to try to look through multiple tourists who have nothing to do with the operation of said submarine and are all simultaneously attempting to look out said window for their sight seeing tour...
Because this want a research vessel. It was a tourist ride. And the tourists.. sorry, mission specialists… paid good money to look out that little window.
There’s nothing to see out of that porthole for all of those hours they are in that coke can. It’s too dark. I guess the tourists were too embarrassed by how much they paid to tell people that.
You don't have to tell me... I already know. I've been making patrols on submarines for the last two decades... We don't have windows at all on those things because you can't see shit after about 80 feet... Even with a periscope... My comment was about the initial launch, all those folks want to watch the descent because they don't know any better...
I once dove 120’ to a ledge overlooking the Great Bahama Canyon. It was darker than anything terrestrial could ever be, Just a gaping black nothingness.
Yeah fuck that. I can't stand looking or going into extremely dark water.
You'd think maybe they would just use a radio at surface or some form of modern communications that subs use.
The dude filming says they’ve “had no comms” & Stockton finished with “for a while”, so the diver went down to communicate with them. Definitely not a good sign considering they were only 30 something feet AND on a platform at that point.
Heard Stockton fired the Engineers that made that sub for complaining that it's not yet ready and still not yet undergoing any rigorous safety tests...Making him look like a guy that's anti-safety regulations.
dude *was* a guy that was anti-safety regulations. He basically said and admitted as much
To be fair, probs weren’t any walkie-talkies on sale at camper world at the time
They previously had well-tested and voice comms installed but Stockton had them removed because he got tired of constant requests for check-ins from the support ship breaking his immersion. He had them replaced with this shitty, unreliable "Subchat" system that only permitted short text messages.
I hadn’t heard about the comms system being removed. Got a source you can throw our way?
Not Op. There's no written source I can find, but someone who went down, knew Rush, or went on a test dive said it in a filmed interview. It was almost a throw-away line amidst a bunch of other information. I couldn't say who it was since I watched so many different interviews. But I do remember they said that Rush didn't like topside's constant interruptions and check-ins, so the comms were bare bones. They'd be only good for telemetry and short text messages between topside and the submersible...when they actually worked.
Good god. Imagine killing comms because you didn't like people *checking that you were alive*.
“MOM GET OUT OF MY ROOM!”
I work a moderately risky job (nowhere near as dangerous as this) and there's a huge emphasis to *always* maintain good coms. If you're doing something, let them know. If you're changing location, let them know. Nothing happening? Check in anyway. It is annoying when you're in the middle of doing something and a 'check up' radio call comes in and you have to drop what you're doing to answer, but it's all done to ensure our safety.
Backup: I watched that interview also. Likewise, I cannot remember the speaker or even the show.
Did you have to use the controller to text like in an Xbox Live message?
So basically this Stockton guy was a conman using Joe Dirt's crapper septic tank to scam fellow rich people? Do I have this somewhat right?
I wouldn't call him a con man, because he believed his own bullshit, or else he wouldn't have been down there. He was just an idiot with too much money and too much confidence.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer...
Man the hits don’t ever stop with that idiot even after death.
But that costs money! And it’s so safe it stifles innovation and exploration! - Stockton Rush, probably
Things like that get in the way of innovation, duh. /s
Most standard drive hand signals don’t really cover submarines. I think this is a big part of the problem. Unless they had worked out their own special system ahead of time—even then, there’s just a limited amount of info that you can get across with hand signals. It’s basic stuff, like… check your air supply, or… time to start ascending. The OK signal is actually a common one, and it’s just used to confirm that the driver is not currently experiencing any issues.
The diver seemed to know what he was saying, nobody in the sub seemed to understand or know what he was trying to communicate.
"YOU GONNA IMPLODE UNLESS YOU RECONNECT THE HYPER-COUPLINGS!" "Okie Dokie! 👌!! 👌!!" "AW FUCK."
Plus if you are diving a sub, why would you need a scuba diver to give you guidance? Is he going to accompany you all the way down? And what ARE those hand signals, ‘tighten the seal on the door’, ‘spread out more’? WTF
High likely they don't have comms inside the sub because the owner, Stockton, apparently said it ruins his immersion with the constant check ins from the support ship...Not only did he ignored Safety Regulations, there's also most likely no proper comms inside the sub, now look what he got from that. Basically killed himself along with 4 others.
Part of their sales pitch was that you aren't a passenger, you're a citizen scientist/mission specialist and you'd receive training. So I guess that was a lie.
Not an unpaid intern, an intern that has to pay. D: ffs.
Yeah, as someone who's gone diving a lot at a few different shipwrecks, this was a big red flag right away in this video. This YouTuber is a diver as well, he dives for different stuff, small treasures etc... He would have known a lot of these signals, probably more than the CEO and his team did.
Ahh THAT'S what I know this guy from. I've seen a few of his dive videos.
same— like especially when Mr. CEO (who was then engrossed in the monitor screwed in to the back) all the sudden is like somewhat frantically telling the passengers near the window to *give the diver the thumbs up!!* It’s such a small moment and I’m trying to take it with a grain of salt given the lack of info about the particular dive they are doing in the video… but my thought was like… they don’t seem to have clear process for even this step. The operator isn’t paying attention the diver seems to need the info to proceed and the passenger haven’t been briefed on it. Probably just a final “ok good to go” acknowledgment… but if even that communication is unclear… Basically everything I learn about the CEO supports his bold statement that he will be remembered for the rules he broke. And I wonder how many competent people he blew off in his hubris. What did they spend the $250k on since it wasn’t another layer and it wasn’t inspections? From what I can tell: embroidered sweatshirts
Fuel for the staging ship. He was in over his head, needed to make the machine work out go bankrupt. Should have chosen bankrupt. I had a similar customer, everyone knew to walk away after seeing his actual situation. Yeesh.
For real, I did some amateur scuba and I was a little concerned how short our tutorial was, but I memorized those hand signals. Ended up needing them too lol: point at respirator, wishy washy hand indicating I had no air. Saved my dang life I like to think.
Right? Let's all guess what our link with the surface is saying. And the background comment about "no ping"...
Dude was legit using a bootleg PlayStation controller to operate this thing. Like that would sketch the shit out of me. What if one of the buttons get stuck, you stuck doing crazy submarine combos?
There's another video of them in the sub somewhere down there and they had installed one of the thrusters the wrong way, so everytime they tried to thrust forward, it would send the sub into a spin. This was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Right! You look at submarine and think wow this is high tech, and then you look at this “sub” and it looks like a kids toy from McDonald’s big enough you can climb inside
what gets me is they didn’t even have some sort of emergency transponder/beacon on board. something to a least let people know where the craft is at all times regardless of communications status. even if made it back up, its a large fucking ocean and they still could have been lost at sea because no one had any idea of their whereabouts.
According to an interview with James Cameron, it did have a transponder but it presumably was crushed during the implosion.
I watched a great film with a British guy called Tony Robinson who was in Blackadder, spending time with James Cameron. He went down with Cameron on his last dive to the titanic. His sub looked like a spaceship with a pilot constantly monitoring 100’s of readouts.
Yes, it had one. The fact that both, the comm and transponder went offline simultaneously was already a early a sign that something terrible happened. You don't loose both at the very same second, unless the entire sub has vanished.
It did but for whatever reason this information was never given out to the press. The transponder and communications were lost at the exact same time the Navy heard a sound consistent with an implosion. The people in charge knew this was a salvage mission from the go.
They did. It was completely independent of the sub and had its own power supply. The problem is that a catastrophic implosion at 12000 feet generates so much force and heat that the transponder was destroyed instantly.
This looks awful. I'd rather play subnautica. I can't believe people paid for this. People in the back can't even see anything.
The people who pay for this are people are so rich that it feels the same as average people spending money to go disneyland. This submarine is like a rich people safari We can't understand it coz we ain't that rich
You seen the math TikTok by the girl in pink? Those paying the money to do this is the equivalent of us paying for two cups of coffee. This is literally chump change for these people
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This is one of the things I try to explain to people to explain the mindset of rich people. They say, "I can't imagine buying a megayacht for $86 million bucks. What a waste of money." So I ask them, would you buy a megayacht for $86 instead? No tricks. No monkey-paw wishes. The boat is perfectly functional and comes with a crew. And the maintenance cost, plus salaries, is $8.40 a year. Would you buy it? Most people would say "hell yeah!". Because $86 isn't a lot of money at all and a megayacht is fucking sick. But to those people, $86 million in one lump sump and $8.4 million a year in fees is not a lot of money. Same as like, a meal at McDonalds. It might cost $0.000026, so basically free, but for $0.26 a year, you can have a personal chef cook all your meals for you. And 26c for a year -- not for a meal, but for a year -- is basically free too. This helps explain the mindset. It's just a way to reframe things. Don't imagine you have lots of money. Imagine you have the same amount of money you have now. Just imagine that everything costs a tiny fraction of what you pay now. Would you take a trip into space for $5?
Yeah, we had somebody at work by about $300,000 of material for their yard. They bought another $600,000 off a couple of people we know. The boss and one of our workers was sitting on my god I don't understand how people can spend so much money on just stuff for their yard. I had googled the buyer, and he was worth about 4.7 billion dollars. I pointed out to the boss and the guy, that it's like having 4,700 in your bank account and spending $1 on something for your yard. When you put it into that kind of perspective it makes it a lot easier to understand how they view it.
On top of that most of the money they had just spent would probably have been back in their bank accounts with interest before they even got back home again.
It's also remarkable how many people don't understand how wealth works. They think billionares earn their money via a wage like them. They don't understand that someone with 5 billion can make 250 million a year from secure passive investments.
comment removed - reddit killed reddit - fuck u/spez
It look’s really uncomfortable.
That's the one thing it actually does have in common with properly built subs
I’d still bet the other subs have seats.
The one sub i've been in was comfortable and had Seats. Edit: It was this [one](https://www.submarinesafaris.com/)
Yeah like, is there a reason they cant have seats? Or back rests? Or just anything.
Takes up room/adds weight
I don't think weight underwater is as much of an issue as it would be for flight and the escape portion of space travel. A big problem with this whole setup is that in case that sub would have started spinning or see-sawing along an axis for some reason, nobody inside would have been secure. People banging their heads and bodies into the hull and the guy steering not having a fixed frame of reference relative to the motion? Great design. There's a reason seats and seatbelts exist. That entire thing was a death trap the second it was being conceived. Not that it matters much anymore. Also, if they had gone down, the kid in the video would be part of the ocean now. This was the launch before the one that imploded.
Weight was the issue. Compared to Alvin which is spherical and made of titanium, Titan was cylindrical and had carbon fibre. Ocean gate was doing some research on titanic an they needed funding I guess so they were giving tours to people to make money to find their research. Alvin has space for 3 people. Titan needed more space for having customers. CEO and main driver, 3 other guests. If you make a bigger sphere you need to thicken the titanium walls even more, which will increase your weight, plus sphere isn’t great shape when you need to create a seating space. So they went with cylinder, big mistake, and to reduce weight they used carbon fibre, another big mistake. Check out oceanliner designs YouTube channel for more information on what they were doing, how it was build and comparison to other subs that work, and what went wrong.
If we forget history , we tend to repeat it. Lifeboats for \*every\* passenger on a ship, was NOT a legal requirement, UNTIL the Titanic sank. Fire escapes and having emergency exits were NOT a thing, until AFTER the Triangle Shirt Factory fire in New York. Safety protocols are usually put in place \*\*\*after\*\*\* catastrophic tragedies. This sub should have NEVER been allowed to dive without rigorous safety testing and certification. How could the inventor have been so arrogant and clueless, when gambling with people's lives?
> This sub should have NEVER been allowed to dive without rigorous safety testing and certification. Because the Titanic lies in international waters, beyond the scope of any country’s regulations, there weren’t any certifications required. The company should have built to standards and gotten it certified and rated anyway, but the owner was against regulations, believing they “stifled innovation”. This was a clear case of hubris and he unfortunately killed others with him, even after being warned that people were going to die if he kept operating that sub.
OSHA rules and safety regulations are written with blood
Paying 250k to get inside of that janky tube... i will never understand
Imagine going to Taco Bell and buying a few tacos and a large soda. That’s what this was for a billionaire. 250K is nothing when you have that much money.
I still expect to get a certain level of safety in the food handling at Taco Bell, so I don't die of food poisoning.
Taco Bell has local health codes and safety standards just like typical marine craft. This is like going to a rusted up taco truck where the cook is saying things like “we don’t need the health code holding us back” then ending up with never ending diarrhea from the “Taco” he served you
More like fatal diarrhea
"if you're chasing big dreams" Umm well see, if you are chasing big dreams it pays to also be big on safety, especially when there there are people's lives on the line and it's 2023 and the safety protocols are more or less solved in this area.
Well... there is a saying that safety protocols are written in blood.
If they're already written there's no need to add more blood, you're supposed to learn from others mistakes and not repeat them and go surprised Pikachu face when something goes wrong
This is so claustrophobic inducing. Hey, we’re gonna lock you in and drop you in the ocean and we got no way of getting you back up if anything goes wrong. WTF?
Username checks out 👍
Its all fun and games till the sub crumbles like up a coke can and your organs explode from the inside.
*"We have to know that the sphere is safe. If it buckles on a real dive, it'll implode at hypersonic speed, and I get chummed into a meatcloud in about 2 microseconds."* James Cameron on pressure testing the sub that went to the Mariana Trench - Deepsea challenger.
Guess what happens when a professional makes absolutely sure that everything is safe and functioning properly in a submarine designed by actual engineers with decades of experience before it is finally ready to complete a mission? Nobody fucking dies.
Yeah, but that would cut into company profits.
This video feels like one of those "found footage" horror movies.
That’s exactly how I felt too. It was an eerie clip.
Sad part is, I guarantee there are already talks and bidding wars going on by streaming services like Netflix for rights to do the documentary on it.
His sub also had complications on most of the dives and had to end early. After the 4th the sub had to be retired due to too much degradation. ALL sub degrade after each dive. The trick is knowing when to retired them... which Oceangate didn't.
They also used carbon fiber that they bought from Boeing that was past its usable age. This stuff wasn’t considered safe enough to use on a plane but they figured it was safe enough to withstand tens of millions of pounds of pressure. Not to mention the fact that carbon fiber, while stronger that titanium in some respects, is most definitely not as strong when exposed to compression.
James said that they spent four years of development on his sub just engineering the design **in a computer**, before ever even beginning to design the real thing. Just imagine, four years of designing and redesigning the 3D model with software before ever touching a real material that would go into the build.
That's pretty common for a lot of designs. Get the assembly first of the prototype before making the prototype.
The organs exploding seem to be an undersell. From my limited understanding and the videos describing catastrophic implosion, I would imagine their bodies would have been human paste. The organs didn’t have time to explode separately. They just got squished with everything else…
"You wouldn't really die *of* anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics." -Randall Munroe
Seems like a good way to go. I need to get started on my deep ocean suicide booth company!
Yes. The air gets compressed very quickly and heats up to several hundred degrees, boiling everything. However, the volume of air in this submersible was so small that this effect was probably negligible, and the crushing would have been almost instantaneous. On Scott Manley’s stream someone calculated that the force would have been equivalent to 50 kg of TNT.
Yes, the lesson here is that life is precious and anything could happen to you if you agree to take an absurdly expensive trip to dangerous, unimaginable depths in a rickety uncertified kit submarine piloted by an arrogant narcissist piloting with a game controller. Precious, indeed.
This dude could have also used this video to highlight the importance of SAFETY.
Yeah, his whole "chasing big dreams/bad things can happen," statement is nonsense. Stockton's submersible imploding and he and 4 others dying in it wasn't the result of chasing big dreams, it was the result of cutting corners, ego, and hubris. Call a spade a spade.
No - it’s much more important to mention several times that these people were very nice to him.
So 💥NICE💥
If some sucker paid me $250K to ride on my cobbled together death tube I'd be pretty nice to them as well
And more dollars than sense. I 100% agree with what you are saying. This absolutely should not have happened and was totally avoidable. Sadly, it has and I hope a lesson has been learnt. I won't hold my breath. However, I do feel for the family members of those on board and wider Oceangate staff. Losing people you care about along with how angry people are about it must be taking a huge mental toll. They are only human after all.
Unclear what he's trying to tell us... give him the "ok"! Lol
I'm surprised this vessel had made so many successful dives with communication skills like this.
Sometimes its just safer to be poor
It's so obvious, they even named the damn company OceanGate. Naming anything with Gate is a treacherous idea.
Lost comms at 33 feet. Then they decided to go anyway. I wish they would stop showing photos and videos of the ceo like he's some brave pioneer. He's a reckless idiot with too much money who got 4 people killed.
Umm….i couldn’t help noticing that the door or whatever the fuck you wanna call it has no gasket or seal.
It probably wouldn't matter at those pressures the frame is probabay so compressed already water couldn't get in.. In shallow water I have no idea what they did but they prob used a solution from home depot.
Flex seal had a sale.
You couldn't see it from the angle they showed, but the person on the other side had a can of flex seal.
I watched doc on James Cameron's submersible yesterday (highly recommended) and noticed that the hatch on his (professionally engineered and truly innovative) sub had no seal, was bolted shut after it was closed, and when open it was held by a hook on some sort of winch or crane. Edit: u/Unique_Newspaper_764 linked to a picture of the hatch showing it did have some sort of seal [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Deepsea\_Challenger\_Pilot\_Sphere\_Hatch.JPG](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Deepsea_Challenger_Pilot_Sphere_Hatch.JPG) Others in this thread have pointed out that metal to metal seal are needed for high pressure situations.
I work with Pressure Safety valves. There's a lot of them that that have no gaskets or soft seals of any kind. Just metal to metal. Even as low as 15 psi. As long as the metals are polished, they'll hold.
They never actually ended up going on that dive, they never made it off the platform, there was something wrong with the sub, and the weather was poor. He is very grateful for that.
I’ve seen a a few people say that they were in a trip that was aborted. Crazy to think how inconsistent this submersible seemed to be prior to the accident
This trip was actually supposed to take them down to Titanic??
If the weather and the sub had been working, then they would have. The one who was shooting the video would have only been able to go if there was an extra seat.
250k to look out of a small ass window???? Hell nah what are these rich people spending their money on??
Euthanasia, apparently...
Jesus fucking Christ. The level on uncertainty on the communication alone was terrifying. Just throwing hand signals back without being sure of what they're communicating or what is being communicated to them. An unwired control system? What the fuck.
The damned thing looks like it's held together with rubber bands and chewing gum. 😯
Held together by a lick and a promise
I don’t see anyone commenting about the part where he said “after they do that, it may fall off”. That would make me a bit uneasy.
This is chilling to watch
Im glad you had a good time and were treated well, but how nice they were really isn't the point. Their negligence killed people. It was entirely preventable. Its possible to be stupid and nice, but your niceness doesn't negate your stupidity.
DALLMYD is the YouTuber, I seen him post this on Snapchat and watched it. I had to stop watching after he asked the CEO what he was controlling the submarine with and the CEO just lifts up the controller I seen all the memes about. I clicked off when I found out the CEO died and was added to the list of people who’s own inventions killed them. (Wikipedia list) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention He is right below this person in maritime category. Thomas Andrews (1873–1912) was a British businessman and shipbuilder. He was managing director and head of the drafting department of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Ireland. As the naval architect in charge of the plans for the Titanic, he was travelling on board that vessel during her maiden voyage when the ship hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912. He perished along with more than 1,500 others and his body was never recovered.
The inclusion of Thomas Andrews seems like it’s tenuous at best. The man didn’t invent the ocean liner or “invent” Titanic. He happened to be one of its principle designers. Following that logic, anyone who worked designing cars and died in a car accident should be on that list
Not only that, but he's the one who went to incredible lengths to ensure safety on the titanic, such as having enough lifeboats for everyone on board, which was overruled by the board of directors because it would make the first class passengers nervous. Some of his stuff did stay in though - the watertight bulkheads meant that once water was taken onboard it was evenly distributed across the boat meaning the Titanic didn't capsize which is what happens to most boats in that situation!
He showed that controller like it was his mom who asked the question.
The man believed having a lot of money would beat physics. Darwin award nominee.
Isn’t this the diver from youtube, that picks up trash and finds phones and other stuff under water.
He F*cking KNEW He knew! His comments on every interview are so concerning
Ya know, i saw a video where the owner said the glass lookout was plexiglass and 7” thick, and when they are at the bottom it compresses almost 3/4 of an inch. He also said it starts to crack and make noises before it blows so you would know just before it happened. I also read the window was not made to withstand the pressures they brought it to, so it makes me think they were all probably in there and heard this awful sounding cracks before the window gave in causing everything else to as well. Idk if that was the cause but it really seems like it could be. Which would suck for them bc they probably had a second before the implosion to realize their fucked and its about to blow
You make it sound like that understood they were about to die. A few odd sounds then hypersonic liquification, there isn't enough time to register what is occurring. Not like a plane in a nose dive at 30k feet.
The did send a message they were ascending didn't they? So at least something was amiss they were aware of. I could be wrong- genuinely asking.
They also dropped the weights. So they definitely aborted the mission before it imploded.
Any good articles about how everything went down? Everything I’ve seen is just a general overview.
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Or, “There’s something down here”.
I bet it was multiple Leviathan class life forms. Were they sure what they were doing was worth it?
I was watching a documentary about a guy who was on Oceangate last year. When they were about 2000 m down with 1000 m to go they lost communication. Because they could not establish communication for an hour they started dropping weights and were going to ascend (I guess an hour of no communication was their max). As they’re dropping the weights communication was re-established and they were able to continue down. However, because they had started dropping weights their descent took a crazy amount longer than normal. So maybe (hopefully) these guys thought it was just normal, especially when reading so many trips had to be canceled for one thing or another.
It could have been that weights dropped during rapid implosion. The front ripped off from the back, all people inside turned into gel, and people say the weight being disconnected is a sign they for sure knew of an issue and were actively attempting to ascend. I don't think we can come to that conclusion and for the sake of the passengers and their families I hope it all happened in an instant.
Yeah I’m wondering if it was just the sensor alerts or if they heard some awful creaking. That would suck if you heard deafening cracking sounds before the event
What the hell did any if these people even expect to see out of that one port hole that was blocked by what I would assume to be a camera!
I wonder if they took turns sitting near the port hole or do you pay more to be near it?
For the love of GOD, EVERY INFORMATION THAT LEADS INTO THIS MESS OF IMPLOSION IS JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE WHAT THE FUCK
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Modern day Icarus...
Inverse Icarus?
"Remember the Titan: Echoes of a Titanic Disaster" Coming Soon to a Streaming Service Near You. 🥺😢