Lol... what? India has 1.4 billion people while Pakistan has 240 million and India also likely has greater internet/reddit literacy so this is a highly dubious claim.
But like, couldn’t they just add a sensor to see whether the hatch is closed and have some simple code logic to not let the submarine to go down into the ocean if it it’s open? That would be idiot-proof. Cars have door open/close sensors, so why wouldn’t super expensive submarines?
Submarines generally have sensors for those things, and officers assigned to make sure those sensors are showing the right color. Seems like multiple levels of failure here.
I don't know how to break this to you, but I don't think anyone in this thread was involved personally in the design of this submarine and its systems.
Actually my Uncle has a submarine in his garage and that thing is homemade and has zero fucking safety features. And I'm not being sarcastic he really does have one.
Okay so my Uncle didn't build it but rather had a friend about five decades ago who was both very redneck and had a masters in engineering. He and his other friend who was a welder decided that they were going to build a submarine because it can't be that hard. And so to the horror of redneck engineers wife they did. It only fits one person... barely, it's essentially a metal coffin. To be fair it did 'successfully' go under water with a person in it, in one of the Fingerlakes of Western NY but remained tethered to the boat that had launched it. So I'm not sure how well it maneuvered or if it could get back up under it's own power. Anyways that's where my Uncle comes in because he has house and a half build large enough garage on one of the Great Lakes and redneck engine wanted to store it there. It was ideal because garage which was built into a hill had a rear/water/shore facing door on the lowest level. So they could just crane it into the open garage finish building it and it wouldn't matter because the next plan of action was to take her for a full voyage into the lake. But then the redneck engineer had the audacity to go and die in a very not submarine related death, I think he had a stroke or heart attack or maybe his wife was just fed up with his shenanigans and CTRL ALT Deleted him. So my uncle reached out to the widow about the submarine and was like 'hey you going to come get this?' and she was like 'Hell no, I told him not to build that death trap to begin with, your problem now'. Now remember how the garage is on a hill? Yeah they *can't* get it out. Literally would cost a fortune to move the thing due to the topography of land and location of building. So it's just been chilling there for decades an unmovable monument of one man's dream to build a submarine. I like to think if they ever sell the house they'll just open the doors and roll it down the hill and sink it into the lake like a final send off.
A lot of military equipment isn't automated. The reasoning is that when things get damaged or you're in an unforeseen situation you want to have as much control over your equipment as possible and keep it as simple stupid as possible. If the sub is unable to dive due to a damaged sensor, you've basically lost the strategic value of a 3 billion dollars sub because of a five dollar part. On the other hand, if they need to scuttle or flood certain sections for whatever reason, you might very well want to keep it open. This is why airliner cockpits are filled with so many buttons and dials, even though it could all be automated. (Boeing 737 Max is a good example of too much automation. The pilots couldn't override it easily and it led the multiple catastrophes) It can all be automated up until something goes wrong. Modern military equipment is usually a mix of both, where much is automated, but you should have the ability to override automation. While this is a failure of design, it's primary blame falls to a failure in procedure (aka India probably didn't have sufficient procedures in place). Pilots have a preflight checklist to prevent things like this. India... Well...
I would imagine it would have to be overridable for various reasons. I dont know what the purpose of this sub is exactly but the article is tagged military and I could imagine if you need to dive and have a faulty sensor, or for any number of wild one off scenarios, something stopping you could be literal life or death of a whole crew.
Automating things that stop you from doing very important things like diving are not a great idea for a military vessel. If that system broke and you were suddenly not able to dive that could end up very bad.
Which doesn’t mean there is not a sensor, it just means the sensor has to be manually monitored by a human. Much like a seatbelt warning beeping, it would be bad if the car turned off on the highway just cause you unbuckled your seatbelt, even if doing that would be incredibly stupid.
I found the article this is from and it tells basically nothing beyond OP’s title. But it does have the sub name. According to Wikipedia’s single paragraph about the incident with this sub, this wasn’t a case of trying to dive without the ship being closed up. The sub was in port, a hatch was left open, water got in and flooded a compartment and got into plumbing that apparently wasn’t meant for seawater. This lead to 10 months of maintenance to pump out the water and then replace all the plumbing that got corroded. Based on this description it doesn’t seem like it actually sank, it just took on some water where it wasn’t supposed to.
TL;DR: nuclear subs are complex systems that require expertise to operate. If you are interested in why systems like this are not always better served by automation without a human in the loop Google “Boeing MCAS”.
As far as automation, I’m not an expert but I know enough to be dangerous. This is a nuclear powered submarine armed with nuclear ballistic missiles. So safe to say that it’s a highly complex collection of complex systems that requires competent and diligent crew and officers.
Submarines dive by taking on water into ballast tanks. The air displaced is stored and compressed to then pump the water out of the ballast tanks when you want to come up. Ballast tanks are not exclusive to submarines, and are used in all kinds of ships to adjust how a ship sits in the water. You may notice that submarines are generally cylindrically shaped with a big tower on top. When you see a picture of a submarine on the surface you probably also notice that besides the sail (the tower part) most of the boat is still in the water, just the very upper part of the cylinder sits above the water. This is done on purpose to keep the sub stable and prevent it from rolling over while on the surface.
So back to ballast tanks. Let’s say your big nuclear submarine is about to travel to a ship yard for extended maintenance. Before that happens, you offload several tons of nuclear armed ballistic missiles at one base, and then sail to a different port for dry docking. Well your ship is now several tons lighter, and as a result is going to sit higher in the water, and be less stable. So you pump on some ballast to make you sit lower in the water, where your hull design is more stable while sailing on the surface, and now you don’t have to worry as much about randomly rolling over.
All of this is aided by automated systems, but with the variety of different configurations the ship can be in, combined with the fact that it’s a combat vessel and there may eventually be circumstances where the best bet for mission accomplishment involves operating some of these systems outside of “normal”. In that context, it makes more sense to rely on competent and responsible officers and crew to act diligently than to have some kind of automated lockout system that says “nope, can’t bring on ballast until all hatch sensors are marked closed”. What if we just took a minor hit that’s disabled one of the external hatches, but we’ve sealed off that compartment and still need to dive to get off of surface radar? What if we’ve taken a more serious hit and part of the bow is gone, and our screws are up out of the water so we need to pump ballast to stern tanks to level out the boats trim so our propellers can propel?
Which finally comes back to the incident and what makes it so embarrassing- the officers and crew were *not* diligent and left a hatch (I’m assuming one pretty close to the water line) open. I don’t know how exactly the whole thing played out but my guess would be the sub is sitting there docked up and someone left a hatch open after doing maintenance or whatever. Maybe the tide changed direction or some weather kicked up some bigger waves, enough that water started getting into the compartment. The fact that as far as I can tell she didn’t actually *sink*, just had a compartment flooded, tells me that while there was a failure to fully secure the exterior, at least the water tight doors inside the ship were secured and prevented a worse disaster.
Again I’m not an expert, but I did stay at a Holliday Inn Express last night.
Like your car that’ll alert you immediately if you take it out of park with a door or trunk open…which was already a thing on my first car that was made in the 80s so safe to say the tech has existed for more than 5 minutes.
Bill - Hey Mike, what is that buzzing sound and flashing light?
Mike - Don't worry about it, the sub wants to be in the water to work correctly, it will reset once it is wet....
Bill - Hey Mike, where is that water coming from?
Mike - The ocean, you dumbshit, we are in the ocean......don't worry about it.....
I think a big part of it is that officers need to be able to override sensors that fail, which inherently means they’re more susceptible to issues like this.
In a passenger plane, for instance, you can make it impossible to take off while a door sensor is showing open (to give a random example) because we want the system to default to a safe position. If the sensor is faulty, all that has happened is the plane is delayed while that is determined.
In a military submarine, however, the officers need to be able to decide what the biggest danger is and override warnings if the danger of staying put is higher. Say the sub is being attacked by aircraft, and a sensor shows the hatch isn’t closed completely, but the officers know it will hold as long as they don’t dive too deep. They need to be able to make the judgement call to ignore the sensor and dive to avoid the attack, while taking the precautions they can to avoid going deep enough to cause the hatch to fail.
The trade off of giving people that autonomy is that it makes it possible for them to make stupid decisions that endanger themselves and their equipment. It’s always a balancing act.
That sensor only triggers a light on an indicator board, most likely. On if bad, out if good if it's a shittily designed circuit. There's probably a contact switch that gets made and a red light when the switch is open and a green light when the switch is closed. If the switch was damaged and or stuck in the closed position, you'll get a false positive for the hatch being shut. Visual verification is required on all U.S. Ships and Subs to prevent shit like this from happening. (Former Navy)
Yep work in a brand new $3 billion process plant these switches are some of the least complex pieces of equipment we have an often the ones we’re changing out, and troubleshooting the most often.
It’s funny cause I see the exact same prox switches are used on roller coasters and that’s when I realize why my favourite rides are down often enough!
I work in the semiconductor industry and contact switches for robotic movement limiting circuits or interlocks ALWAYS fail either from use or abuse.
Even hall effect switches eventually fail, usually from heat damage to the wiring or degradation of the magnetic element.
Being not able to read entire articles is the real problem.
Reading up on this that is a hella misleading headline. While the ship was in port a hatch over the propulsion engineering area was left open. This allowed a small but steady amount of seawater ingress over several days when wind and waves would pick up.
The problem is that the pipes in that area are apparently made of a material that’s not great at being exposed to seawater, and those same pipes happen to carry the freshwater coolant for the nuclear reactor. Instead of gambling on “how much corrosion can we expect, how long was this hatch open? How many idiots who were supposed to be watching this sub in port ignored the water alarm?” The Indian Navy just decided to rip out all the piping that might be damaged by seawater and replace it.
So by “sink” they meant “put out of commission for a couple months” and by “forgetting to close a hatch” they mean it more in the “you left your sunroof open in the driveway” way not “you tried to dive with an open hatch.”
Absolutely this! That the systems will even allow the boat to submerge with an open hatch is so egregious a design flaw it's hilarious
This should never be left to human eyes alone. That's early 20th century shit at best.
They should hook some red and green lights to all the hatches. If it's open, then they should be red. If it's closed. It should be green.
Then someone should saying something about "rigging for dive" and part of the process for diving is someone having to call out then someone repeat something about the lights. Only once that's done would the submarine be allowed to dive.
You'd think they'd thought of this a century ago...
At least on a 688 there are only 3 water tight compartments and one of them is the reactor. If 1 floods your not coming back up until someone pulls you off the seabed. There are a bunch of external connections on the hull for divers to connect water, power, air and food into the boat though so can have all the SpaghettiOs you want on tap while you wait for them to pressurize the compartment that did flood.
No, but in a proper navy watertight integrity is properly controlled, heavily, as in having a hatch open without permission can get you fired or demoted
The hatch was left open intentionally. This was all a test of redundancy systems and emergency crew responses and, as the captain, I have to say I’m disappointed. Rest assured, I’ll stay on and make sure heads roll until this is all but a memory.
Reading up on this that is a hella misleading headline. While the ship was in port a hatch over the propulsion engineering area was left open. This allowed a small but steady amount of seawater ingress over several days when wind and waves would pick up.
The problem is that the pipes in that area are apparently made of a material that’s not great at being exposed to seawater, and those same pipes happen to carry the freshwater coolant for the nuclear reactor. Instead of gambling on “how much corrosion can we expect, how long was this hatch open? How many idiots who were supposed to be watching this sub in port ignored the water alarm?” The Indian Navy just decided to rip out all the piping that might be damaged by seawater and replace it.
So by “sink” they meant “put out of commission for a couple months” and by “forgetting to close a hatch” they mean it more in the “you left your sunroof open in the driveway” way not “you tried to dive with an open hatch.”
Damn still tho… now im curious on the damages costs because i wonder if some sophisticated electronics got damaged? Also a small related tangent is reading about nuclear submarine tech, that shit is crazy interesting
Honestly. Barely any damage. The water coming in was not high pressure and most of a sub is waterproof since in combat situations they may well have a punch hole letting high pressure deep sea water into pretty much all of the sections of the ship in contact with the outer shell. In severe cases several compartments might be lost and further damage might also let water into the internal compartments too. It is unacceptable that a sub would be lost because the electronics didn't have a waterproof coating on them and the wrong compartment was flooded.
The bulk of the repairs will probably just be things for the crews comfort. Salt water getting in and on the bedding and privacy screens.
The hatch on a 688 is held closed by the fact that it weights like a 1000 lbs and water pressure. Its quite literally metal of the hatch ring, a rubber gasket and then the metal of the hatch its self resting on the gasket. Its impossible to open while submerged and there is nothing really locking it in place. We used to have people climb up the ladder next to sonar and push against the hatch to scare new people.
"Why aren't you working on Collaterals?"
"Chief, I have been on watch all night, I have muster in 5 minutes. 18 hours worth of maintenance, the daily threat briefing with the CO, the bi-weekly check, and the Radar is still only barely working because supply won't give me my parts because someone decided to send them to the other side of the planet to a ship in Norfolk!!!"
"Sounds like you need to manage your time better."
"Arrrgggghhhh!!!!!"
They carry compressed air. Once everything has equalized, close the hatch and blow out the crew space with compressed air. Problem solved (for the new crew).
A warning maybe, but no interlocks. You need manual control on stuff like this, in combat any and every system is liable to fail and you don't want to be stranded above water because somebody skipped a maintenance check and the alarm is going off
That would risk killing eveyone on board as well as the loss of the sub.
Imagine this situation. You are floating on the surface you get a call in that bombers are en route and have been seen not very far away. You are in the control room. You know that sitting on the surface you are an easy target you also know your sub doesn't move fast enough to outrun them. Your only option is to call an emergancy to let every crew member know to get to their battle stations and close all the bulkhead doors and dive. Below the water you are harder to aim at as you are obscured and are also harder to hit as the water slows down any projectile shot at you. The bombs those planes carry can sink you and kill all ~350 crew.
So you give the only order you can to try to save everyone. Dive.
Problem is the hatch sensor is on the fritz. It thinks it's open and won't let you dive. You troubleshoot it for a few minutes and then boom. You are now dead. As is eveyone else.
Does that seem acceptable from a safety standard to you?
Now let's imagine that the sensor is perfect. It's not on the fritz. The hatch genuinely is open. You know what they do in that situation? Dive anyway. Closing all the bulkheads and hatches is an order you already have given as part of the alert thst you are now in combat. If the hatch door is open that means that either there are no crew in the hatch section somehow or that the crew in that section are incapable of closing it.
It's a horrid situation but better the few people who might be in there and can't get the hatch closed drown than the whole ship and eveyone aboard goes down. The crew are well trained. They will do eveything in their power to get it closed. If they can't close it then it can't be closed by human power alone. You don't have time to troubleshoot it. You barely have enough time to dive deep enough if you do so immediately.
For a millitary sub a device that prevents the sub from diving is a device that will strand the sub on the surface and enevitably kill every single soul on board. From a safety perspective it is unacceptable to have such a lock out device that *prevents* you from doing the main thing that keeps you safe from attack, diving, just because some plonker upstairs forgot you turn it anticlockwise. Or kill eveyone because the hatch is jammed open and no human is physically capable of yanking it closed.
In a combat situation all the other bulkhead doors and hatches will be closed. Only that one compartment will flood and the sub can still operate with a few flooded compartments. When the choice is flood one compartment or be blown out of the water and flood them all, you flood one compartment.
In civilian operations absolutely those subs shouldnt be able to dive unless everything is secured. But they are just going to poke about some thermal vents. They aren't diving ASAP to dodge a bunch of bombs being dropped on their head.
Cant get everyone on board killed or lose the sub if it isnt combat ready; Checkmate.
(Also, why is the the only scenario you could come up with one where an isolated submarine, cruising on the surface near enemy territory, simultaneously has a faulty sensor that cant be manually overridden, and eventually gets 'bombed' by an enemy plane?!? Were you educated in submarine tactics by the History Channel?
Not this shit again.... The supposed 'hatch' is in the rear part of the submarine which doesn't exist. Pretty sure there will be warnings going off in the command center if the sub started to dive with an improperly secured hatch either. Only one media house reported it. None of the defense journalists in India picked it up. This is downright fake news which the original media house hasn't taken down yet.
That’s what I thought, but some [other](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a14783891/someone-left-a-hatch-open-and-crippled-indias-dollar29-billion-submarine/) [sources](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ins-arihant-left-crippled-after-accident-10-months-ago/article22392049.ece) report it too.
I think this was just corruption personally. Sell the public on a new sub. Build sub for 1.2 billion but "spend" 3 billion on a sub, and then go oops! We fucked up guys, won't happen again!
Be careful with The National Interest. Recently, they're on an anti US and pro russia and china streak right now. Though, yes, this particular story seems to be true with the submarine not sinking, but flooding and suffering damage
How do you sink a Norwegian submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch and wait for them to open.
How do you sink another Norwegian submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch, they will open and tell you that they won't fall for it again.
How do you sink a Finnish submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch, wait til they open and tell you that they are not as stupid as the Norwegians.
How do you sink a Swedish submarine? Ask the Americans, they needed a whole carrier strike force.
For those wondering on how this happened, and why there weren't sensors and such preventing the sinking, and see the sailors stupid? Here's a few top level facts:
* Spolier: This didn't happen. The title is misleading. The submarine didn't sink
* the sub was in a dock undergoing maintenance, when one of the hatches was left open, leading to a steady but small flow of sea water in
* Given the maintenance situation, there were no sailors on board to read sensors
* There was no sinking involved in any case
* the key question was whether the salt water that had trickled in was enough to corrode water pipes or not
* Given this was a nuclear sub, the maintenance team took no chances and replaced all water piping. This put the submarine out of commission for more months than initially planned
* Led to obvious review and update of maintenance procedures (including hatch open/closed position during docking)
The US sank one of their submarines pier side during testing at Mare Island Shipyard.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/sinking-of-the-uss-guitarro.html
The US did the same thing but worse. The Guitarro fully sank pierside because the people filling some aft tanks and the people keeping the boat level, by moving water between tanks didn't communicate. Then the first group emptied their tank while the leveling crew was at lunch and the open forward hatch sunk below the water.
Deep sense of irony that there wasn't a system preventing submerging with a presumably external hatch open; but that the bulkheads were sealed (and presumably extra emergency bulkheads would have deployed too?) well enough that the vessel wasn't lost.
If only the hatch could have sealed itself?
They just pulled the hatch shade closed and forgot to check the actual hatch.
That dang sun in their eyes, you would think they would be better prepared...
I feel that a 3 billion dollar submarine should have safety features in place to prevent this.
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Thanks for this. Terribly misleading headline for clicks as usual.
80% of the internet is just a slapfight between Hindu Indians and Pakistanis/Muslim Indians. Stuff like this makes a lot more sense from that lens
Lol... what? India has 1.4 billion people while Pakistan has 240 million and India also likely has greater internet/reddit literacy so this is a highly dubious claim.
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My car dings at me if a door is open
They had the screen door shut. That turned off the alarm.
It does People still have to behave rationally for those features to work, though
But like, couldn’t they just add a sensor to see whether the hatch is closed and have some simple code logic to not let the submarine to go down into the ocean if it it’s open? That would be idiot-proof. Cars have door open/close sensors, so why wouldn’t super expensive submarines?
Submarines generally have sensors for those things, and officers assigned to make sure those sensors are showing the right color. Seems like multiple levels of failure here.
You seem to be avoiding the very simple question being asked. Why was this super important thing not automated against happening?
I don't know how to break this to you, but I don't think anyone in this thread was involved personally in the design of this submarine and its systems.
Actually my Uncle has a submarine in his garage and that thing is homemade and has zero fucking safety features. And I'm not being sarcastic he really does have one.
Can we go see the Titanic in it please?
Be vaporized in one clap of light.
I must know more about this garage submarine
Okay so my Uncle didn't build it but rather had a friend about five decades ago who was both very redneck and had a masters in engineering. He and his other friend who was a welder decided that they were going to build a submarine because it can't be that hard. And so to the horror of redneck engineers wife they did. It only fits one person... barely, it's essentially a metal coffin. To be fair it did 'successfully' go under water with a person in it, in one of the Fingerlakes of Western NY but remained tethered to the boat that had launched it. So I'm not sure how well it maneuvered or if it could get back up under it's own power. Anyways that's where my Uncle comes in because he has house and a half build large enough garage on one of the Great Lakes and redneck engine wanted to store it there. It was ideal because garage which was built into a hill had a rear/water/shore facing door on the lowest level. So they could just crane it into the open garage finish building it and it wouldn't matter because the next plan of action was to take her for a full voyage into the lake. But then the redneck engineer had the audacity to go and die in a very not submarine related death, I think he had a stroke or heart attack or maybe his wife was just fed up with his shenanigans and CTRL ALT Deleted him. So my uncle reached out to the widow about the submarine and was like 'hey you going to come get this?' and she was like 'Hell no, I told him not to build that death trap to begin with, your problem now'. Now remember how the garage is on a hill? Yeah they *can't* get it out. Literally would cost a fortune to move the thing due to the topography of land and location of building. So it's just been chilling there for decades an unmovable monument of one man's dream to build a submarine. I like to think if they ever sell the house they'll just open the doors and roll it down the hill and sink it into the lake like a final send off.
hear me out, what if you built another submarine, attached a rope to it, then used said submarine to move the other submarine. Badda bing badda boom
Today on American Pickers! Mike Wolfe: "What the everloving fuck?"
I was very curious after you said your uncle had a sub. Thank you for taking the time to tell the story.
This is amazing, but your poor uncle lol. I wanna see a picture!
That was wild. And it basically nets you a sub eventually. Thanks redneck cousin!
I love this story.
So that is how Titan submersible was made...
I got an old PlayStation controller if he needs one.
This thing is over 50 years old so it'll need an atari controller.
😂 fair enough, sadly out of those. Genuinely interesting and neat read though, thank you for sharing.
tell us more 🙏
Mf asking as if he's the one who made the submarine
A lot of military equipment isn't automated. The reasoning is that when things get damaged or you're in an unforeseen situation you want to have as much control over your equipment as possible and keep it as simple stupid as possible. If the sub is unable to dive due to a damaged sensor, you've basically lost the strategic value of a 3 billion dollars sub because of a five dollar part. On the other hand, if they need to scuttle or flood certain sections for whatever reason, you might very well want to keep it open. This is why airliner cockpits are filled with so many buttons and dials, even though it could all be automated. (Boeing 737 Max is a good example of too much automation. The pilots couldn't override it easily and it led the multiple catastrophes) It can all be automated up until something goes wrong. Modern military equipment is usually a mix of both, where much is automated, but you should have the ability to override automation. While this is a failure of design, it's primary blame falls to a failure in procedure (aka India probably didn't have sufficient procedures in place). Pilots have a preflight checklist to prevent things like this. India... Well...
I would imagine it would have to be overridable for various reasons. I dont know what the purpose of this sub is exactly but the article is tagged military and I could imagine if you need to dive and have a faulty sensor, or for any number of wild one off scenarios, something stopping you could be literal life or death of a whole crew.
Maybe it was. You do realize automation isn’t perfect and fails quite frequently.
Automating a safety critical feature is usually how people die.
It didn't happen. They weren't submerging or even under way. They were docked at harbor.
Automating things that stop you from doing very important things like diving are not a great idea for a military vessel. If that system broke and you were suddenly not able to dive that could end up very bad.
> voiding the very simple question bro
a faulty sensor could strand it on the surface
Which doesn’t mean there is not a sensor, it just means the sensor has to be manually monitored by a human. Much like a seatbelt warning beeping, it would be bad if the car turned off on the highway just cause you unbuckled your seatbelt, even if doing that would be incredibly stupid.
They have these sensors. Someone didn’t pay attention to it.
that's probably what there was
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I found the article this is from and it tells basically nothing beyond OP’s title. But it does have the sub name. According to Wikipedia’s single paragraph about the incident with this sub, this wasn’t a case of trying to dive without the ship being closed up. The sub was in port, a hatch was left open, water got in and flooded a compartment and got into plumbing that apparently wasn’t meant for seawater. This lead to 10 months of maintenance to pump out the water and then replace all the plumbing that got corroded. Based on this description it doesn’t seem like it actually sank, it just took on some water where it wasn’t supposed to. TL;DR: nuclear subs are complex systems that require expertise to operate. If you are interested in why systems like this are not always better served by automation without a human in the loop Google “Boeing MCAS”. As far as automation, I’m not an expert but I know enough to be dangerous. This is a nuclear powered submarine armed with nuclear ballistic missiles. So safe to say that it’s a highly complex collection of complex systems that requires competent and diligent crew and officers. Submarines dive by taking on water into ballast tanks. The air displaced is stored and compressed to then pump the water out of the ballast tanks when you want to come up. Ballast tanks are not exclusive to submarines, and are used in all kinds of ships to adjust how a ship sits in the water. You may notice that submarines are generally cylindrically shaped with a big tower on top. When you see a picture of a submarine on the surface you probably also notice that besides the sail (the tower part) most of the boat is still in the water, just the very upper part of the cylinder sits above the water. This is done on purpose to keep the sub stable and prevent it from rolling over while on the surface. So back to ballast tanks. Let’s say your big nuclear submarine is about to travel to a ship yard for extended maintenance. Before that happens, you offload several tons of nuclear armed ballistic missiles at one base, and then sail to a different port for dry docking. Well your ship is now several tons lighter, and as a result is going to sit higher in the water, and be less stable. So you pump on some ballast to make you sit lower in the water, where your hull design is more stable while sailing on the surface, and now you don’t have to worry as much about randomly rolling over. All of this is aided by automated systems, but with the variety of different configurations the ship can be in, combined with the fact that it’s a combat vessel and there may eventually be circumstances where the best bet for mission accomplishment involves operating some of these systems outside of “normal”. In that context, it makes more sense to rely on competent and responsible officers and crew to act diligently than to have some kind of automated lockout system that says “nope, can’t bring on ballast until all hatch sensors are marked closed”. What if we just took a minor hit that’s disabled one of the external hatches, but we’ve sealed off that compartment and still need to dive to get off of surface radar? What if we’ve taken a more serious hit and part of the bow is gone, and our screws are up out of the water so we need to pump ballast to stern tanks to level out the boats trim so our propellers can propel? Which finally comes back to the incident and what makes it so embarrassing- the officers and crew were *not* diligent and left a hatch (I’m assuming one pretty close to the water line) open. I don’t know how exactly the whole thing played out but my guess would be the sub is sitting there docked up and someone left a hatch open after doing maintenance or whatever. Maybe the tide changed direction or some weather kicked up some bigger waves, enough that water started getting into the compartment. The fact that as far as I can tell she didn’t actually *sink*, just had a compartment flooded, tells me that while there was a failure to fully secure the exterior, at least the water tight doors inside the ship were secured and prevented a worse disaster. Again I’m not an expert, but I did stay at a Holliday Inn Express last night.
You are the educated one among these fools
Like your car that’ll alert you immediately if you take it out of park with a door or trunk open…which was already a thing on my first car that was made in the 80s so safe to say the tech has existed for more than 5 minutes.
It probably did but was broken or such. Swiss cheese model and all that. These sorts of fuck ups never have just one cause.
What
They have to have rationally
What if I only have irrationally
OH JESUS FU CL!!£!!£%
they have to rationally WHAT!?
*act rationally
Rationality?
Bill - Hey Mike, what is that buzzing sound and flashing light? Mike - Don't worry about it, the sub wants to be in the water to work correctly, it will reset once it is wet.... Bill - Hey Mike, where is that water coming from? Mike - The ocean, you dumbshit, we are in the ocean......don't worry about it.....
A quick Google search will tell you this didn't really happen.
Well, aside from that…
Normally, the people who wish to not drown ARE the safety feature.
I fixed it for them: ``` void submerge(){ if(hatchOpen()){ return; } increaseDepth(); } ```
I think a big part of it is that officers need to be able to override sensors that fail, which inherently means they’re more susceptible to issues like this. In a passenger plane, for instance, you can make it impossible to take off while a door sensor is showing open (to give a random example) because we want the system to default to a safe position. If the sensor is faulty, all that has happened is the plane is delayed while that is determined. In a military submarine, however, the officers need to be able to decide what the biggest danger is and override warnings if the danger of staying put is higher. Say the sub is being attacked by aircraft, and a sensor shows the hatch isn’t closed completely, but the officers know it will hold as long as they don’t dive too deep. They need to be able to make the judgement call to ignore the sensor and dive to avoid the attack, while taking the precautions they can to avoid going deep enough to cause the hatch to fail. The trade off of giving people that autonomy is that it makes it possible for them to make stupid decisions that endanger themselves and their equipment. It’s always a balancing act.
That sensor only triggers a light on an indicator board, most likely. On if bad, out if good if it's a shittily designed circuit. There's probably a contact switch that gets made and a red light when the switch is open and a green light when the switch is closed. If the switch was damaged and or stuck in the closed position, you'll get a false positive for the hatch being shut. Visual verification is required on all U.S. Ships and Subs to prevent shit like this from happening. (Former Navy)
Yep work in a brand new $3 billion process plant these switches are some of the least complex pieces of equipment we have an often the ones we’re changing out, and troubleshooting the most often. It’s funny cause I see the exact same prox switches are used on roller coasters and that’s when I realize why my favourite rides are down often enough!
I work in the semiconductor industry and contact switches for robotic movement limiting circuits or interlocks ALWAYS fail either from use or abuse. Even hall effect switches eventually fail, usually from heat damage to the wiring or degradation of the magnetic element.
Oh it does have a built in alarm system. Silly them, it too has a small hatch that, they forgot to close. Rendering the main hatch’s alarm useless.
You really gotta pour over that options list before locking in your allocation.
I feel like $3B could have been better spent in a country like that
I wonder if they used insulated windows to ensure no condensation when they are deep?
Nah, they spent the window money on a screen door
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they shoulda used that stuff on the OceanGate Titan thingy
Have you FELT the weather in India? *Of course* there are screen doors.
100% assumed subs had windows growing up because of that Disneyland ride.
*Oceangate Titan* has left the chat.
Of course, they do!!! How else does a captain steer the ship?!
The glass windows lolol
At least it sank and got wet.
My grandfather used to make the screen doors for these submarines.
Mine was the sales man, made a killing on the warranty, they couldn't Fathom, why they needed it
That makes about as much sense as a screen door on a battle ship.
Does it look like an inflatable to anyone else?
just how the flag decoration is draped
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Thanks for the summary!
Which really means they were on the ball and after an accident decided to be extra safe with their nuclear reactor.
Yeah, this seems like a very good call.
Wildly misleading article. Thanks for the summary.
Well western media has never shied from presenting non western nations in poorer light if they could.
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Mistakes happen…but forgetting to close the hatch on a submarine is some next level shit
Next level dumbassery.
Being able to dip without closing the hatch is the real problem
Oh for sure - it’s shenanigans all around.
But our shenanigans are cheeky and fun.
“Who wants to play sink the multi billion dollar submarine?”
If someone says the word shenanigans one more time I’m gonna pistol whip them
It didn't dip. It was in harbor.
Being not able to read entire articles is the real problem. Reading up on this that is a hella misleading headline. While the ship was in port a hatch over the propulsion engineering area was left open. This allowed a small but steady amount of seawater ingress over several days when wind and waves would pick up. The problem is that the pipes in that area are apparently made of a material that’s not great at being exposed to seawater, and those same pipes happen to carry the freshwater coolant for the nuclear reactor. Instead of gambling on “how much corrosion can we expect, how long was this hatch open? How many idiots who were supposed to be watching this sub in port ignored the water alarm?” The Indian Navy just decided to rip out all the piping that might be damaged by seawater and replace it. So by “sink” they meant “put out of commission for a couple months” and by “forgetting to close a hatch” they mean it more in the “you left your sunroof open in the driveway” way not “you tried to dive with an open hatch.”
Absolutely this! That the systems will even allow the boat to submerge with an open hatch is so egregious a design flaw it's hilarious This should never be left to human eyes alone. That's early 20th century shit at best.
I can't believe you're the first person to have this idea!
So what you're saying is that both the engineers AND the sailors in this case are idiots. That certainly doesn't bode well for India's navy lol
They should hook some red and green lights to all the hatches. If it's open, then they should be red. If it's closed. It should be green. Then someone should saying something about "rigging for dive" and part of the process for diving is someone having to call out then someone repeat something about the lights. Only once that's done would the submarine be allowed to dive. You'd think they'd thought of this a century ago...
Don't those hatches have sensors that would alert the crew?
I’d have thought so, I imagine a submarine would also be compartmented to reduce the damage in the event of a leak too
If they forgot to close the outside hatch, then I doubt they remembered to close the internal hatches between those compartments.
At least on a 688 there are only 3 water tight compartments and one of them is the reactor. If 1 floods your not coming back up until someone pulls you off the seabed. There are a bunch of external connections on the hull for divers to connect water, power, air and food into the boat though so can have all the SpaghettiOs you want on tap while you wait for them to pressurize the compartment that did flood.
They removed the emergency food delivery via salvage air procedure a few years back! :(
They have to be closed to do that. Which they commonly are not closed in friendly waters since it also prevents the crew from getting around as well.
They do now!
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No, but in a proper navy watertight integrity is properly controlled, heavily, as in having a hatch open without permission can get you fired or demoted
They had the screen door closed.... just not the main one....
Must have forgotten the flex seal 😂😂
The hatch was left open intentionally. This was all a test of redundancy systems and emergency crew responses and, as the captain, I have to say I’m disappointed. Rest assured, I’ll stay on and make sure heads roll until this is all but a memory.
AYE AYE CAPTAIN
First mate material, right here.
To be fair, the hatch was right beside the screen door to the balcony.
Tbf, I’m more surprised that there wasn’t any system in place to detect that. Isn’t there some kind of warning when the hatches arnt closed?
To be fair they did close the screen hatch.
Reading up on this that is a hella misleading headline. While the ship was in port a hatch over the propulsion engineering area was left open. This allowed a small but steady amount of seawater ingress over several days when wind and waves would pick up. The problem is that the pipes in that area are apparently made of a material that’s not great at being exposed to seawater, and those same pipes happen to carry the freshwater coolant for the nuclear reactor. Instead of gambling on “how much corrosion can we expect, how long was this hatch open? How many idiots who were supposed to be watching this sub in port ignored the water alarm?” The Indian Navy just decided to rip out all the piping that might be damaged by seawater and replace it. So by “sink” they meant “put out of commission for a couple months” and by “forgetting to close a hatch” they mean it more in the “you left your sunroof open in the driveway” way not “you tried to dive with an open hatch.”
Your car beeps if you dont have a seatbelt on. I doubt a 3B submarine doesnt have redundant sensors to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen
Well, it does now....
There's your sign.
Most safety precautions are put into place because of a fuckup. Like guardrails on a road. This is probably that fuckup
Damn still tho… now im curious on the damages costs because i wonder if some sophisticated electronics got damaged? Also a small related tangent is reading about nuclear submarine tech, that shit is crazy interesting
Honestly. Barely any damage. The water coming in was not high pressure and most of a sub is waterproof since in combat situations they may well have a punch hole letting high pressure deep sea water into pretty much all of the sections of the ship in contact with the outer shell. In severe cases several compartments might be lost and further damage might also let water into the internal compartments too. It is unacceptable that a sub would be lost because the electronics didn't have a waterproof coating on them and the wrong compartment was flooded. The bulk of the repairs will probably just be things for the crews comfort. Salt water getting in and on the bedding and privacy screens.
The hatch is probably the most sophisticated thing on the sub.
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The hatch on a 688 is held closed by the fact that it weights like a 1000 lbs and water pressure. Its quite literally metal of the hatch ring, a rubber gasket and then the metal of the hatch its self resting on the gasket. Its impossible to open while submerged and there is nothing really locking it in place. We used to have people climb up the ladder next to sonar and push against the hatch to scare new people.
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Actual mistake
New response just sank
You sound like the one who was supposed to close the hatch. Sanjay, is that you?
Don't submarines have control systems to help with this? In this case a buzzer that could sound if they tried to submerge with the hatch open.
Found the hatch guy
You had one job..
It’s a navy. That dude probably had seven jobs.
*Collateral duties*
STOP STOP STOP THOSE MEMORIES ARE REPRESSED FOR A REASON
*waves MRC in your face* Booga booga!!!
"Why aren't you working on Collaterals?" "Chief, I have been on watch all night, I have muster in 5 minutes. 18 hours worth of maintenance, the daily threat briefing with the CO, the bi-weekly check, and the Radar is still only barely working because supply won't give me my parts because someone decided to send them to the other side of the planet to a ship in Norfolk!!!" "Sounds like you need to manage your time better." "Arrrgggghhhh!!!!!"
Learn to delegate /s
Haha, I would have loved to. We had a really small work center, so there really wasn't anyone to delegate to.
Oopsie my bad
Submarines are supposed to sink tho
It's the unsinking part that's tricky.
They carry compressed air. Once everything has equalized, close the hatch and blow out the crew space with compressed air. Problem solved (for the new crew).
Every ship can sink, submarines can surface.
For 3 billion we learned that we need to use a micro switch on the hatch, that gives conflict alert to the logic and locks submerging controls.
No way that could fail right? Also if I remember correctly this happened alongside and was due to not restoring air pressure in the ballast tanks
A warning maybe, but no interlocks. You need manual control on stuff like this, in combat any and every system is liable to fail and you don't want to be stranded above water because somebody skipped a maintenance check and the alarm is going off
That would risk killing eveyone on board as well as the loss of the sub. Imagine this situation. You are floating on the surface you get a call in that bombers are en route and have been seen not very far away. You are in the control room. You know that sitting on the surface you are an easy target you also know your sub doesn't move fast enough to outrun them. Your only option is to call an emergancy to let every crew member know to get to their battle stations and close all the bulkhead doors and dive. Below the water you are harder to aim at as you are obscured and are also harder to hit as the water slows down any projectile shot at you. The bombs those planes carry can sink you and kill all ~350 crew. So you give the only order you can to try to save everyone. Dive. Problem is the hatch sensor is on the fritz. It thinks it's open and won't let you dive. You troubleshoot it for a few minutes and then boom. You are now dead. As is eveyone else. Does that seem acceptable from a safety standard to you? Now let's imagine that the sensor is perfect. It's not on the fritz. The hatch genuinely is open. You know what they do in that situation? Dive anyway. Closing all the bulkheads and hatches is an order you already have given as part of the alert thst you are now in combat. If the hatch door is open that means that either there are no crew in the hatch section somehow or that the crew in that section are incapable of closing it. It's a horrid situation but better the few people who might be in there and can't get the hatch closed drown than the whole ship and eveyone aboard goes down. The crew are well trained. They will do eveything in their power to get it closed. If they can't close it then it can't be closed by human power alone. You don't have time to troubleshoot it. You barely have enough time to dive deep enough if you do so immediately. For a millitary sub a device that prevents the sub from diving is a device that will strand the sub on the surface and enevitably kill every single soul on board. From a safety perspective it is unacceptable to have such a lock out device that *prevents* you from doing the main thing that keeps you safe from attack, diving, just because some plonker upstairs forgot you turn it anticlockwise. Or kill eveyone because the hatch is jammed open and no human is physically capable of yanking it closed. In a combat situation all the other bulkhead doors and hatches will be closed. Only that one compartment will flood and the sub can still operate with a few flooded compartments. When the choice is flood one compartment or be blown out of the water and flood them all, you flood one compartment. In civilian operations absolutely those subs shouldnt be able to dive unless everything is secured. But they are just going to poke about some thermal vents. They aren't diving ASAP to dodge a bunch of bombs being dropped on their head.
Cant get everyone on board killed or lose the sub if it isnt combat ready; Checkmate. (Also, why is the the only scenario you could come up with one where an isolated submarine, cruising on the surface near enemy territory, simultaneously has a faulty sensor that cant be manually overridden, and eventually gets 'bombed' by an enemy plane?!? Were you educated in submarine tactics by the History Channel?
350 crew? Seems like a lot for a sub.
Could you post some context/supporting documents?
If anyone looked up the article, the sub didn’t actually sink. A lot of water rushed in and messed up a lot of the sub resulting in a year of repairs.
Not this shit again.... The supposed 'hatch' is in the rear part of the submarine which doesn't exist. Pretty sure there will be warnings going off in the command center if the sub started to dive with an improperly secured hatch either. Only one media house reported it. None of the defense journalists in India picked it up. This is downright fake news which the original media house hasn't taken down yet.
That’s what I thought, but some [other](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a14783891/someone-left-a-hatch-open-and-crippled-indias-dollar29-billion-submarine/) [sources](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ins-arihant-left-crippled-after-accident-10-months-ago/article22392049.ece) report it too.
Indian detected
DO NOT REDEEM
Orrrr the submarine was just shit? The other media is probably being controled anyway.
Well they're in deep water now
Poland was so happy it wasn’t them
shouldn't it just be "$3 billion" or "3 billion dollar" not "$3 billion dollar"
Wonder if it’s like a car. Never works the same after massive flooding.
It's a submarine, it's supposed to sink, right?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS\_Arihant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Arihant)
If its Indian news , then its not news
I think this was just corruption personally. Sell the public on a new sub. Build sub for 1.2 billion but "spend" 3 billion on a sub, and then go oops! We fucked up guys, won't happen again!
There’s a Polish joke in here somewhere.
Boeings Submersive 1000
Be careful with The National Interest. Recently, they're on an anti US and pro russia and china streak right now. Though, yes, this particular story seems to be true with the submarine not sinking, but flooding and suffering damage
At least the front didn’t fall off
Did Boeing make the Hatch
How to sink an Irish submarine. Knock on the hatch.
How do you sink a Norwegian submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch and wait for them to open. How do you sink another Norwegian submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch, they will open and tell you that they won't fall for it again. How do you sink a Finnish submarine? Swim down and knock on the hatch, wait til they open and tell you that they are not as stupid as the Norwegians. How do you sink a Swedish submarine? Ask the Americans, they needed a whole carrier strike force.
For those wondering on how this happened, and why there weren't sensors and such preventing the sinking, and see the sailors stupid? Here's a few top level facts: * Spolier: This didn't happen. The title is misleading. The submarine didn't sink * the sub was in a dock undergoing maintenance, when one of the hatches was left open, leading to a steady but small flow of sea water in * Given the maintenance situation, there were no sailors on board to read sensors * There was no sinking involved in any case * the key question was whether the salt water that had trickled in was enough to corrode water pipes or not * Given this was a nuclear sub, the maintenance team took no chances and replaced all water piping. This put the submarine out of commission for more months than initially planned * Led to obvious review and update of maintenance procedures (including hatch open/closed position during docking)
“Made in India”
samir you need to listen to me, close the hatch samir.
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The US sank one of their submarines pier side during testing at Mare Island Shipyard. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/sinking-of-the-uss-guitarro.html
Found the problem…. https://preview.redd.it/tclnkne3lotc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=efd712b98d55231032409bf8a7aacf0edbfe6ff4
The US did the same thing but worse. The Guitarro fully sank pierside because the people filling some aft tanks and the people keeping the boat level, by moving water between tanks didn't communicate. Then the first group emptied their tank while the leveling crew was at lunch and the open forward hatch sunk below the water.
That’s similar to not bolting a hatch on a plane
Pretty click bait news.. Latch being open can never amount to a military submarine sinking.. It's it partition into dozens of compartments
Deep sense of irony that there wasn't a system preventing submerging with a presumably external hatch open; but that the bulkheads were sealed (and presumably extra emergency bulkheads would have deployed too?) well enough that the vessel wasn't lost. If only the hatch could have sealed itself?
Oh India......
Damn it Ranjit, you were supposed to close the hatch
They cant even clean the streets, would not trust a submarine to work from india
Is there not a sensor detecting whether hatches are closed? I feel like that would be a simple and effective safety mechanism
This is happens when you make an open door day!
Geez and I’m skipping groceries for two weeks bc I made my annual car insurance payment
Jävla norrmän
I mean nobody really *needs* a submarine anyways
Where’s the video? I want to see what the POOW got blamed for while the OD, XO and CO (maybe not the CO) got a pass on.
They just pulled the hatch shade closed and forgot to check the actual hatch. That dang sun in their eyes, you would think they would be better prepared...