I Wouldn’t Let These Guys Change my Oil

I’m waiting for my wife to call, so I am killing time with you.

Today we all know what happened to the Titan sub that was on its way to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. It blew up, or more accurately, in, on Sunday. Our Coast Guard found the pieces near the Titanic. I have heard they were 600 feet away and 1300 feet away. Maybe someone knows the correct figure.

I was surprised to see that the most intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, analysis of the accident came from film director James Cameron, who directed the movie Titanic. He has a lot of contacts in the general area of things that go down deep in the ocean.

He says the sub probably imploded way above the depth to which it was considered safe. The Titanic rests at around 12,500 feet, and the sub disintegrated at 3,500.

That’s not the kind of failure a company can come back from without a whole new design. The sub fell apart at less than 30% of its working depth, so it experienced less than 30% of the pressure it was designed to endure every time it was used. It’s like having a hitch designed to pull 12,500 pounds snap in front of a 3,500-pound trailer. It suggests the design was totally worthless.

How would you like it if you were on an elevator rated for 2,000 pounds, and you and the other occupants weighed, say, 500, and the cable snapped?

Cameron says he emailed people on the day of the implosion, telling them the sub’s occupants were dead. He says he was very confident.

According to Cameron, the sub lost communication and tracking when it imploded. He says the tracking equipment had its own pressure-resistant housing outside the sub, as well as its own power. His conclusion when he learned this information was that the sub had been torn apart, because gentler failures wouldn’t have interfered with the tracking equipment.

That sounds pretty smart to me. Of course, Cameron is a movie guy, known to have a monumental ego, so it could be that he’s just good at looking smart. And he’s the same guy who thinks he found the bones of Jesus, which Jesus is still using.

He also says Oceangate, the tourism-sub company, was urged repeatedly to have its vessel certified, whatever that means. Experts wanted it to receive proper testing, and Cameron says that never happened.

He also says the composite hull was a stupid idea.

A composite is a material made up from at least two different materials. Two examples are fiberglass-reinforced plastic, which is used in boat hulls, and steel-reinforced concrete, which is used in nearly everything made from concrete. A composite will combine desirable qualities of different materials. In concrete, adding rebar allows the concrete to bend more without cracking.

The Titan’s hull was shaped like a watermelon (the old kind). The ends were titanium domes. The middle was a carbon-fiber tube. “Carbon fiber” is shorthand for “carbon fiber imbedded in something else.” Plastic, maybe?

Cameron used the word “horrible” to describe the decision to use this composite. He said the problem was that the carbon could start separating from whatever it was imbedded in, and that eventually, this would produce weak areas that would cause implosion. He believes this is what happened.

I would guess it works like this: carbon fiber and plastic are not equally stretchy, so whenever pressure produced tension inside the hull, the fibers would try to stretch more or less than the plastic around them. After many repetitions, the fibers would start to come loose and move slightly. When that happens, you don’t have a composite or its virtues. You have two different materials rubbing against each other.

Again, just my wild guess.

Something like this happens to car paint in the sun. Cars are now painted with stupid two-layer coatings. The bottom layer is colored, and the top layer is clear plastic. When the car heats and cools, the layers expand and contract at different rates, causing them to try and slide past each other, and a few years down the road, your clear coat falls off and can’t be replaced unless you redo the entire paint job at enormous cost.

Cameron claims it’s not possible to do a quality analysis of a sub made from a composite. He says one “contiguous” (he means “homogeneous”) material can be tested using finite element analysis, but composites can’t.

I think he is getting in over his head, because the web says finite element analysis works on composites. In any case, as far as I can determine, the sub never got any kind of creditable certification.

I see someone in the submersible community, if there is such a thing, is now claiming the sub must have been engineered well because an expert went down in it with the rest of the dead. The idea is that he wouldn’t have done that if the sub had been unsafe.

That doesn’t convince me. A 2012 article from the New York Times says that up until that time, only 5 people had died in submersibles, and there had been plenty of descents. The first bathyscaphe was launched in 1948.

If Titan was so safe, why did it implode? If implosion is a risk that can’t be mitigate well, why have all those other vessels done just fine?

I would have more faith in the Titan design if they built another one, had it tested with extreme rigor, and got the company’s top remaining employees to do a hundred safe descents. My bet: plastic deep-sea manned submersibles aren’t coming back soon.

If Cameron is basically right, the vessel was doomed by third-rate engineering. In that case, even if the company can somehow hold together and get over its now-abysmal reputation, it will have to splurge on a real sub. No one wants to enter a demolition derby in a Ford Pinto.

I don’t think anyone seriously believes the company can survive, though. On top of all its other problems, the guy who ran it is dead.

Some people are calling for new laws. That’s ridiculous. You should be allowed to go down to the Titanic in a cheap sub if you want. It’s not like this is a significant threat to the public. So far, the death toll, since the beginning of time, stands at 5. Also, the people who rode in this sub all signed a disclaimer that made it very clear the company thought there was a good chance they would die. I don’t know what more we should do to protect people from their own bad judgment.

Over 1500 people died when the Titanic sank, they died due to incompetence and greed, and humanity continued using ships. That was the right decision. If rich people want to continue risking death in tiny subs, they should be allowed to do it. As for disclaimers, liability, negligence, and all that, we already have laws covering those things, as will become obvious when the lawsuits start.

Yesterday I read about a high school classmate of mine. He died on a mountain in the Himalayas at about 33 years of age. He had kind of an ego. He decided to leave his group for a while, and he fell into a snow-covered crevasse. They found his sunglasses, journal, and trekking poles next to the hole he made, and that was it. There was nothing they could do. For all the world knows, he was wedged between two walls of ice, dying, for several days, watching light appear and disappear above him as the sun rose and set.

He is still there.

We still let people climb mountains.

Mount Everest is not the world’s hardest mountain to climb. Not by a wide margin. Annapurna has a fatality rate of about one third. Still, 1% of the people who try climbing Everest end up dead. That’s a horrible record. No one is trying to end the lucrative Mount Everest extreme-tourism trade, and people are allowed to climb mountains that are much more dangerous.

It’s sad the Titan’s occupants died. It’s even sadder that their deaths appear to have been caused by incompetence and recklessness. It’s a good lesson for anyone who thinks fancy-looking equipment, a cute logo, vehicle wraps, and custom golf shirts make a company trustworthy.