Originally published at: James Cameron explains why the entire submersible search was a 'prolonged nightmarish charade' | Boing Boing
…
19 Likes
the obvious reason for the disparity is that people don’t actually care about the circumstances and fate of distant strangers. they just want a dramatic and novel story to be gripped by.
24 Likes
There was nothing stopping him from calling someone in the press and explaining what the Explorer Dude’s Backchannel knew. Nothing.
The media spectacle was/is disgusting.
26 Likes
If we don’t show sufficient reverence for our coin holding betters, then their wealth may not trickle down!
alternate…
I show extreme reverence for the obscenely wealthy as I want to be shown that reverence should I ever become obscenely wealthy!
15 Likes
As I said somewhere else, I don’t find it surprising or scandalous that an insider in a small community had more information than the general public. That happens all the time and is no indication that only “super-rich explorer dudes” get to know. It’s just that people who know each other talk to each other. And clearly those involved in the rescue operation and the Navy didn’t want the public to know at the time, or else there would have been a press release. So him keeping it secret from the media isn’t an indictment either.
35 Likes
This spectacle isn’t exactly a national security event. I would think that sharing information in this case would add to a collective solution and or quick resolution instead of wasting resources needlessly. But yeah, the world has to do all it can do to save its millionaire tourists.
Meanwhile off the coast of Greece…
12 Likes
If he had done that, we would have accused him of making it all about himself. That information was out there and it was not on James Cameron, one of probably dozens of people that knew it but weren’t involved in the rescue operation, to break it to the world and to the families.
22 Likes
He has been known to be quite the attention magnet.
4 Likes
I’m sure they shared it with the appropriate SAR authorities.
14 Likes
Well shit, had I known there was a loud bang heard underwater, and they DID have a transponder that stopped working, I wouldn’t have even mounted a rescue effort.
Did the Coast Guard not have that info, or were they like, “This is a good excuse to get practice in for if a Navy sub goes missing.”
I couldn’t help wondering why we put so much effort into 5 likely dead people and won’t bother looking for indigenous women who go missing in the United States.
Aw gee, don’t wonder toooo long on that. 
12 Likes
I love the point in the video where he says “I assume someone smarter than me…”
He assumes no one is smarter than he.
12 Likes
I’m sure he’s already thinking about making a movie about it, with a romance at the center.
6 Likes
I work in aerospace composites engineering. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a composite pressure vessel and composites in general perform well in fatigue loading. But from wiki:
David Lochridge, the OceanGate Director of Marine Operations, inspected the Titan as it was being handed over from Engineering to Operations and filed a quality control report in January 2018 in which he stated that no non-destructive testing of the carbon fiber hull had taken place to check for voids and delaminating
Like, NDI is the backbone of composite safety after process control. Somewhere in the same piece it says they weren’t inspecting the adhesive bondlines between the hull and the Ti endcaps. It’s just wild how shoddy this entire program was.
edit: Just to add, I don’t know how many times this thing went down but if it was a dozen or two, that doesn’t really qualify as fatigue (if this thing had been properly fabbed). But it wasn’t, so you’re getting additional crack propagation per cycle.
21 Likes
18 Likes
The information would have come from the expedition mothership, so you would presume the SAR operations would have known about it but you can only conclude from that info that it’s what probably happened.
Combined with the info from the Navy about the breakup noises (they have plenty of experience there) in the vicinity with an overlapping timestamp, then you can conclude that they were already dead.
Blame the USCG for the wasted time - they probably already knew and needed to put on a show because they were rich folk whose relatives would have raised a stink if they didn’t.
15 Likes
Man, the conspiracy nutters are out in force now…
Vorhies claimed that “explosives were placed on the Titanic to blow it out.” The reasoning, Vorhies added, was to enact the Federal Reserve because rich families on board the Titanic were opposed to its creation. Vorhies then connected the Rothschilds — a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories — to his conspiracy theory by claiming that the OceanGate sub “was being funded by the Rothschild dynasty. Right? What they want to do is they want to prevent people from visiting this Titanic.”
9 Likes
I’d have expected them to do a destructive test, a hull wired with everything, including a thermometer up its butt, lowered deep with a data cable until it implodes.
Too bad testing gets in the way of “progress”.
17 Likes
I’ve seen whole systems pulled out of submarines because one pipe weld missed it’s NDT. Sure it’s expensive and causes delays but what are the consequences of not doing it?
28 Likes
Definitely. Destructive testing should absolutely be part of the design and validation process. But once you know something can be acceptable, NDI and process control verify that it is acceptable.
17 Likes
… they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency …
Well, so much for my hope that it was all over before they had any idea that anything was wrong. I’m sure that when it did go, the death of all aboard was practically instantaneous, but it sounds as if they had at least a little time to realize that they were in big trouble before that.
17 Likes
