Well, those navies are almost all operating in the area now in the search and don’t seem to have much luck.
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Right, I would want some much simpler backup system that’s not relying on USB working. I have a backup USB mouse and keyboard in the office because it’s too unreliable to count on it letting me send some emails. Using that in a critical system? Sounds crazy to me.
Compare this with the aviation industry’s way of handling all-digital controls (fly by wire).
I wish these adventurers a safe return but I highly doubt it at this point. Even if it could be located right now there might not be enough time to get the right rescue ship in place and bring it to the surface. I do believe they are alive in it, because it sounds like it’s very strong mechanically and isn’t going to implode or crack. It’s terrifying to think about it.
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Yeah, that’s pretty messed up considering that the migrant boat disaster had about 100x the number of lives at stake:
Even more messed up is that these migrant boat disasters are disturbingly common and you have to specify which one you’re talking about. There was another really bad one off of Italy in February that left about 100 dead.
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They did say at one point that they carry spares for the controller. They supposedly have seven redundant systems to drop ballast, including one which is inherently fail-safe, so there have been at least a few times they’ve actually applied proper safety culture for this thing. Contrast that with the lack of a surface locator beacon, lack of a life raft, and no way to egress on the surface without outside assistance.
There have been reports that acoustic systems have picked up banging at regular intervals, which gives reason to believe that they’re still alive and didn’t just instantly implode. Whether or not that’s good news or bad news depends on what happens in the next 24 hours or so.
Edit:
Here I have to disagree. The bulk of the hull is carbon fiber, which is extremely strong but subject to fatigue and tends to fail catastrophically with little warning. The rest are titanium caps which were literally glued on with little to no mechanical reinforcement. And yeah, in theory the pressure will keep those sealed on, but at those pressures, a small failure can become a total failure in milliseconds.
The most concerning part is that they detected cyclic fatigue 2-3 years after originally building it, which dropped the rating to 3 km. So they did a complete hull rebuild… two years ago.
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Right - but they didn’t even do that. I was wondering the same thing after I had commented. But it seems that something that could be floated up would at least get someone in the general area. Hell - thin wire could even be used to let it stay attached to the sub, I would think to get a beacon closer to the surface. Christ, they could use something akin to the strongest braided stuff called Spiderwire.
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Interesting. And good to know. I had read [in a place I now cannot find, natch] that the method for releasing ballast was to have people rock the ship back and forth, which dumped it out of its holders.
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Ah ok, your explanation makes me think it did have a catastrophic implosion, which would be a lot more merciful than being stranded for days at the bottom of the sea and would also explain the sudden loss of communication.
This whole thing sounds like a crackpot design. Why even use carbon fiber at all? Did they really need to save weight on this? Titanium or steel would be much easier to work with and safer.
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Yeah, I don’t get the fascination with the “game controller”. As an engineer I’m considerably more bothered by the carbon fiber hull combined with acoustic real-time monitoring used in the design. CF is relatively weak in compression compared to it’s tensile strength. I would be extremely concerned about cyclic stressing.
Unlike metals, the failure mode for carbon fiber structures is you get no warning. They had some kind of home-grown acoustic monitoring system they claimed could monitor the “hull integrity on every dive”. This is part of their excuse as to why there ship was better than a “Classed Vehicle” (that is, one certified by governing bodies.)
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Aren’t you exaggerating a little bit when you say “no warning”? According to one of the articles I’ve seen that acoustic system would provide “milliseconds” of warning.
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You had me in the first half 
Yeah, it would be milliseconds of warning, followed by a supersonic bubble collapse shock wave. Suffice to say, they never really get into the details of what they’d do if their warning system did manage to detect a hull anomaly.
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SpaceX fanbois have been criticizing the quaintness of having no touchscreen controls (manual only) in the cockpit of NASA’s Orion space capsule while declaring the superiority of the (still-to-be-logically-justified) use of touchscreen controls in their hero’s Dragon spacecraft. Low-orbit, Moon, or Mars? I’d prefer MIL-spec switches.
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Leadership appears to believe that their warning system would give them enough warning that they could surface in time. They fired the guy who said it might only give them milliseconds of warning. It’s not at all clear if this is based on anything; as far as I’m aware they haven’t tested to destruction.
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Ah, thanks for the article. This is an amazing quote:
n 2019, Rush gave an interview to Smithsonian magazine, in which he said: “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”
The next submarine builder will be able say, “The commercial sub industry hasn’t had an injury in a certified submarine in 35 years.”
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For those of you talking about beacons, MSNBC interviewed a guy that had dove the Titanic a few times with James Cameron. He explained all the safety features involved in their submersible.
If they get tangled up things get jettisoned to free them up. In an emergency a bouy is released to let people on the surface know there is a problem and where they are at.
Another expert described a safety feature that is designed to corode after 24 hours dropping ballast allowing the submersible to get to the surface automatically.
Other expeditions travel with equipment to retrieve their submersible.
In other words, other expiditions go prepared. Of course there’s probably a lot more money involved because safety ain’t cheap.
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There are reports of banging sounds in the area of the sub; so apparently not.
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Really hoping they can get them out - but wow, all the details piling up are not making things look good. 
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Air Tags require Bluetooth signals, which at that depth, are not possible. I think they were just deployed to determine which side of the boat to point passengers to board the submersible.
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