The fact that hearing cracking noises on several of the descents, which was reported by many different passengers, was just completely disregarded by Rush or regarded as "normal" is absolutely mind blowing. Or the fact that they would lose contact with the mother vessel regularly and this was also regarded as normal and "not a big deal" is insane. Rushs arrogance had reached delusion and the negligence was to the umpth degree.
Human heuristics for risk are terrible. If nothing goes wrong the first few times, we get used to it and then it just *feels* safe. It affects everything from doctors flouting new guidelines to my mom never washing her hands after handling raw chicken (to be fair, we haven't gotten food poisoning... yet).
I'm glad the fucker is dead, I just wish he hasn't taken 4 others down with him. His hubris got him good. I wonder what he was thinking in that last second of his life, if indeed he even had time to think (afaik, a sub implosion is instant death within a second so maybe it was just suddenly lights out?)
Ocean gate reminds me of a lesson from my business ethics class where my teacher showed us seemingly ridiculous OSHA regulations. We all thought why would there be rules on things like waste storage and my teacher then showed us the real life cases that made those rules a thing
Apparently no one paid much attention to the rules over PepCon either. Chemical plant built straddling a main gas pipeline? Check. Plant fulfilling a contract to manufacture a dangerous chemical in bulk? Check. Plant suddenly needing to store said dangerous chemical on site, again in bulk? Check. Stockpile of said dangerous chemical growing to an alarming size? Check. Now for the spicy bit. The chemical in question was ammonium perchlorate. Nice, powerful oxidising agent that will turn a small fire into a raging inferno in no time. Worse still, if it gets hot, ammonium perchlorate will decompose explosively. So, what happened? Fire starts in the factory. Fire reaches the ammonium perchlorate stockpile. All 4,500 tons of it. Ammonnium perchlorate stockpile goes BOOM. With the force of a small tactical nuclear weapon. Resulting local earthquake registers 3.6 on the Richter Scale. Another example of why we have rules. And why idiots end up generating a body count when they ignore said rules and cut corners.
Oceangate’s brochure answering the question “why wasn’t it classed?” has completely backwards logic. It said that certifications were bad because they don’t protect against operator error and most marine accidents are due to that operator error. No…. the reason most accidents are due to operator error is that certification weeds out all of the terrible designs! If it weren’t for that process we’d probably have way more Oceangate type accidents.
Absolutely. The first time I read that line I was shocked. The question is: Did they truly believe that or were they knowingly lying? That the CEO was on most (all?) of the trips, including the final one, leads me to believe that he believed what he was telling people.
You can do some research I believe there is a video on it, a bunch of guys were trying to set speed records on mountain bikes over different terrain, one was sand and they designed a Carbon Fibre bike to be as light as possible, without doing proper testing they sent a dude down a massive dune only for it to fold in half when it came to the level off. The dude suffered massive injuries and 6 buffets worth of sand down his throat.
My limited knowledge of carbon fibre is through bike bits, and even I know that it's a great material until all of a sudden it really isn't. This doesn't seem sensible, even without their complete lack of testing!
@@bringerebrethil6176 I remember watching a documentary on this. I think it was a guys nicknamed the Red Baron trying to ride down a volcano in Nicaragua, and yeah as you mentioned got fucked by a sudden gradient change. He did come back with a better bike and claim a speed record If i'm not mistaken.
I am an engineer (retired now) and still remember what one of university lecturers said - when cooks make a mistake people get stomach ache. When engineers do, people die. Lesson I have remembered all my working life.
@@Dsw8691 I wouldn't say either is harder. Lawyers have to remember thousands obscure and sometimes conflicting rules well enough to determine what could be life or death for their clients. Additionally the mental burden of literally being completely responsible for the fate of your client is a bit rougher that most make it out to be. Engineers also have to worry about that, but it's distanced enough that they aren't forced to look people in the eyes and know that they're relying entirely on them. Different types of difficult, for sure, but both difficult. Also, where did you get those numbers lol? Engineering in some capacity is the most popular subject in pretty much every college in America. Sure they have to graduate first but it's a very popular job.
Fortunately engineering is a relatively slow process. There is plenty of time to get second opinions, design reviews, tests. They can also hire independent third parties to verify and certify the product. That’s why such engineering mistakes are relatively rare (compared to bad food).
The most important words that anyone can say who is involved in designing something are "I can't do that, it isn't safe". When I'm working on servers that handle the payment transactions of hundreds of thousands of people, and I get told to cut a corner, those are the words I use. Because I can't. It'll hurt too many people if I screw up and people's credit card details get leaked. When my friends who develop software for medical equipment are told to rush something or bodge it, it's the words they use. It's the words my friends, mechanical engineers, use when they're asked to cut corners or rush something without sufficient testing or review.
You say "it isn't safe," management hears "someone will sue you." The result is the same, but translating "manager" is a bit funny like that. It's a strange language.
And that not apply to a few people that wanna take risk to die themselfs for the sake of humanity. Let the Brave ones go wild and gather as much data as they can. Some people are evil and will disrepect the efforts of this amazing people but humanity as a whole will be better trough the new tecnology and data.
“The vast majority of marine accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.” Yes, because the regulators catch the mechanical failures
It's scary how dangerous playing with statistics or misinterpreting statistics is. And many people fell for that because they only look at the number on the surface level.
I'm reminded of the survivorship bias example story from WW2: Literally none of these aircraft that have made it back from combat have been hit in these places, they don't need armor there. No, every aircraft that was hit there did not make it back, those are the places that need armor the most.
@@theInsaneRodent also the story about helmets increasing the number of wounded in ww1…it increased because the number of dead decreased. It turned the dead into wounded and the British were really confused for a while
@@FreeMind5094 Not really because proper testing has things like measurements to be checked after each dive to make sure nothing has moved or deformed. It seems like the only measurement was whether or not they made it back to the surface.
That blog post is nuts. It's argument is, "Everyone else is taking this safety precaution and then not having the kind of accidents the precaution exists to prevent. It's clearly unnecessary, let's get rid of it."
I remember a friend studying engineering in college told me his professor said he was so strict about them making mathematical errors on exams because, “engineering errors lead to injuries and death. You need to take responsibility that a mistake could be deadly.”
That's exactly why we do have independent entities and engineers check our work, to confirm that we've not made silly mistakes or overlooked something crucial. Errors are inevitable but as long as convention and regulation is followed, you're at least doing your best and using the knowledge and experience gained from past mistakes. F***ing hate it when cowboys come in and think that they know better...
@@carlholland3819 Technically, yes. You shouldn't be held personally responsible for any and all mistakes as long as they are not simply rooted in negligence. And this applies for many professions. But... If you're in an job, working on something where lives might be at risk and you feel no responsibility what so ever, you're in the wrong field. And, when I say "you", it's not you as in "you, carlholland3819", but you as in anyone in such professions.
Being weak at higher math I decided to get into the Architecture rather than the Engineering. I simply design Flighted Fantasy, the Engineers have the important task of making it a Reliable Reality.
This is exactly what I've been saying with regard to the stress strain curve for carbon fiber. Using acoustic sensors to warn you when a carbon fiber hull is failing is like having a sensor that monitors your heart and warns you that it has stopped. By the time you get the warning, you're effectively already dead.
not really they will pick up the multiple layers moving against one another way way way before failure therefore you can calibrate how much tolerance before a warning is triggered
More than likely it had to do with the 3 component design of the craft. Carbon-fibre, Titanium, and the window (I think acylric... probably wrong). They also descended way, way too fast, further stressing the components.
@@louisburland5346 The Engineer who was allegedly fired for raising concerns about the sub and not signing off on it said in a court filing, “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail-often milliseconds before an implosion-and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.”. Regardless of whether they had any warning at all, the fact that the sub imploded should be evidence that if it did give any warning they didn't have enough time to do anything about it.
Acoustic monitoring is standard for composites. Micro-fracturing in a laminate will always occur, but it's determining when an amount of critical microcracking has occurred. Composite failure is far more complex than that of a standard metallic or polymeric material and can't just be explained with one simple mechanism most of the time.
My Youngest recently graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. She passed on the university commencement but attended her engineering school's ceremony. In it, all the engineers were given a steel ring to wear on the pinkie of their dominant hand. It was made (at least in the past) from steel recovered from buildings that failed due to poor engineering practices. The message spoken to all graduates was: "Wear this ring to remind yourself throughout your career that what you do matters. If you f*&k it up, there is a good chance someone will die."
Canadian. American or? I know Canadian P.Eng.'s get that ring. It goes on your dominant hand to pass over all your work. On your little finger to humble you.
@@eh42 that's the one! Yeah, her dean stated in the beginning of the ceremony that the practice started in Canada and soon came down to the US. I like the idea.
Steel rings are dangerous, I'd recommend not googling degloving for the details. Seems a odd choice to gift something that is a risk for health and safety.
Stockton Rush spent more effort in avoiding regulations than he did making sure his craft was safe. He will be remembered all right, the topic in many engineering safety courses for years to come!
"Regulations are written in blood" is a phrase that the CEO did not seem to heed. The bitter irony of this is that the Titanic itself (the very ship they wanted to see) caused many, many deaths, spurring safety regulation changes that were very much written with the blood of those who died.
The Titanic didn't skirt any regulations. Everything they did was in line with common practice in 1912. Lifeboats were not for saving all the passengers and were made for tendering. The design was well within the guidelines of the time. The regulations changed after the disaster but to say that the crew was overly arrogant is not correct.
@@timothybogle1461 I never said the Titanic crew were arrogant, nor did I say they skipped regulations. I only said that the deaths on the Titanic spurred new regulations ...and only after those death occurred. Hence, those regulations were indeed written in blood.
it blows my mind that this is still considered an accident. this was entirely foreseen, predicted, and warned of. at best, it's negligence. at worst, it's murder.
To those complaining about the "lateness" of this video: this is what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not get to be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you do get to be the best. This is without question the best analysis of this accident on RUclips.
Here's the problem: All the monday morning "experts" are coming out after the fact. Show me ONE video where someone was ringing the alarm bells BEFORE the accident.
@@larrybud the people who knew about it rang alarm bells. I don't see why people should have known about this company before they killed 4 passengers along with their own CEO.
4:32 I've recently learned about *Survivorship bias* which is a logical error of focusing on successes but not failures. They think most errors are operational completely overlooking that mechanical errors weren't even being given the chance to happen since they were already filtered out because of existing certification standards.
That chat about raising concerns (and this whole ordeal) has reminded me of something one of my old lecturers told me back in my undergrad days. It was near the end of a lecture in a course on Thermodynamics and Structure of Matter. After discussing a couple of engineering disasters, Primarily the DeHavilland Comet, he told us something along the lines of "during the course of your careers as Physicists you will be pressured by powerful actors both political and from the private sector to made decisions that are counter to scientific rigour. I hope you make the right decisions because if you act and something disastrous happens the people issuing the orders will not be held to account but you will. Not just by any formal investigation but by yourself as well as by others in your field. I hope when these events arise you make the right choice because you will have to live with the consequences and more importantly others might not."
When Oceangate mentioned most errors are due to operators, my mind immediately went to the survivorship bias example of WW2 planes coming back, and engineers wanting to add reinforcement to the areas where planes were showing damage coming back, before realizing the reason the other planes weren't coming back were because they were getting shot in areas the survivors weren't.
Or like when the introduction of steel helmets lead to a sharp rise in head injuries... Top officials thought that soldiers became more careless. (Spoiler: People who would habe previously died, now were "just" badly injured.)
@@PfropfNo1 That wasn't Oceangate's conclusion. Oceangate stated a fact, that most deadly errors are due to operators, and their conclusion was that it would be safe. We know that Oceangate came to that conclusion because they let people into the submersible 12,500 feet below the surface. Their own CEO, mind you.
Exactly the same here, the bomber planes that didn't return. "Oh the only failures of this kind of thing are user error, so we'll skip the testing" but all the vehicles that wouldn't have passed the test would end the same way, they were just smart enough to not send them out.
I second this. Brian has the RUclips skills and the reach to really do justice to a lot of engineering case studies, and it would definitely help get them in front of more people
In many cases it is the management ignoring warnings from engineers that is the problem. The Titanic itself is an example of this. Engineers designed the bulk heads going up further, owners had them reduced to provide wide open decks. Were it not for that change it would have probably stayed afloat long enough for help to arrive.
A related thought: I can't get over how much the very name "Stockton Rush" sounds like what you'd name a corrupt corporate executive in a video game or a cartoon. He really is a real life Cave Johnson.
To be fair, "move fast and break things" was a software engineering motto, formulated at a non-critical social media company, that was co-opted by other engineers, sometimes working in critical software or hardware applications. It's a perfectly adequate way of doing low-risk engineering. It's not how you would engineer self-driving cars, or, I don't know, maybe a commercial submarine.
The comparison to SpaceX is interesting. SpaceX performed hundreds of flights of Falcon 9 before they put a human on the thing. They also had to go through an extensive human rating programme, to ensure it was as safe as could be reasonably expected of a vehicle filled with hundreds of tonnes of highly reactive propellant being shot into space. OceanGate performed a few test dives and, as Brian states, minimal checks by independent individuals. It was also operating in an environment that is arguably more challenging than space. This needs to be a wakeup call that "move fast and break things" is not a suitable design model when failure of the object could lead to the loss of human lives.
Fast iteration works best on any project when failures are low-impact. You absolutely do not apply that with avionics controls or medical equipment, for example. Fast failures are great when you learn fast but don't hurt anyone. Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack software engineer), Tesla/SpaceX (Elon Musk), and many others were perfectly willing to risk equipment to learn but not lives. That's the right approach.
@@franzfanz Falcon was classed for human spaceflight before humans flew on it. The move fast and break stuff applies to the development testing phase, to discover the unknown unknowns and progress the design faster by increasing the understanding of the materials and systems. Destructive testing is a legitimate engineering tool. What OceanGate did was essentially put their development test vehicle into production without understanding the risks.
@@MushookieManPeople have died from autonomous vehicles, but no one has died from Tesla's Full Self Driving, yet. Most news reports confuse autopilot with FSD.
It's savage, yet severely needed. Since we live in the 'faster, cheaper' age. We need more public, easily consumable materials on cautionary tales like this.
As an engineer, I can tell you that stupidity, or perhaps incompetence, is fairly prevalent in this field. There is too much "gung-ho" attitude, and not enough logic and just simple paying attention. I feel quite uncomfortable hearing my colleagues say things like "we will fix this in rev. 2."
There is a reason why when I was taking intro to engineering we started with going through catastrophic failures. We were taught "if something were to happen and it were in the papers, would you be spoken of negatively or positively?" If an engineer fails people (plural) can die. There are so many stories ranging from a quick overlook of something (like the Missouri City TV Antenna Tower Collapse or Hyatt Regency walkway collapse) to systematic failures that cause deaths and many of these stories are fascinating in its own right... regulations and such are written in blood. Sure they might hamper innovation, but to ignore them and say your "in-house" tests of saying "yup the sub dove once" is enough is gross negligence. SpaceX plays Kerbal Space Program with unmanned rockets, this company did the same with manned subs. There's a difference. Make no mistake, this case will be taught about in intro to engineering courses once an indepth investigation is finished.
That bit about SpaceX struck me. Oceangate tried to play that they were "moving fast and breaking stuff", but no where in that process described did they break things until a human was already in the driver's seat.
@@Theroha Indeed, say what you will about the failures of the starship, at least space x is doing those flights unmanned because they KNOW it can, and very likely will for a few more flights result in catastrophic failures.
Yes. SpaceX does a "hardware rich" development kind of thing. But they doesn't (as far as we know) neglect safety. The things they are breaking are just hardware: expected to fail, expected to be destroyed. There's a big difference there.
@@sysbofhdoesn't neglect safety? Which is why there were soot and dirt landing on other people's property many miles away, a failure of the self destruct sequence, and massive destruction of their facility, due to something VERY predictable? Musk was literally playing with people's lives. He was lucky nothing happened
To paraphrase the spanish youtuber "Tri line" who briefly spoke about the incident "There's the reason nobody felt bad about the incident, the CEO was a millionare who called himself an innovator after making things cheaper, sacrificing safety in the process, in that case, go ahead, you can also jump off a plane using a blanket as a parachute and call yourself an innovator, nobody will feel anything"
I feel bad for the passengers who were not engineers and who didn't know the problem. The "they're rich who cares" idea is really immature and childish
@@Stettafire naw you don’t get that rich without screwing a bunch of people over and general human misery. They thought the laws of God and man did not apply to them, and while the laws of man might not, the laws of God (and by god I mean Physics) absolutely do.
I'm an automotive engineer and my company is trying to adopt the "Move fast and break stuff" mentality. It means requirements no longer get written until us testing engineers demand them for us to write our tests (and sometimes not even then) and that flaws can't be removed without undoing other work that's already been done on top of them. Instead those flaws get bought off by upper management even when they're incredibly noticeable for customers. The motto we have for the employees is "take two (minutes) for safety" which I find to be the opposite since it's essentially asking us to take extra time to make sure a situation is safe to proceed with. Other phrases that are opposite are "haste makes waste", "measure twice, cut once" and many more similar sayings that have been around for generations because _anyone with half a brain cell can tell you that rushing through something results in more safety issues_ ...I just remembered I have an external ethics survey I was sent that I should fill out
There is one specific phrase I remember that can pretty much be boiled down to for every company: "Your regulations are *written in blood."* People should do well to heed that more often, IMO.
While i was studying engineering all our professors had zero mistake policy, it could be a simple math mistake or even typo. It didn't matter we would get zero points regardless. We all were crying and criticizing it but as we learned more we realized they were trying to teach us engineers can not do mistakes. So we learned to check our mistakes again and again, verify everything several times. I don't know if im cruel but i can't feel sorry for them, an engineer was fired for questioning them and he even sued them which was a huge red flag. They ignored it because of their narcissism and thought ''everything was fine''. I hope in future wealthy CEOs etc would listen to engineers more...
I love his comment: "As Hanlon's Razor goes “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” on why Oceangate's CEO piloted the craft himself.
Don't forget Shithead Rush also sued the man he put in charge of his company's safety when that guy raised an issue with the vehicles safety. So yea, Rush WAS STUPID, but he was ALSO MALICIOUS!
I do not think it was stupidity. I think he took risks like flying experimetal aeroplanes as he loved doing it. I think he did what he most loved and he knew he would not have to explain implosion to the mother of his son or the the families of his clients as he was onboard.
I'm not a highly qualified engineer, but I do actually hold a qualification in engineering. During that engineering course, I was required to study an "advanced or space age" material, on two occasions. I elected to study fiber composites (kevlar and carbon fiber), and titanium, as both were relevant to my interest in motorsports engineering, and in particular, aerodynamic device design and manufacture (titanium brackets are commonly used in creating mounting points for carbon fiber aero elements such as wings). When I heard "submersible" "carbon fiber" and "lost contact" in the same sentence, for me, the conclusion was foregone. I knew, as you also attested to in this video, that fiber composites are strong in tension, not compression. It did not take much thought at all to realize that the failure was likely as instantaneous as their deaths, and, due to the common failure modes of fiber composites, destruction was most likely near-total due to the immense forces involved. I also understood from my education that fiber composites suffer terribly from inconsistency, even in ideal conditions for their manufacture. While I was studying engineering, my father worked in motorsports, and I was regularly brought "dead" samples of carbon fiber that had failed (for a number of reasons. The number of samples that never made it to the car, simply because they had failed in the manufacturing process - the bagging and curing method having been used - was not insignificant, and this was with people who worked with the material regularly. Parts where safety was absolutely paramount (such as the driver safety cell) were never trusted to bagging and curing, an autoclave was mandatory. And even in the autoclave, manufacturing defects occurred that resulted in having to re-lay and impregnate an entirely new safety cell. This is the first video I've watched in which I've learned that not only did they use an unsuitable material for this application (carbon fiber), but they did not autoclave their carbon fiber. While using carbon fiber in this application is damning enough in its own right, bagged and cured, to my mind, goes above and beyond gross negligence. There is no room at all for hubris in engineering, and I applaud Lockridge for taking a stand, rather than allowing himself to become immersed in what seems to have been a culture of risk and lack of responsibility. I've long believed that, to be an engineer, one has to place ethics above all else, because there are scant few other professions in which the lives of thousands rely on just one person.
Bro, why didn’t you submit this to someplace more worthy like a forum or paper? Seems like you’re an intelligent one, Instead you just wrote all that to entertain a group of morons in the RUclips comments
To those who complain about this video being "late": here's what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you can be the best. This is without a doubt the best analysis of this accident on RUclips.
Absolutely. As an actual naval architect, this is easily the best video I’ve seen on the topic. This is really the only video I’ve seen that actually discusses the engineering behind this and the likely failure mode. And this is the only one that really drives home just how spectacularly stupid Stockton Rush was, and that this accident wasn’t a result of malice, but just a result of sheer stupidity.
I feel like anyone who says "screw quality, just get it live as fast as possible" on a video about OceanGate probably never had much chance of understanding the problem with OceanGate to begin with.
@@bmyra I completely disagree, I watched probably 40 videos on Titan and honestly this one was a real disappointment, it didn’t add anything I didn’t already know, and didn’t do a great job illustrating things either.
Thank you for saying this: "This is profiteering, not innovation" - I've been saying this since the accident unfolded, knowing what the CEO said about the risks and concerns but also how they treated warnings and people alerting them! Also thank you for this very informative video, you really spoke about things I hope many listens to regarding the era we live in at the moment with all this innovations which may or may not be too innovative but maybe just someone wanting to make money out of something which isn't even good to start with - innovation should be the main goal and focus of any project like this, not profit, cause if that's the main goal you know they will take shortcuts to cut the costs and gain as much of the money they can themselves.
The fact that you call it an accident is a larger indication of comprehension defenciencies located within the many folds, dips, trenches, and valleys situated in the grey matter that your skull protects.
I remember a short (I don't know who posted) but a college in Canada for engineers, once they graduate they get a ring that they have to wear forever cause that ring reminds them that what they built and what they make their job can put people in danger if they are not careful.
i love how the usual "insane engineering" video title was replaced with "questionable engineering" and i would've love it if this was turned into a series, like we had too many videos about good engineering lets shake things up a bit and take a look at the even-more questionable engineering of certain things.
You mean like Fukushima engineering, where a country who invented the word tsunami put a nuclear power plant ocean side, great idea! Even better let's put the back up systems in the basement! Bet the guy got a big bonus for that.
On Wikipedia's page on the 1963 Thresher sub disaster, an authority is quoted as saying: - I think it is important that we re-evaluate our present practices where, in the desire to make advancements, we may have forsaken the fundamentals of good engineering.
As a materials engineer, he got very concerned about the materials. As an electronics engineer, I freaked when I found out about the wireless gamepad and Bluetooth communications system. Those communication protocols and programming standards are totally unfit for critical to life systems.
Agreed what if you lose connection at a critical point! We could have steered out of the mess if we had been able to turn the wheel but the controllers battery died!😮 Many parts of this screamed stupid b4 you ever got to the hull design!
I wonder what backups were in place. There was one dive where one of the drive motors was plugged in backward and they reprogrammed their controls at the bottom of the ocean. (The fact a critical control was untested until at the ocean floor is aweful, but a different topic) This tells me that there's a software layer between the controller and the switching hardware, so whatever was running the control software could probably be used as a backup, but a hardware backup is of course the gold standard.
this will go into engineering ethics courses all engineers take during their first year of college. There were Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and now Oceangate.
Just goes to show that big companies are above the law. If an individual was responsible for one person's death, he will be charged with involuntary manslaughter. If a big company is responsible for multiple deaths, they get slapped with a small fine. Nobody ever goes to jail.
I don't see it so much as an engineering failure as it seems engineers were telling Stockton Rush that his sub was flawed. It is definitely a greed issue
As an engineer myself, I found myself fuming mad the more I heard about the Oceangate debacle, to the point where my wife had to be like "you need to chill" lmao
Exact same conversation happened in this household as well. I was so angry seeing people pie this off as exploratory or innovative. It was none of that, it was criminal stupidity
I told my wife "this is going to be an engineering case study soon" because I remember studying similar cases where the experts were ignored before tragedy struck (the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in particular)
I get similar fumes while watching scammer payback videos after seeing the audacity of the scammers. This video also explains something similar so I feel u mate.
Um, tell the wife that innocent people died because of Stockton Rush's refusal to listen to his own designers. One was even fired for telling him it wouldn't work!
I saw an explanation in other video of a Doctor, explaining this: both image and pain signals travels slower to the brain than the fact itself. Which means that one milisecond they´re alive, the next they´re dead. No feeling, no pain, no image, because the brain just didn´t have time enough to receive the signals and process them properly. Here´s the link, I searched for this specific issue because I had the same thought, what a horrifying last minutes on this earth... but, luckily (sort of speack) they felt nothing. ruclips.net/video/CfUcNPr2T8A/видео.html I hope it relieves you as it relieved me ;)
They didn't have time to really hear anything, carbon fiber doesnt bend, it shatters! At those pressures they would have been instantly imploded (into a thousand pieces) instantly, faster than a fraction of a second...
@@Vaninasanta they didn't feel anything, but they would've heard all sorts of horrific sounds before the actual sub imploded. Especially if as in the video he says the material starts peeling from the inside first.
From the (unvalidated) transcript of the voyage, there was a crackling noise for about 20 minutes before communication was lost. That alone would have made me poop my pants.
The fact that so many warnings were ignored is truly shocking, as an engineer in training I’m disgusted to hear that an employee who raised concerns was fired considering the fact that during my time in this industry I have been taught to speak up if I think something is wrong even if it isn’t, this project that ocean gate undertook was nothing short of greed and stupidity and as the video perfectly put it “This is not innovation; it’s profiteering” a truly sad situation that could have easily been avoided but has now persisted past the end point into something that unfortunately cannot be undone.
In Electrical Engineering we were warned that ethical questions and challenges would come our way. They were 100% correct. Usually the challenges were manufactured by, you guessed it, leadership CEOs etc.
Everything a CEO asks should be prefaced by "If feasible...". If it isn't currently feasible, either abandon it, or invest in working towards making it feasible.
Even worse than the engineering was the hubris of Oceangate. They just tuned out everyone that said “that’s probably a bad idea.” Things rarely go right when people refuse to listen to others.
My training is in materials engineering, and reading through the (lack of) due diligence just had me clutching my hair and going "no no no no no" over and over again. I did more testing in my undergrad labs than they did. My stakes were as high as trying to get an A, but they had actual lives on the line. My final response on this matter ended up being, "what did you think was going to happen!?"
Once I got to the part about it barely being tested, I was already thinking the guy had "Haha, Sub make money go brrr." in his mind far too much. I only learned some engineering stuff in highschool due to the CAS and AP programs they had, but even someone with no training at all should be able to see the red flags in a lot of this.
I took physics in high school, nowhere as advanced as engineering training or having a degree. But when I first heard about the use of carbon fibre, my first thought was literally, "I don't think that it can actually handle the pressure of being so deep"... it's sad that the people who paid to go on this vessel didn't notice the red flags and they are paying the price of what is honestly willful ignorance...
When I heard about this case, I wasn't surprised but that they would have the gall to not even autoclave the vessel during curing and not fatigue test it at all is just insane. And aside from a serious lack of redundancies that were also painfully glaring.
That kind of nonsense sounds like something a "50 year old white guy" would say, that Rush didn't want on his team. Where's the "inspiration" from younger, fresh out of school would bring to the table? Oh right, imploded on the ocean floor.
As someone who works for Instron making dynamic testing systems it was good to see the emphasis on fatigue testing of composites and to highlight the complexities.
Any links or resources for composite fatigue testing methods? Just curious, We never got down that road when I took material science. I know "acoustic monitoring" probably isn't the gold standard.
There’s a lot of blatant misinformation online about this, especially on TikTok. I was privy to a conversation between friends sharing a video that, frankly, peddled outright lies about the situation to make it sound *spoooookyyy*. I explained, to the best of my recollection, your explanations here and was able to demonstrate just how false the content was. Cited my sources too! They were pretty receptive thankfully, and ended up following my point; the ACTUAL story is far more spooky and interesting than any lies peddled by faux-content creators on social media. I’m paraphrasing a lot here, it’s not like I was some nerdy hero - these are people I know relatively well and had their suspicions of the content already. I appreciate what you do, please keep it up!
James Cameron's Deep Sea Challenger was designed with the pressurized hull being separated from the rest of the vessel because at extreme depths the vessel would actually compress to about 2 inches smaller from it's default size all around, proving that the human portion of the sub must be built wisely, and patiently
I bet it compressed more than 2" The Trieste compressed around 5" and that was made from high nickel steel. The end caps were HAND GLUED together out in the open. No vacuum, just a plastic spatula smearing the glue together. I think this is where the failure began, the end caps. Made from dis-similar materials that compress different amounts. It was a miracle it made it more than once.
@@TheBandit7613 I suspect that temperature related stresses played a part too. In the open warehouse that they did the gluing, I doubt they held the temperature completely constant until the cure was complete. Temperature changes and different expansion rates could have lead to a joint that was weaker than the calculations said it was.
In the Deep Sea Challenger doco they also mentioned that they limited the amount of deep sea dives before doing the main dive as each dive increases the risk of catastrophic failure. To me it sounds like there is no sub that can do extreme deep dives on repeat, they get rated to be able to do x and after that they need to build a new one. Just my understanding, I have no qualifications in this field, just what I understood from the doco.
I’m not an engineer but I find the psychology behind this fascinating, the amount of things that would have to line up for this to happen. Not just the psychology of rush either but politics, the US has very bad employment laws, or rather laws that mostly favour the employer, you can be sacked because they just don’t like you for example, whereas in Europe, you can’t do that, and you certainly can’t sack someone for raising safety concerns, Which means that if those employment laws were different or the location was then he would have either been forced to confront those issues or have been taken to court and have them confronted for him.
Even Elon is on record saying that for all the destructive testing they do, their crewed vessels absolutely cannot be allowed to fail under any circumstances and stressed the importance of prolonged testing and certification to ensure the safety and reliability of the vehicle before taking a single passenger. I’m not sure that citing SpaceX by name is the shining endorsement that OceanGate thought it was.
@@ppsarrakis Elon is just a frustrating public figure. He did some cool stuff, made a ton of money for it and then decided that becoming a professional right wing troll was such a good career move that it was worth throwing a decent chunk of his fortune into the trash just to give himself the biggest platform money can buy.
Yeah. That's the thing about Elon. He used to be cool. He did great things in the past. He's now a bloated egotistic and narcisistic billionare that thinks he's right on everything and to be fair there isn't much we can do about it. Even so, even on all the great advancements he allowed to happen he build his image on lies and pivilege. That's the whole thing with him. He was an asshole, did great things for a while and went back to being an asshole. When you defend Elon you must remember you are defending him NOW not before. I don't think anyone would argue that SpaceX and Tesla had made great things. Besides, at the end of the day is not like he designs or manufactures all of the great things. Remember that a CEO only gives orders. They can be, and often are, just idiots with a ton of money that take all of the credit.
Its truly ironic that it was the Titanic they were visiting, since it's sinking was what sparked the growth and importance of classification societies in the maritime industry to prevent maritime accidents due to subpar construction standards, methods and materials
Yeah but the Titanic sank because of hubris, not dangerous design. Had they been paying attention and missed that iceberg it wouldn't even been remembered.
@@AverageAlienAgreed. The thing that caused it to sink was blunt trauma caused by an iceberg, and that is more user error than a design flaw. Even if you could prevent the impact from breaching the hull, the impact force would have likely caused even more issues. You can engineer a vest to stop a bullet, but that force will still be transferred regardless.
Watching them apply the glue by hand and then just drop the titanium ring on was kind blowing to me, I make more effort to keep projects clean in my own garage.
@@lukas3606 for carbon fiber, its a bunch of carbon fiber strands essentially glued/laminated together. If there are gaps or air bubbles in it, it greatly decreases strength and makes it much more vulnerable, from what I know.
What's truly insane is that the 2024 NTSB inquest found that the accoustic monitoring system DID WORK, and found a major strain/fault incident in one of Titan's final dives... But, true to form, Stockton Rush just ignored it.
The "crackling sound at aft" from the comms logs still haunts me after reading it. I can't imagine how scary hearing noises when you're so far under water. I'm guessing those sounds could have been the material de-laminating...
@@Man_fay_the_Bru Rush was warned by several experts, one even directly warning him in no uncertain terms that his actions will someday cost people their lives... He found a single loophole in the law where he could let his narcissistic tendencies go unchecked in international waters and it didn't take long for it to kill.
Since the Titan incident (I won't call it accident) I've watched a number of the explainations as to what happened. Thank you Brian for doing your usual exceptional work as this is the best, most comprehensive video I've seen. Your skill in explaining very complex engineering ideas in simple to understand terms that allow us who understand basics of engineering, but not the formal education, to better comprehend and then share with our friends and family (specifically my children) what happened and why. I've been a long time Nebula and Curioustiy Stream member and use Real Engineering as a tool to help better understand and engage with my family so many of the topics you've covered over the years. Thank you.
When I was learning to investigate collisions in college, the instructor always said accidents can't be avoided, most collisions can. I do much prefer your use of incident instead of accident since this could have been avoided.
@@Steamrunnert's not about what could have been. Catastrophic damage and/or injured people = accident. In this case, dead people. Either your instructor misspoke or you‘ve missheard.
I remember seeing a video of the CEO stating “engineers tell you not to mix titanium and carbon fibre - guess what? I still did it.” I went totally ballistic! This guy played with people’s lives. He probably never read the famous appendix F (for Feynman) of the Challenger catastrophe analysis: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Stockton Rush really thought he was Cave Johnson "The bean counters told me I couldn't fire a man just for being in a wheelchair. Did it anyway, ramps are expensive." "They say great science is built on the shoulders of giants. Not here. At Aperture, we do all our science from scratch. No hand holding." "Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT. Why is so much of our science dangerous? Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you on the butt on the way out, because you are fired."
an engineering studies in the Netherlands I did, included Morals and Ethics as a subject, where we were taught to choose to be a whistleblower in cases where people would feel they are part of a project where they are being asked or steered to neglect safety over success. The Challenger space shuttle and the issue with the O-rings was used as one of the examples in one of these classes. I am sure they will now also have added Oceangate Titan as one of the example cases.
Something I saw pointed out in another analysis of this was that the carbon fiber wasn't weaved as most people are used to seeing with the material, but wrapped essentially like a spool of thread. The engineering of this thing is oddly fascinating in a 'what is even going on here' way.
Yes, I saw that somewhere too. Apparently the fibre was 'unidirectional', which made no sense at all, other than the fact that the whole thing was cf, which made no sense at all either. Probably cheaper to make.
This isn't unusual, almost all composite pressure vessels are filament-wound. It's just not what most people imagine when they think about carbon fiber.
I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Any way you do it, the carbon fibers are worthless in compression. Would be interested in hearing a materials engineer's opinion on this. I have an interesting question: would they have been better off if they made the hull out of solid epoxy and no carbon fiber at all? Not that it is a good idea (probably very dumb) but what exactly is the purpose of carbon fibers in this application where the vessel experiences ONLY compressive loads and nearly no tensile loads?! What does is add? It may actually make things worst by creating layers and opportunity of delaminating the epoxy layers after repeated pressure and temp cycles.
@@bna441 that's a really good question, and I wondered exactly the same thing myself. Making an all epoxy cylinder, and then testing it to destruction, would provide a very valuable 'starting point', to find out exactly how much strength the cf actually adds, and I'm guessing not a huge amount, in stark contrast to where it's used properly, where it produces a material which is both stronger and lighter than steel. It's frightening to think that people were diving to 3800m in a vessel essentially made of plastic, and not even shaped as a sphere ...
@@richardconway6425 You hit the nail on the head. That's why deep submersibles aren't made from CF. A CF tube with titanium end caps essentially glued on... Anyone who even remotely knows something about composites and their manufacturing knew this thing imploded.
@@appa609 An more specifically Jurassic World were the owner of the park piloted his own helicopter to chases down i dinosaur which ended disastrously for him and everyone in the park.
A similar story can be found in the documents of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. Management rationalized the use of sealant beyond its tested usable temperature, and it leaked, killing seven crew.
Iirc, the head of safety even refused to sign off on the launch due to concerns but they overrode him and launched anyway. During a press conference shortly after the incident the then current head of NASA (iirc) and PR folks tried to lie about the cause of failure and one of the engineers from a 3rd party company that worked on the rocket spoke up and told the truth, he was fired then after a court case given his job back with extra pay and benefits. I think he eventually became the head of the company (I'm fuzzy on the details, it's been a while since I read/watched the relevant articles/videos).
The same for Discovery accident. They reject the final walk before the Shuttle returned to Earth, so no one found that a large hole was formed on the hull of the shuttle. And even later NASA gaslight everyone and raised the boycott campaign against investigators who said that the accident caused by the foam on the fuel tank contacted and destroyed the heatshield. Crazier, even after be confirmed by the real test that the foam indeed damaged the heatshield and create a hole large enough for plasma to leak to the fuel tank, NASA still tried to deny they are the one who killed every Astronauts on Discovery mission by trying to convinced everyone the company produced that foam trying to sabotage the Space Shuttle program by INTENDED to make the foam puncture the shuttle during separation, many years later the microscopic revision concluded that the flaws are nature of the foam, thus redeemed the company and up till then NASA officially apologize for all of the faults. But its too late, that disaster signaled the end of Space Shuttle program because no one in NASA found a way to fix that. Move cargo and Astronauts to ISS have to rely on super expensive Russia rockets (and they increased 150% of the price for US right after SS program terminated) up until Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon be approved.
@@grn1Good on the guy for stepping up and basically saying "Yeah, no. NASA and its PR croneys are trying to talk out their asses, and hide the truth. Here's the truth:"
It pains me when I hear "We don't have the tools to test it so we don't have to" This is exactly when they should have stopped using this composite hull.
That's when you have to develop a test that can be done without putting lives in danger. Even just wrapping the sub in a steel cable net and filling the inside with cameras and microphones before lowering it down to your test depth or at least service depth would be better than just shrugging it off and putting people on board anyway.
The idea that the sub didn't need testing because accidents are caused by operators reminded me of the story of survivorship bias in WW2 bombers. The planes showed most bullet holes on the wings, so that's exactly where you don't want to put armour. The planes that got hit in the engines and the cockpit didn't come back to be involved in the study.
@@Ma_Zhongying Not just subs, but also ships... The Mk14 failed because it never had any field testing pre-intro to the Navy, with this being due to cost-cutting & bureaucracy.
I love that you call out Stockton Rush as a narcissist. As I learned of all the red flags and outright written warnings he ignored, I immediately came to the conclusion that he was a narcissist who simply thought he was smarter than every submersible engineer out there. It’s sad that his delusions got so many people killed, including himself.
This reminds me of the story of Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned NASA and his company (Morton Thiokol) that Challenger was going to explode. He was sadly ignored because of the huge public interest in the mission, given the fact that Christa McAuliffe was on board.
@Praisethesunson as someone who studied Public Relations, this is often how PR is treated by companies. They don't see us as a tool to spread good, but shut down the bad. Personally, that kind of PR is antithetical to my personal practice (although I'm not an official PR rep, I work in the comms industry). Regardless of which field/industry, we should never sacrifice our morals for money
Not forgetting the saga of Boeing's 737 Max where safety concerns raised by engineers and test pilots were minimised and swept under the rug by senior management.
I am not trained in composites at all, but the second that i heard the first hand account of people who had been in the submarine saying that you could hear popping and banging noises as you went down and as you went up i knew exactly the failure mode, those sounds were without a doubt the layers delaminating from eachother
10:57 the acoustic monitoring system in Titan was like a car alarm that alert you right when the car flipped so that the passengers can prepare for the upcoming crash.
Exactly! Because once a sub begins to have a structural failure like the tiniest fracture the whole thing can just implode within a split second. Like squeezing an empty soda can.
An acoustic emission system is well suited for predictive maintenance, especially in carbon fibre materials. CFRP emits plenty of ultrasound signals long before its failure. It is a rather complicated structural health monitoring system though and the way of interpreting the data is the most important part. It's used a lot on CFRP fuel tanks for rockets, which, to be fair, are loaded under tension and not compression. This video is a bit dismissive about acoustic emission testing in general, although I doubt they had experts to interpret the signals properly, which renders it pretty useless.
This line in their document justifying the decision not to test the vehicle pissed me off: "The vast majority of marine accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure" Yeah... maybe because THEY TEST THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY WONT FAIL MECHANICALLY. I know you addressed this exact point in the video, i just needed to vent
I had the same reaction after seeing the construction. Four plus decades in aerospace composites design and prototyping, my first thought was WTF. My second was with the TEC's of carbon fiber, epoxy and titanium. Given both the temp and pressure differentials, it seemed insane to combine these materials in they method they did.
I thought the same thoughts! I was of the opinion that the transition between the titanium rings and the carbon fibre shell was the weak point due to the dissimilar physical properties of the rings and shell. Reading this article showed that the end s of the shell also provided ingress point for the sea water to initiate delamination of the carbon fibre lay-ups. What I find really inexcusable was the lack of investigation into the cracking sounds during previous dives. To me at least that would indicate carbon fibre failure which is a cumulative failure ultimately leading to catastrophic failure. Is there a record of the locations where this cracking sound originated in he vessel?
As a technically proficient layperson, my original thought was the C.F. center, and the Titanium endcaps would expand/contract at two different rates as the temps changed upon descent.
@@BasementEngineer Apparently the CEO expressly forbid any maintenance testing because it would potentially mean an official report showing a flaw with his design.
This incident is the reason professional engineers need to be so methodical, and is an example of the type of "she'll be right" shit we need to deal with from people that think they know better. Great video.
Engineers were not the problem, capitalism is the issue, it put stupid, spoiled men that have power because of inheritance in power and they can ignore what qualified engineers have said. This company fired and sued the guy that warned that this might happen. Tesla is doing the same mistakes then this company and everyone is pretending it is all good, elon musk's rocket threw tons of garbage over enviromentally protected area and the real engineering keeps pretending it is alright.
I may not be a materials engineer, but as a mechanical engineer I was immediately concerned about that composite construction. I knew the compressive strength of composite isn't exactly incredible, and that if this hasn't been done before there's probably a good reason since composite is lightweight and inexpensive. This gives the technical knowledge that confirms those suspicions. Also, one physical test is worth more than a thousand simulations. Simulations are great for cutting down on physical testing by identifying simple failure modes before you ever begin construction, but you need physical testing for more complex failure modes.
Your paper was spot on. My buddy at work did a PhD at a time on detecting destruction in the materials using ultrasound and he stated numerous times, that standard means do not work for composite materials, so they dissected aircraft hardware of different materials and tested each piece individually. Once I’ve heard that it was mostly titanium and carbon, the jigsaw puzzle was in place
When I was in the Navy, one of our instructors was asked, with the substantial benefits given to submariners, why he didn't join the submarine service. He answered: "there is a natural law that says that what goes up must come down: there is no law that says that what goes down has to come back up."
So basically, he was a *ussy. How many US Navy submarines have sunk in the last 50 years? With that reasoning he should have joined the Army instead and stayed on earth.
My friend you inspire the current generation of engineers too. I made my way here from Legal Eagle and kinda surprised I hadn't seen your channel before! I'm a disabled civil/enviro engineer and I love seeing people make this type of content. You do a great service, thank you!
My university dissertation was on how different projectile shapes and speeds effect carbon fibre at high velocity impacts. I did tonnes of research for my literature review on how CF reacts under pressure and impacts. When I heard the body of the vessel was made from CF I knew immediately what the failure was. CF isn’t a magic light weight material that’s just “better” than metal counterparts. At best it’s an alternative with different downsides.
I remember when I was a kid and just learned about carbon fiber and how amazing it is. I thought it was indestructible compared to "lesser" materials, and then I got my hands on a carbon fiber badminton racket... I mean, it didn't break and still hasn't, but I could definitely snap it in half with some force. If little baby 12 year old me can figure that out, there's no excuse for anyone trying to actually build things with it.
As someone who has never had a day of engineering education, I surprised myself by actually understanding this video. All the credit goes to how skilled you are at explaining these high-level concepts in an understandable way. Thank you! :)
well now that one rich guy was trying to do what Stockton and ocean gate were trying to do with deep ocean exploration now knows that the experts telling him he was going to die and kill people if he went for it he is likely now looking at this and thinking thank god I listened to the warnings
They happen because of operator errors, because we're testing machines before using them, we're testing people before using them as well, but machines are more reliable than humans are. Given that you TEST machines. Hence the stats
@@Stratelier It's the equivalent of saying "most 747s crash because of user error, which means if I jump off this cliff wearing two wing-shaped pieces of plywood I won't crash either."
I applaud your video which is roughly a year old now. Virtually all of my professional materials engineering experience was with metal pressure vessels and piping. Whilst not discounting anything you've said regarding delamination mode failures, I still have to wonder about the dissimilar joint between the titanium hemispheres and the composite cylinder. It looked from the videos that they were simply epoxied together. I have to wonder whether differential thermal expansion or differences in moduli of elasticity may have also been weak links, especially when cycled. All the best.
Jaw-dropping to find out that someone had actually heard cracking noises coming from the hull in its early testing. One assumes that Rush and his team of yes-men persuaded themselves (with no way of knowing) that it was just the structure 'settling down'.
Yeah, somewhere in the various interviews their reasoning was something like "it's just some weak fibres snapping. once the weak stuff is gone, it's fine."
Excellent point that innovation isn't simply doing and hoping, it's doing and knowing. It's about really finding out what the limits are rather than flying blind and hoping it'll be all right.
I can't remember the full quote but Richard Feynman's comment at the space shuttle challenger hearings about how nature cannot be fooled comes to mind here.
Thank you for this video. I work in the space sector. Every single component of a spacecraft, every subsystem made up of those components, and finally the entire spacecraft, are tested rigorously. And I work with *uncrewed* spacecraft. The fact that they built a vessel with such hubris and put *people* in it baffles me.
Also in the space industry, and it is a bit surprising (but also not surprising) how much testing is done at EVERY step of the design and building process, even for unmanned craft like you said. And if things go even slightly off (not even outright bad), then at a bare minimum, there is days of deliberation and analysis to see if the outcome was acceptable, or if a fix/re-design, followed by more testing is required.
"Moving fast and breaking stuff" means you have to break stuff, which is precisely what they didn't. It's a bit weird to blame that one on SpaceX, when what they are doing is blowing up rockets until they know they are save. If Oceangate worked like SpaceX, they would have built a few hundred subs before putting people on it, while also building a very safe emergency procedure...
Can't believe it's been more than a year since this happened and even funnier that some folks on the internet still make jokes about this cluster-f*ck of an incident.
I agree, but I suspect his legal team will compare them to traffic accidents. Indeed, high-speed many-laned roads with pedestrian crossings have projected annual casualties too. Funnily enough those were originally viewed as negligent street design or vehicle operator regulation, but auto lobbying (much like with jaywalking) convinced people to think of them as accidents - acts of god, legally. We're unfortunately quite deep into "you can't let a few deaths hold back progress!" mentality, at least a century. If not two, given all the boiler explosions in buildings and railways in the 19th century.
@@kaitlyn__L You should check the New Yorker article on this disaster. They did all kinds of crazy legal things, like classifying their passengers as workers.
Yup. There were no "passengers" onboard. They were "mission specialists". Also the waiver included the phrases "injury or death" and "experimental vessel"
Let this sink in. The official page of Oceangate Titan Submersibles stated that "Titan’s unique ability to carry five people allows for multiple Mission Specialists, scientists and content experts to share a *_once-in-a-lifetime experience_* diving in the deep ocean."
"Move fast and break things" works when you're using un-manned ships. SpaceX blew up many rockets, but all the ones with people on them have stayed assembled.
I remember someone commenting that the Starship being used the transport passengers around earth is never going to happen because it will be too easy for people to die. But if you build 100 ships and transport goods for 10 years with each ship doing a flight every week you would have 52,000 test flights. I can easily see terrestrial human transportation being validated by SpaceX.
Moreover, SpaceX's version of "move fast and break things" is part of a relentless cycle of design iteration - build, test (sometimes to failure), improve, repeat. It couldn't be more different from OceanGate, who didn't get as far as the "test" part, much less improving and iterating the design.
And most importantly, SpaceX work very closely with NASA and FAA, now they even have Gwynne Shotwell, a former Chief Engineer in NASA as the president and COO of SpaceX. Now with Shotwell in charge, i don't see any safety oversight can ever occur
To be fair to the game controller used as a steering device, there's a reason why it's a more widespread practice than you'd think. They are intuitive to use, easy to program to do whatever function they are used for, cheap to order in bulk and are standardized to be very easily replaceable, which makes them perfect for when you need to Steer a thing but don't need to design a separate mechanism for it.
An off brand Chinese Bluetooth controller. He saved maybe $30 on not getting a real Japanese Bluetooth controller like the military use. A sub having zero backup systems is also insane, but there's a long list of insanity in this story.
As an Industrial Chemical Engineer, my mind immediately jumped to my materials classes I had in college when I heard about the carbon fiber composite used as the material of the hull, and it took me a few seconds of thinking to realize that a sudden catastrophic implosion occurred, and they'd passed the moment contact was lost. And this is a take away that I will always remember from my safety classes, regulations are there because of two possible things: a) we didn't know better and now we do; or b) someone was dumb enough to decide that rules didn't apply to them (basically fck around and find out). This was a clear example of the latter.
Multiple people tried to talk to Rush, even the employee that was fired for raising concerns. But he was determined to get himself and his clients killed under the merciless weight of the ocean.
It wasn't that he didn't know; Rush actively ignored the advice he was given. Multiple times. And purposefully avoided hiring people who had lots of experience building this type of vessel. His ego and desire to cut corners killed four other people and himself.
I'm so happy you got to use your Masters thesis in this topic! Bet it was hard for you not to make this a ten-hour video though, discussing all the fine details of void propagation etc...
im not joking here as i am a boat builder of 4 decade and a marine mech. The younger college/uni levers even at masters level know knothing of composites. They are taught very basic level stuff especially the layup phase. Nowadays a computer tells them whats what they dont understand what they are looking at or how composites actually behave. I'll give you an example, We got a boat in that had been completely refurbished by a start-up company, then fell apart within 3yr. The owner then demanded his cash back and a long drawn out process happened where he had to force them to hand over the blueprints for the refurbishment, materials and all. They were ran by two postgraduates and had a workforce that read as a family&mates list. They were so bad at it they never knew the difference between a layering up resin (aka polyester or vinylester) and a bonding and layering resin (aka proper epoxy resin the amine type) so they had basically used the polyester resin on its own as a transom bonder and to oversize plug all the fitment holes so they could redrill them to accept the new fitting. They used a powder bound 400gm chop strand with a polyester resin not realising the powder bound was for proper epoxy. Then they made a total disaster of the transom from the re-design stage. The boat was originaly outshaft motor that was converted to an outboard transom by them and they didnt have a clue. Bet they could push a mouse about or a pen about and mumble a bunch of figures they got partially right on the subject. Also a vast amount of students now are activist types and you dont want to be in the sea with anything they have designed or made. Infact thats whats happened here.
@@bigduphusaj162I don't think engineering degrees are infested with the activist type. No offense but you're a bitter old dude if you think that of the entire younger generation of academics.
It should be noted that some of the critical failure modes are resin dominated not fiber dominated. E.g peel stresses at the edges of voids under compression loads. The resin itself at the peeling edge has a tension component. As the void propogates under this out of plane opening load the margin to catastrophic buckling diminishes. And low temp curing resin properties are poor. This is why 350F curing and higher is the norm in aircraft parts, for both prepreg and resin infusion. Note 787 a350 wing upper skins and stringers are in compression but millions of fasteners !!
I'm not an engineer, but from everything I've seen and read about this, it's hard to call this an accident. The CEO was warned multiple times that this was an accident waiting to happen. He didn't care.
If the CEO is alive right now he would be charged up the ass for ignoring and out right refusing too follow set maritime regulations and safety protocols, plus he would be charged for Involuntary manslaughter, enough to put him behind bars considering the named individuals on the Sub, not counting the CEO himself.
The CEO knew the dive would end in a disaster. That is what he wanted, and he wanted to do down with the ship - literally. There is a reason he put the word "gate" at the end of his company's name. Nothing good has ever come out of a thing called gate. None.
@@morpheus6749 It's hard for me to believe that he actually wanted the result he got. i think he just thought he could cut corners and things would be okay. If he was *expecting* disaster, I don't think he would've gone down himself.
The fact that hearing cracking noises on several of the descents, which was reported by many different passengers, was just completely disregarded by Rush or regarded as "normal" is absolutely mind blowing. Or the fact that they would lose contact with the mother vessel regularly and this was also regarded as normal and "not a big deal" is insane. Rushs arrogance had reached delusion and the negligence was to the umpth degree.
Human heuristics for risk are terrible. If nothing goes wrong the first few times, we get used to it and then it just *feels* safe. It affects everything from doctors flouting new guidelines to my mom never washing her hands after handling raw chicken (to be fair, we haven't gotten food poisoning... yet).
There's a term for this - "normalisation of deviance"
Meaning: we got away with it, so it must be ok.. 😮
I'm glad the fucker is dead, I just wish he hasn't taken 4 others down with him. His hubris got him good. I wonder what he was thinking in that last second of his life, if indeed he even had time to think (afaik, a sub implosion is instant death within a second so maybe it was just suddenly lights out?)
*descends
@@OutragedPufferfish No, descents. Descent is a noun, descends is simple present, singular, third person.
“This is not innovation; it’s profiteering,” is so succinct, such an apt way to describe the whole thing. Well said.
Good thing the CEO is dead himself. Greed kills
Many people talk about innovation just for marketing purposes
he believed in it, and he died on it. This is not a case of corruption, this is a case of arrogance.
Innovation without due diligence is speculation.
@@reagank.2268 Agreed ... and of ignorance.
"Questionable engineering" should be a new series in this channel! I would devour every part of it!
Yes!
Hear hear!
yes plz
Wytp is probably the podcast for you then
To elaborate on the above, it's "well there's your problem"
Ocean gate reminds me of a lesson from my business ethics class where my teacher showed us seemingly ridiculous OSHA regulations. We all thought why would there be rules on things like waste storage and my teacher then showed us the real life cases that made those rules a thing
Well, those rules are written in blood. Wish it said that on warnings signs to scare people straight.
@@ainzooalgown3927 "but this shouldn't apply to ME!" Is the refrain of libertarians and other willfully ignorant...
Apparently no one paid much attention to the rules over PepCon either.
Chemical plant built straddling a main gas pipeline? Check.
Plant fulfilling a contract to manufacture a dangerous chemical in bulk? Check.
Plant suddenly needing to store said dangerous chemical on site, again in bulk? Check.
Stockpile of said dangerous chemical growing to an alarming size? Check.
Now for the spicy bit.
The chemical in question was ammonium perchlorate. Nice, powerful oxidising agent that will turn a small fire into a raging inferno in no time.
Worse still, if it gets hot, ammonium perchlorate will decompose explosively.
So, what happened?
Fire starts in the factory. Fire reaches the ammonium perchlorate stockpile. All 4,500 tons of it. Ammonnium perchlorate stockpile goes BOOM. With the force of a small tactical nuclear weapon. Resulting local earthquake registers 3.6 on the Richter Scale.
Another example of why we have rules. And why idiots end up generating a body count when they ignore said rules and cut corners.
@@templarw20 What does Libertarianism have to do with OSHA regulations?
@@Melior_Traiano That's a joke, right? Sarcasm doesn't really come through in text.
Oceangate’s brochure answering the question “why wasn’t it classed?” has completely backwards logic. It said that certifications were bad because they don’t protect against operator error and most marine accidents are due to that operator error. No…. the reason most accidents are due to operator error is that certification weeds out all of the terrible designs! If it weren’t for that process we’d probably have way more Oceangate type accidents.
Who would read that and still board that tin can?
Survivorship bias. Excellent observation.
Absolutely. The first time I read that line I was shocked. The question is: Did they truly believe that or were they knowingly lying? That the CEO was on most (all?) of the trips, including the final one, leads me to believe that he believed what he was telling people.
It is the stupidest thing I've seen. Confirmation bias taken to the extreme.
Yes! I paused the video to exclaim that loudly.
My carbon fiber bicycle frame went through more testing than this freaking submarine. This thing is such an insane story the more we learn about.
You can do some research I believe there is a video on it, a bunch of guys were trying to set speed records on mountain bikes over different terrain, one was sand and they designed a Carbon Fibre bike to be as light as possible, without doing proper testing they sent a dude down a massive dune only for it to fold in half when it came to the level off. The dude suffered massive injuries and 6 buffets worth of sand down his throat.
@@bringerebrethil6176 Totally unnecessary but fascinating
My limited knowledge of carbon fibre is through bike bits, and even I know that it's a great material until all of a sudden it really isn't. This doesn't seem sensible, even without their complete lack of testing!
@@bringerebrethil6176i'm going to hell for laughing at the sand buffet part
@@bringerebrethil6176 I remember watching a documentary on this. I think it was a guys nicknamed the Red Baron trying to ride down a volcano in Nicaragua, and yeah as you mentioned got fucked by a sudden gradient change. He did come back with a better bike and claim a speed record If i'm not mistaken.
I am an engineer (retired now) and still remember what one of university lecturers said - when cooks make a mistake people get stomach ache. When engineers do, people die. Lesson I have remembered all my working life.
If you are bad enough as a cook you can kill people too
😅
Good lesson. But anyone can kill someone with negligence. Improper food prep and handling has killed many people.
That’s why we have what feels like millions of lawyers and only a couple thousand engineers…it’s harder
@@Dsw8691 I wouldn't say either is harder. Lawyers have to remember thousands obscure and sometimes conflicting rules well enough to determine what could be life or death for their clients. Additionally the mental burden of literally being completely responsible for the fate of your client is a bit rougher that most make it out to be. Engineers also have to worry about that, but it's distanced enough that they aren't forced to look people in the eyes and know that they're relying entirely on them. Different types of difficult, for sure, but both difficult.
Also, where did you get those numbers lol? Engineering in some capacity is the most popular subject in pretty much every college in America. Sure they have to graduate first but it's a very popular job.
Fortunately engineering is a relatively slow process. There is plenty of time to get second opinions, design reviews, tests. They can also hire independent third parties to verify and certify the product.
That’s why such engineering mistakes are relatively rare (compared to bad food).
The most important words that anyone can say who is involved in designing something are "I can't do that, it isn't safe". When I'm working on servers that handle the payment transactions of hundreds of thousands of people, and I get told to cut a corner, those are the words I use. Because I can't. It'll hurt too many people if I screw up and people's credit card details get leaked.
When my friends who develop software for medical equipment are told to rush something or bodge it, it's the words they use. It's the words my friends, mechanical engineers, use when they're asked to cut corners or rush something without sufficient testing or review.
You say "it isn't safe," management hears "someone will sue you."
The result is the same, but translating "manager" is a bit funny like that. It's a strange language.
Tell that to the Chernobyl crew hahaha
You’re totally a man of honor. May God bless you and your love ones in every way. 🙏
And that not apply to a few people that wanna take risk to die themselfs for the sake of humanity.
Let the Brave ones go wild and gather as much data as they can. Some people are evil and will disrepect the efforts of this amazing people but humanity as a whole will be better trough the new tecnology and data.
@@lucasbastosrodrigues140 what are you yapping about💀
“The vast majority of marine accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.” Yes, because the regulators catch the mechanical failures
It's scary how dangerous playing with statistics or misinterpreting statistics is. And many people fell for that because they only look at the number on the surface level.
I'm reminded of the survivorship bias example story from WW2:
Literally none of these aircraft that have made it back from combat have been hit in these places, they don't need armor there.
No, every aircraft that was hit there did not make it back, those are the places that need armor the most.
@@theInsaneRodent
My first thought as well.
@@theInsaneRodent also the story about helmets increasing the number of wounded in ww1…it increased because the number of dead decreased. It turned the dead into wounded and the British were really confused for a while
@@theInsaneRodentexactly!
Oceangate did real time test runs with live subjects aboard. Problem is, everyone died when they discovered the failure rate.
an engineering description of what actually happened
@@FreeMind5094 Not really because proper testing has things like measurements to be checked after each dive to make sure nothing has moved or deformed. It seems like the only measurement was whether or not they made it back to the surface.
Oof 💀💀💀💀
Ooof that’s something I feel bad at laughing at 😂.
@@Je_QzcY3mN0 not y’all saying “oof” I mean it is an oof moment though 😭😭
Man, you can feel the anger Real Engineering has against ocean gate incompetence, considering his thesis was on Composite materials
This is why I waited for Real Engineering to cover it and haven't bothered with anyone else's videos. I knew I could trust him.
He's exactly the type of guy Stockton Rush would have loved to fire ... there's no time for these nerd calculations, we've got a Titanic to see!
😊
not incompetence criminal negligence and total disregard for safety
Even more particular than that his thesis was in composite material failure properties.
I don't think anyone was really paying attention and are now frustrated they hadn't caught this sooner to put more pressure on them to stop.
That blog post is nuts. It's argument is, "Everyone else is taking this safety precaution and then not having the kind of accidents the precaution exists to prevent. It's clearly unnecessary, let's get rid of it."
Sounds like the logic of an MBA who was playing engineer.
"What is survivorship bias?"
I remember a friend studying engineering in college told me his professor said he was so strict about them making mathematical errors on exams because, “engineering errors lead to injuries and death. You need to take responsibility that a mistake could be deadly.”
That's exactly why we do have independent entities and engineers check our work, to confirm that we've not made silly mistakes or overlooked something crucial.
Errors are inevitable but as long as convention and regulation is followed, you're at least doing your best and using the knowledge and experience gained from past mistakes.
F***ing hate it when cowboys come in and think that they know better...
they dont take responsibility, thats what lawyers and insurance is for
@@carlholland3819 Technically, yes. You shouldn't be held personally responsible for any and all mistakes as long as they are not simply rooted in negligence. And this applies for many professions. But... If you're in an job, working on something where lives might be at risk and you feel no responsibility what so ever, you're in the wrong field.
And, when I say "you", it's not you as in "you, carlholland3819", but you as in anyone in such professions.
Regardless of lawyers and insurance,, engineers get put in jail for manslaughter for negligence.
Being weak at higher math I decided to get into the Architecture rather than the Engineering. I simply design Flighted Fantasy, the Engineers have the important task of making it a Reliable Reality.
This is exactly what I've been saying with regard to the stress strain curve for carbon fiber. Using acoustic sensors to warn you when a carbon fiber hull is failing is like having a sensor that monitors your heart and warns you that it has stopped. By the time you get the warning, you're effectively already dead.
not really they will pick up the multiple layers moving against one another way way way before failure therefore you can calibrate how much tolerance before a warning is triggered
@@louisburland5346 so how well did this go for the titan sub?
More than likely it had to do with the 3 component design of the craft. Carbon-fibre, Titanium, and the window (I think acylric... probably wrong). They also descended way, way too fast, further stressing the components.
@@louisburland5346 The Engineer who was allegedly fired for raising concerns about the sub and not signing off on it said in a court filing, “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail-often milliseconds before an implosion-and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.”. Regardless of whether they had any warning at all, the fact that the sub imploded should be evidence that if it did give any warning they didn't have enough time to do anything about it.
Acoustic monitoring is standard for composites. Micro-fracturing in a laminate will always occur, but it's determining when an amount of critical microcracking has occurred. Composite failure is far more complex than that of a standard metallic or polymeric material and can't just be explained with one simple mechanism most of the time.
My Youngest recently graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. She passed on the university commencement but attended her engineering school's ceremony. In it, all the engineers were given a steel ring to wear on the pinkie of their dominant hand. It was made (at least in the past) from steel recovered from buildings that failed due to poor engineering practices. The message spoken to all graduates was: "Wear this ring to remind yourself throughout your career that what you do matters. If you f*&k it up, there is a good chance someone will die."
Canadian. American or?
I know Canadian P.Eng.'s get that ring. It goes on your dominant hand to pass over all your work. On your little finger to humble you.
@@eh42 that's the one! Yeah, her dean stated in the beginning of the ceremony that the practice started in Canada and soon came down to the US. I like the idea.
Awareness is everything in engineering. Following-up is everything, too. Half-assed won't do!
Steel rings are dangerous, I'd recommend not googling degloving for the details. Seems a odd choice to gift something that is a risk for health and safety.
@@thatjeff7550 Me, too. It shows everything in engineering matters.
Stockton Rush spent more effort in avoiding regulations than he did making sure his craft was safe. He will be remembered all right, the topic in many engineering safety courses for years to come!
Stockton Rush was a wasteman
He effed around and found out - the tragedy is he took others with him.
"Regulations are written in blood" is a phrase that the CEO did not seem to heed. The bitter irony of this is that the Titanic itself (the very ship they wanted to see) caused many, many deaths, spurring safety regulation changes that were very much written with the blood of those who died.
The Titanic didn't skirt any regulations. Everything they did was in line with common practice in 1912. Lifeboats were not for saving all the passengers and were made for tendering. The design was well within the guidelines of the time.
The regulations changed after the disaster but to say that the crew was overly arrogant is not correct.
@@timothybogle1461 I never said the Titanic crew were arrogant, nor did I say they skipped regulations. I only said that the deaths on the Titanic spurred new regulations ...and only after those death occurred. Hence, those regulations were indeed written in blood.
.
Funny how history repeats itself.
@@timothybogle1461muricans simply can't read, it seems.
it blows my mind that this is still considered an accident. this was entirely foreseen, predicted, and warned of. at best, it's negligence. at worst, it's murder.
Exactly! My husband and I think exactly the same.
Murder in the second degree, for sure. Maybe engineers should be required to be on board when the first tests rides are made.
Agreed. This was a crime. Since the person responsible is dead, I hope the relatives sue the company for whatever scraps are left.
@@plcoylethe engineer spoke up and was fired and sued. Make the Executives who make the calls go on it first
the 19 year old was forced onto the submarine, so yes it could be considered murder
To those complaining about the "lateness" of this video: this is what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not get to be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you do get to be the best. This is without question the best analysis of this accident on RUclips.
I don't see anyone complaining.
Wouldn't call it the best as there are many other amazing analysis out there, but definitely among the best
Here's the problem: All the monday morning "experts" are coming out after the fact. Show me ONE video where someone was ringing the alarm bells BEFORE the accident.
6:08
Literally says it took him two days to research and write the script for the video lol
@@larrybud the people who knew about it rang alarm bells. I don't see why people should have known about this company before they killed 4 passengers along with their own CEO.
4:32 I've recently learned about *Survivorship bias* which is a logical error of focusing on successes but not failures. They think most errors are operational completely overlooking that mechanical errors weren't even being given the chance to happen since they were already filtered out because of existing certification standards.
a phrase i heard once was "it's like asking why meteors only land in craters" 😆
@@vesperfromtheinternet5588That is an amazing phrase.
That chat about raising concerns (and this whole ordeal) has reminded me of something one of my old lecturers told me back in my undergrad days. It was near the end of a lecture in a course on Thermodynamics and Structure of Matter. After discussing a couple of engineering disasters, Primarily the DeHavilland Comet, he told us something along the lines of "during the course of your careers as Physicists you will be pressured by powerful actors both political and from the private sector to made decisions that are counter to scientific rigour. I hope you make the right decisions because if you act and something disastrous happens the people issuing the orders will not be held to account but you will. Not just by any formal investigation but by yourself as well as by others in your field. I hope when these events arise you make the right choice because you will have to live with the consequences and more importantly others might not."
Wise words
He said "physicist"?
physicists don't make design decisions. Worst we can do is write a bad paper.
@@appa609 Nuclear Physicists have entered the chat...
@@appa609 doesn't really matter what field of science/engineering, they know vastly more about their own field than an overpaid accountant
@@appa609 The vast majority of trained physicists do not work in academia.
When Oceangate mentioned most errors are due to operators, my mind immediately went to the survivorship bias example of WW2 planes coming back, and engineers wanting to add reinforcement to the areas where planes were showing damage coming back, before realizing the reason the other planes weren't coming back were because they were getting shot in areas the survivors weren't.
do you assume or know how oceangate came to that conclusion?
Or like when the introduction of steel helmets lead to a sharp rise in head injuries... Top officials thought that soldiers became more careless.
(Spoiler: People who would habe previously died, now were "just" badly injured.)
@@PfropfNo1 That wasn't Oceangate's conclusion. Oceangate stated a fact, that most deadly errors are due to operators, and their conclusion was that it would be safe.
We know that Oceangate came to that conclusion because they let people into the submersible 12,500 feet below the surface. Their own CEO, mind you.
Exactly the same here, the bomber planes that didn't return. "Oh the only failures of this kind of thing are user error, so we'll skip the testing" but all the vehicles that wouldn't have passed the test would end the same way, they were just smart enough to not send them out.
@@PfropfNo1 "do you assume or know how oceangate came to that conclusion?"
They posted that conclusion on their own blog.
Could you make a whole series of questionable engineering so that we may have other case studies of engineering failures?
Quiet, you...
I second this. Brian has the RUclips skills and the reach to really do justice to a lot of engineering case studies, and it would definitely help get them in front of more people
I agree this video was really well made
In many cases it is the management ignoring warnings from engineers that is the problem. The Titanic itself is an example of this. Engineers designed the bulk heads going up further, owners had them reduced to provide wide open decks. Were it not for that change it would have probably stayed afloat long enough for help to arrive.
Practical Engineering has quite a few videos on engineering failures!
Got to “love” the Cave Johnson-esque approach to safety Stockton Rush had. Went about the same for Cave too.
at least cave was entertaining
A related thought: I can't get over how much the very name "Stockton Rush" sounds like what you'd name a corrupt corporate executive in a video game or a cartoon. He really is a real life Cave Johnson.
To be fair, "move fast and break things" was a software engineering motto, formulated at a non-critical social media company, that was co-opted by other engineers, sometimes working in critical software or hardware applications. It's a perfectly adequate way of doing low-risk engineering. It's not how you would engineer self-driving cars, or, I don't know, maybe a commercial submarine.
People have died from "Full self driving" cars as well. Fraudulent misrepresentation
The comparison to SpaceX is interesting. SpaceX performed hundreds of flights of Falcon 9 before they put a human on the thing. They also had to go through an extensive human rating programme, to ensure it was as safe as could be reasonably expected of a vehicle filled with hundreds of tonnes of highly reactive propellant being shot into space. OceanGate performed a few test dives and, as Brian states, minimal checks by independent individuals. It was also operating in an environment that is arguably more challenging than space. This needs to be a wakeup call that "move fast and break things" is not a suitable design model when failure of the object could lead to the loss of human lives.
Fast iteration works best on any project when failures are low-impact. You absolutely do not apply that with avionics controls or medical equipment, for example. Fast failures are great when you learn fast but don't hurt anyone. Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack software engineer), Tesla/SpaceX (Elon Musk), and many others were perfectly willing to risk equipment to learn but not lives. That's the right approach.
@@franzfanz Falcon was classed for human spaceflight before humans flew on it. The move fast and break stuff applies to the development testing phase, to discover the unknown unknowns and progress the design faster by increasing the understanding of the materials and systems. Destructive testing is a legitimate engineering tool. What OceanGate did was essentially put their development test vehicle into production without understanding the risks.
@@MushookieManPeople have died from autonomous vehicles, but no one has died from Tesla's Full Self Driving, yet. Most news reports confuse autopilot with FSD.
I love when actual engineers report about someone else stupidity. It just savage honesty in every direction.
It's savage, yet severely needed. Since we live in the 'faster, cheaper' age. We need more public, easily consumable materials on cautionary tales like this.
That's the beauty of Engineering ... raw Truth.
ok
As an engineer, I can tell you that stupidity, or perhaps incompetence, is fairly prevalent in this field. There is too much "gung-ho" attitude, and not enough logic and just simple paying attention. I feel quite uncomfortable hearing my colleagues say things like "we will fix this in rev. 2."
does engineering have something like QA?
There is a reason why when I was taking intro to engineering we started with going through catastrophic failures. We were taught "if something were to happen and it were in the papers, would you be spoken of negatively or positively?" If an engineer fails people (plural) can die. There are so many stories ranging from a quick overlook of something (like the Missouri City TV Antenna Tower Collapse or Hyatt Regency walkway collapse) to systematic failures that cause deaths and many of these stories are fascinating in its own right... regulations and such are written in blood. Sure they might hamper innovation, but to ignore them and say your "in-house" tests of saying "yup the sub dove once" is enough is gross negligence. SpaceX plays Kerbal Space Program with unmanned rockets, this company did the same with manned subs. There's a difference. Make no mistake, this case will be taught about in intro to engineering courses once an indepth investigation is finished.
That bit about SpaceX struck me. Oceangate tried to play that they were "moving fast and breaking stuff", but no where in that process described did they break things until a human was already in the driver's seat.
@@Theroha Indeed, say what you will about the failures of the starship, at least space x is doing those flights unmanned because they KNOW it can, and very likely will for a few more flights result in catastrophic failures.
Yes. SpaceX does a "hardware rich" development kind of thing. But they doesn't (as far as we know) neglect safety. The things they are breaking are just hardware: expected to fail, expected to be destroyed. There's a big difference there.
We already talked about this in my fluid mechanics class. Its already in engineering courses. Its kinda wild how quickly college courses can move.
@@sysbofhdoesn't neglect safety? Which is why there were soot and dirt landing on other people's property many miles away, a failure of the self destruct sequence, and massive destruction of their facility, due to something VERY predictable?
Musk was literally playing with people's lives. He was lucky nothing happened
To paraphrase the spanish youtuber "Tri line" who briefly spoke about the incident
"There's the reason nobody felt bad about the incident, the CEO was a millionare who called himself an innovator after making things cheaper, sacrificing safety in the process, in that case, go ahead, you can also jump off a plane using a blanket as a parachute and call yourself an innovator, nobody will feel anything"
I mean I felt bad for the 19 year old who didn’t even want to go
Mister Rush wanted to be like Captain Kirk, how childish can you get???
I feel bad for the passengers who were not engineers and who didn't know the problem. The "they're rich who cares" idea is really immature and childish
@@Stettafire naw you don’t get that rich without screwing a bunch of people over and general human misery. They thought the laws of God and man did not apply to them, and while the laws of man might not, the laws of God (and by god I mean Physics) absolutely do.
@@Stettafire lets just say you wont get rich by being nice
I'm an automotive engineer and my company is trying to adopt the "Move fast and break stuff" mentality. It means requirements no longer get written until us testing engineers demand them for us to write our tests (and sometimes not even then) and that flaws can't be removed without undoing other work that's already been done on top of them. Instead those flaws get bought off by upper management even when they're incredibly noticeable for customers. The motto we have for the employees is "take two (minutes) for safety" which I find to be the opposite since it's essentially asking us to take extra time to make sure a situation is safe to proceed with. Other phrases that are opposite are "haste makes waste", "measure twice, cut once" and many more similar sayings that have been around for generations because _anyone with half a brain cell can tell you that rushing through something results in more safety issues_
...I just remembered I have an external ethics survey I was sent that I should fill out
As a member of the public, that's very worrisome.
what company is that?
As someone who's about to start studying auto engineering, what company is this that I should avoid?
There is one specific phrase I remember that can pretty much be boiled down to for every company: "Your regulations are *written in blood."* People should do well to heed that more often, IMO.
Hope they move fast to break that idea and move back to the old one
While i was studying engineering all our professors had zero mistake policy, it could be a simple math mistake or even typo. It didn't matter we would get zero points regardless. We all were crying and criticizing it but as we learned more we realized they were trying to teach us engineers can not do mistakes. So we learned to check our mistakes again and again, verify everything several times. I don't know if im cruel but i can't feel sorry for them, an engineer was fired for questioning them and he even sued them which was a huge red flag. They ignored it because of their narcissism and thought ''everything was fine''. I hope in future wealthy CEOs etc would listen to engineers more...
Lol. Not gonna happen any time soon.
All humans make mistakes, the most important lesson is to accept this as fact and use it throughout your decision making processes.
I hope they keep not listening and then most importantly... Dying in their own death traps before anyone else.
Good policy. Partial Credit doesn’t work when a typo means a fallen bridge, and a misunderstood principle means a burning car.
The best engineers are perfectionists in every sense of the word, and that is a good thing
I love his comment: "As Hanlon's Razor goes “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” on why Oceangate's CEO piloted the craft himself.
Don't forget Shithead Rush also sued the man he put in charge of his company's safety when that guy raised an issue with the vehicles safety. So yea, Rush WAS STUPID, but he was ALSO MALICIOUS!
I do not think it was stupidity. I think he took risks like flying experimetal aeroplanes as he loved doing it.
I think he did what he most loved and he knew he would not have to explain implosion to the mother of his son or the the families of his clients as he was onboard.
@@joonaskekoni2867 What makes what you said, and "He was being stupid", mutually exclusive statements?
@@clocked0 Asking the real questions here...
The only word that can describe this is hubris.
I'm not a highly qualified engineer, but I do actually hold a qualification in engineering. During that engineering course, I was required to study an "advanced or space age" material, on two occasions. I elected to study fiber composites (kevlar and carbon fiber), and titanium, as both were relevant to my interest in motorsports engineering, and in particular, aerodynamic device design and manufacture (titanium brackets are commonly used in creating mounting points for carbon fiber aero elements such as wings). When I heard "submersible" "carbon fiber" and "lost contact" in the same sentence, for me, the conclusion was foregone.
I knew, as you also attested to in this video, that fiber composites are strong in tension, not compression. It did not take much thought at all to realize that the failure was likely as instantaneous as their deaths, and, due to the common failure modes of fiber composites, destruction was most likely near-total due to the immense forces involved.
I also understood from my education that fiber composites suffer terribly from inconsistency, even in ideal conditions for their manufacture. While I was studying engineering, my father worked in motorsports, and I was regularly brought "dead" samples of carbon fiber that had failed (for a number of reasons. The number of samples that never made it to the car, simply because they had failed in the manufacturing process - the bagging and curing method having been used - was not insignificant, and this was with people who worked with the material regularly. Parts where safety was absolutely paramount (such as the driver safety cell) were never trusted to bagging and curing, an autoclave was mandatory. And even in the autoclave, manufacturing defects occurred that resulted in having to re-lay and impregnate an entirely new safety cell.
This is the first video I've watched in which I've learned that not only did they use an unsuitable material for this application (carbon fiber), but they did not autoclave their carbon fiber. While using carbon fiber in this application is damning enough in its own right, bagged and cured, to my mind, goes above and beyond gross negligence.
There is no room at all for hubris in engineering, and I applaud Lockridge for taking a stand, rather than allowing himself to become immersed in what seems to have been a culture of risk and lack of responsibility. I've long believed that, to be an engineer, one has to place ethics above all else, because there are scant few other professions in which the lives of thousands rely on just one person.
Isnt Carbon Fiber also a somewhat brittle material compared to metal? That is, it shatters upon failure rather than just crunching?
Bro, why didn’t you submit this to someplace more worthy like a forum or paper? Seems like you’re an intelligent one, Instead you just wrote all that to entertain a group of morons in the RUclips comments
They did autoclave it this video didn’t have all the information. It was still crap though
I love the tiny detail in 3:00 where the paper at the bottom says "the thing is a f--ing death trap!" Still, super well produced video!
I must admit that it made me giggle, too! I saw the one around 9:54, missed the earlier one. Still funny. :)
@@EShirakoThey're actually the same one, just from different camera angles
ok
To those who complain about this video being "late": here's what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you can be the best. This is without a doubt the best analysis of this accident on RUclips.
Absolutely. As an actual naval architect, this is easily the best video I’ve seen on the topic. This is really the only video I’ve seen that actually discusses the engineering behind this and the likely failure mode. And this is the only one that really drives home just how spectacularly stupid Stockton Rush was, and that this accident wasn’t a result of malice, but just a result of sheer stupidity.
Yep. I've watched a lot of analysis videos on this subject. This is by far the best.
I feel like anyone who says "screw quality, just get it live as fast as possible" on a video about OceanGate probably never had much chance of understanding the problem with OceanGate to begin with.
@@bmyra I completely disagree, I watched probably 40 videos on Titan and honestly this one was a real disappointment, it didn’t add anything I didn’t already know, and didn’t do a great job illustrating things either.
And it’s still trending despite being “late” on the topic.
Thank you for saying this: "This is profiteering, not innovation" - I've been saying this since the accident unfolded, knowing what the CEO said about the risks and concerns but also how they treated warnings and people alerting them!
Also thank you for this very informative video, you really spoke about things I hope many listens to regarding the era we live in at the moment with all this innovations which may or may not be too innovative but maybe just someone wanting to make money out of something which isn't even good to start with - innovation should be the main goal and focus of any project like this, not profit, cause if that's the main goal you know they will take shortcuts to cut the costs and gain as much of the money they can themselves.
The fact that you call it an accident is a larger indication of comprehension defenciencies located within the many folds, dips, trenches, and valleys situated in the grey matter that your skull protects.
well said
Ironically, the Titan incident is producing profits for hundreds, if not thousands, of youtubers.
I remember a short (I don't know who posted) but a college in Canada for engineers, once they graduate they get a ring that they have to wear forever cause that ring reminds them that what they built and what they make their job can put people in danger if they are not careful.
It's traditional in all of Canada for engineering graduates to receive an iron ring.
A ring that (until they ran out) was made from the iron from a bridge that collapsed (twice , 1907 and 1914) due to engineering failures.
i love how the usual "insane engineering" video title was replaced with "questionable engineering" and i would've love it if this was turned into a series,
like we had too many videos about good engineering lets shake things up a bit and take a look at the even-more questionable engineering of certain things.
I second this motion!
Agree
You mean like Fukushima engineering, where a country who invented the word tsunami put a nuclear power plant ocean side, great idea! Even better let's put the back up systems in the basement! Bet the guy got a big bonus for that.
Or just call it "insane engineering," since it's still insane but in a different way.
On Wikipedia's page on the 1963 Thresher sub disaster, an authority is quoted as saying:
- I think it is important that we re-evaluate our present practices where, in the desire to make advancements, we may have forsaken the fundamentals of good engineering.
As a materials engineer, he got very concerned about the materials. As an electronics engineer, I freaked when I found out about the wireless gamepad and Bluetooth communications system. Those communication protocols and programming standards are totally unfit for critical to life systems.
Agreed what if you lose connection at a critical point! We could have steered out of the mess if we had been able to turn the wheel but the controllers battery died!😮 Many parts of this screamed stupid b4 you ever got to the hull design!
ok
I wonder what backups were in place. There was one dive where one of the drive motors was plugged in backward and they reprogrammed their controls at the bottom of the ocean. (The fact a critical control was untested until at the ocean floor is aweful, but a different topic) This tells me that there's a software layer between the controller and the switching hardware, so whatever was running the control software could probably be used as a backup, but a hardware backup is of course the gold standard.
@@TlalocTemporal they designed it so you could put it in backwards? Wow
@@thikim8562 insightful
Thank you for the clear-eyed and honest assessment.
Nice
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Good
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The single most lucid indictment of Ocean Gate's Titan, nailed it.
Had never heard of Hanlon's Razor, another gem.
Love this channel.
this will go into engineering ethics courses all engineers take during their first year of college. There were Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and now Oceangate.
Just goes to show that big companies are above the law. If an individual was responsible for one person's death, he will be charged with involuntary manslaughter. If a big company is responsible for multiple deaths, they get slapped with a small fine. Nobody ever goes to jail.
I don't see it so much as an engineering failure as it seems engineers were telling Stockton Rush that his sub was flawed. It is definitely a greed issue
ok
ok
Yeah this may be used in MBA courses too.
As an engineer myself, I found myself fuming mad the more I heard about the Oceangate debacle, to the point where my wife had to be like "you need to chill" lmao
Exact same conversation happened in this household as well. I was so angry seeing people pie this off as exploratory or innovative. It was none of that, it was criminal stupidity
I told my wife "this is going to be an engineering case study soon" because I remember studying similar cases where the experts were ignored before tragedy struck (the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in particular)
I get similar fumes while watching scammer payback videos after seeing the audacity of the scammers.
This video also explains something similar so I feel u mate.
Um, tell the wife that innocent people died because of Stockton Rush's refusal to listen to his own designers. One was even fired for telling him it wouldn't work!
@@Chris-dc5vbThat’s so interesting. I’ve been wondering what engineers have thought about this disaster.
The idea that the crew could have seen and heard their craft coming apart at the seams is terrifying.
It terrifies me to the core.
I saw an explanation in other video of a Doctor, explaining this: both image and pain signals travels slower to the brain than the fact itself. Which means that one milisecond they´re alive, the next they´re dead. No feeling, no pain, no image, because the brain just didn´t have time enough to receive the signals and process them properly. Here´s the link, I searched for this specific issue because I had the same thought, what a horrifying last minutes on this earth... but, luckily (sort of speack) they felt nothing.
ruclips.net/video/CfUcNPr2T8A/видео.html
I hope it relieves you as it relieved me ;)
They didn't have time to really hear anything, carbon fiber doesnt bend, it shatters! At those pressures they would have been instantly imploded (into a thousand pieces) instantly, faster than a fraction of a second...
@@Vaninasanta they didn't feel anything, but they would've heard all sorts of horrific sounds before the actual sub imploded. Especially if as in the video he says the material starts peeling from the inside first.
From the (unvalidated) transcript of the voyage, there was a crackling noise for about 20 minutes before communication was lost. That alone would have made me poop my pants.
The fact that so many warnings were ignored is truly shocking, as an engineer in training I’m disgusted to hear that an employee who raised concerns was fired considering the fact that during my time in this industry I have been taught to speak up if I think something is wrong even if it isn’t, this project that ocean gate undertook was nothing short of greed and stupidity and as the video perfectly put it “This is not innovation; it’s profiteering” a truly sad situation that could have easily been avoided but has now persisted past the end point into something that unfortunately cannot be undone.
It's called having a moral compass and TBH there is a 100% nothing wrong with that.
This video surfaced faster than the submarine
💀💀
bro 💀💀💀
Bro your wild for this lol
Ba dum bum
Wow you make fun of dead people, omg you are so edgy and original.
Something tells me this company and their hubris tube is going to be the subject of many engineering classes for quite a long time.
Something tells me it is literally going to be on page one on many future engineering textbooks.
Hubris tube got a chuckle outta me.
Yep. He wanted to be famous. Well, his name will live in infamy in many engineering classes.
In Electrical Engineering we were warned that ethical questions and challenges would come our way. They were 100% correct. Usually the challenges were manufactured by, you guessed it, leadership CEOs etc.
Morality is subjective and ethics too by virtue of morality being subjective.
@@jeevacation "Don't kill innocent people" is hardly a subjective moral or engineering ethic.
Everything a CEO asks should be prefaced by "If feasible...". If it isn't currently feasible, either abandon it, or invest in working towards making it feasible.
@@kwanarchive lol is that your argument hahahhaa
so it isnt subjective because of what? your feelings?
@@jeevacation What kind of moron laughs in text?
Even worse than the engineering was the hubris of Oceangate. They just tuned out everyone that said “that’s probably a bad idea.”
Things rarely go right when people refuse to listen to others.
They convinced everyone to turn a blind eye. And probably thought the laws of physics would offer them the same courtesy.
@Zorothegallade-gg7zg or they fired the nay-sayers.
My training is in materials engineering, and reading through the (lack of) due diligence just had me clutching my hair and going "no no no no no" over and over again. I did more testing in my undergrad labs than they did. My stakes were as high as trying to get an A, but they had actual lives on the line. My final response on this matter ended up being, "what did you think was going to happen!?"
I did undergrad mech eng at a uni with a prominent materials group and had the same reaction.
One simple factor: *GREED* . Five years old (in levels of maturity, responsibility) *mustn't* be in front of any Company.
Once I got to the part about it barely being tested, I was already thinking the guy had "Haha, Sub make money go brrr." in his mind far too much.
I only learned some engineering stuff in highschool due to the CAS and AP programs they had, but even someone with no training at all should be able to see the red flags in a lot of this.
I took physics in high school, nowhere as advanced as engineering training or having a degree. But when I first heard about the use of carbon fibre, my first thought was literally, "I don't think that it can actually handle the pressure of being so deep"... it's sad that the people who paid to go on this vessel didn't notice the red flags and they are paying the price of what is honestly willful ignorance...
Unit ops or Pchem lab ?
When I heard about this case, I wasn't surprised but that they would have the gall to not even autoclave the vessel during curing and not fatigue test it at all is just insane. And aside from a serious lack of redundancies that were also painfully glaring.
That kind of nonsense sounds like something a "50 year old white guy" would say, that Rush didn't want on his team. Where's the "inspiration" from younger, fresh out of school would bring to the table? Oh right, imploded on the ocean floor.
They were fatigue testing it. They just did it with people inside.
@@MushookieMan ahhhhh I don't like how accurate this comment is
Autoclave is *how much*?!?! Fuc that we'll just do it live.
-That CEO
And no apologies! They just said "inexperienced pilots were driving so its probably their fault , dont blame us."
As someone who works for Instron making dynamic testing systems it was good to see the emphasis on fatigue testing of composites and to highlight the complexities.
works for who? no one knows about your trash company
that's cool tech
Any links or resources for composite fatigue testing methods? Just curious, We never got down that road when I took material science. I know "acoustic monitoring" probably isn't the gold standard.
There’s a lot of blatant misinformation online about this, especially on TikTok. I was privy to a conversation between friends sharing a video that, frankly, peddled outright lies about the situation to make it sound *spoooookyyy*.
I explained, to the best of my recollection, your explanations here and was able to demonstrate just how false the content was. Cited my sources too! They were pretty receptive thankfully, and ended up following my point; the ACTUAL story is far more spooky and interesting than any lies peddled by faux-content creators on social media.
I’m paraphrasing a lot here, it’s not like I was some nerdy hero - these are people I know relatively well and had their suspicions of the content already. I appreciate what you do, please keep it up!
James Cameron's Deep Sea Challenger was designed with the pressurized hull being separated from the rest of the vessel because at extreme depths the vessel would actually compress to about 2 inches smaller from it's default size all around, proving that the human portion of the sub must be built wisely, and patiently
Dude bankrupt companies with his project 😂but he do it well
I bet it compressed more than 2"
The Trieste compressed around 5" and that was made from high nickel steel.
The end caps were HAND GLUED together out in the open. No vacuum, just a plastic spatula smearing the glue together. I think this is where the failure began, the end caps. Made from dis-similar materials that compress different amounts.
It was a miracle it made it more than once.
@@TheBandit7613 I suspect that temperature related stresses played a part too. In the open warehouse that they did the gluing, I doubt they held the temperature completely constant until the cure was complete. Temperature changes and different expansion rates could have lead to a joint that was weaker than the calculations said it was.
In the Deep Sea Challenger doco they also mentioned that they limited the amount of deep sea dives before doing the main dive as each dive increases the risk of catastrophic failure. To me it sounds like there is no sub that can do extreme deep dives on repeat, they get rated to be able to do x and after that they need to build a new one.
Just my understanding, I have no qualifications in this field, just what I understood from the doco.
@@jettbezos8074who care’s money comes back people dont
"This is profiteering. Not innovation."
Nailed it.
I’m not an engineer but I find the psychology behind this fascinating, the amount of things that would have to line up for this to happen.
Not just the psychology of rush either but politics, the US has very bad employment laws, or rather laws that mostly favour the employer, you can be sacked because they just don’t like you for example, whereas in Europe, you can’t do that, and you certainly can’t sack someone for raising safety concerns,
Which means that if those employment laws were different or the location was then he would have either been forced to confront those issues or have been taken to court and have them confronted for him.
Even Elon is on record saying that for all the destructive testing they do, their crewed vessels absolutely cannot be allowed to fail under any circumstances and stressed the importance of prolonged testing and certification to ensure the safety and reliability of the vehicle before taking a single passenger. I’m not sure that citing SpaceX by name is the shining endorsement that OceanGate thought it was.
Elon musk tortures animals in the name of “science”, but really it’s just because he can.
I used to admire him. Now I can’t stand him.
nobody bother point this fact cause "hur hur Elon bad" these days ^^
@@ppsarrakis Elon is just a frustrating public figure. He did some cool stuff, made a ton of money for it and then decided that becoming a professional right wing troll was such a good career move that it was worth throwing a decent chunk of his fortune into the trash just to give himself the biggest platform money can buy.
Yeah. That's the thing about Elon. He used to be cool. He did great things in the past. He's now a bloated egotistic and narcisistic billionare that thinks he's right on everything and to be fair there isn't much we can do about it.
Even so, even on all the great advancements he allowed to happen he build his image on lies and pivilege.
That's the whole thing with him. He was an asshole, did great things for a while and went back to being an asshole.
When you defend Elon you must remember you are defending him NOW not before. I don't think anyone would argue that SpaceX and Tesla had made great things. Besides, at the end of the day is not like he designs or manufactures all of the great things. Remember that a CEO only gives orders. They can be, and often are, just idiots with a ton of money that take all of the credit.
@@webbowser8834he is doing cool stuff even now you just to blind by the "right wing" to bother ^^
Its truly ironic that it was the Titanic they were visiting, since it's sinking was what sparked the growth and importance of classification societies in the maritime industry to prevent maritime accidents due to subpar construction standards, methods and materials
Titanic was not subpar, lmao. It was the safest and most advanced ship of the time
I was thinking the same thing!
@@AverageAlien *of the time.
Yeah but the Titanic sank because of hubris, not dangerous design. Had they been paying attention and missed that iceberg it wouldn't even been remembered.
@@AverageAlienAgreed. The thing that caused it to sink was blunt trauma caused by an iceberg, and that is more user error than a design flaw. Even if you could prevent the impact from breaching the hull, the impact force would have likely caused even more issues. You can engineer a vest to stop a bullet, but that force will still be transferred regardless.
I still can't believe they made the hull in an open air area, no vacuum, no one even wearing masks. This is madness.
This is Oceangate! Lol
Watching them apply the glue by hand and then just drop the titanium ring on was kind blowing to me, I make more effort to keep projects clean in my own garage.
All of those air bubbles and dust particles are delaminations waiting to start.
Pardon my arrogance, but why does the hull need to made in a sterile error? To eliminate fod risks etc.?
@@lukas3606 for carbon fiber, its a bunch of carbon fiber strands essentially glued/laminated together. If there are gaps or air bubbles in it, it greatly decreases strength and makes it much more vulnerable, from what I know.
What's truly insane is that the 2024 NTSB inquest found that the accoustic monitoring system DID WORK, and found a major strain/fault incident in one of Titan's final dives... But, true to form, Stockton Rush just ignored it.
The "crackling sound at aft" from the comms logs still haunts me after reading it. I can't imagine how scary hearing noises when you're so far under water. I'm guessing those sounds could have been the material de-laminating...
Thing is, a man had told rush about those noises the 2nd time it went down,but him being a pompous skinflint totally ignored that
or the powerbanks
@@Man_fay_the_Bru Rush was warned by several experts, one even directly warning him in no uncertain terms that his actions will someday cost people their lives... He found a single loophole in the law where he could let his narcissistic tendencies go unchecked in international waters and it didn't take long for it to kill.
Since the Titan incident (I won't call it accident) I've watched a number of the explainations as to what happened. Thank you Brian for doing your usual exceptional work as this is the best, most comprehensive video I've seen.
Your skill in explaining very complex engineering ideas in simple to understand terms that allow us who understand basics of engineering, but not the formal education, to better comprehend and then share with our friends and family (specifically my children) what happened and why. I've been a long time Nebula and Curioustiy Stream member and use Real Engineering as a tool to help better understand and engage with my family so many of the topics you've covered over the years. Thank you.
When I was learning to investigate collisions in college, the instructor always said accidents can't be avoided, most collisions can. I do much prefer your use of incident instead of accident since this could have been avoided.
Accidents means damage to the craft or loss of a craft. Incident is the opposite but with some problems, like people getting injured.
Maybe you should check out the definitions of accident and incident before calling it anything?
@@Steamrunnert's not about what could have been. Catastrophic damage and/or injured people = accident. In this case, dead people. Either your instructor misspoke or you‘ve missheard.
I have to echo the above. This video is unequivocally authoritative and informative.
You get a 'harumph!' sir.
I remember seeing a video of the CEO stating “engineers tell you not to mix titanium and carbon fibre - guess what? I still did it.”
I went totally ballistic! This guy played with people’s lives. He probably never read the famous appendix F (for Feynman) of the Challenger catastrophe analysis: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Stockton Rush really thought he was Cave Johnson
"The bean counters told me I couldn't fire a man just for being in a wheelchair. Did it anyway, ramps are expensive."
"They say great science is built on the shoulders of giants. Not here. At Aperture, we do all our science from scratch. No hand holding."
"Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT. Why is so much of our science dangerous? Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you on the butt on the way out, because you are fired."
an engineering studies in the Netherlands I did, included Morals and Ethics as a subject, where we were taught to choose to be a whistleblower in cases where people would feel they are part of a project where they are being asked or steered to neglect safety over success. The Challenger space shuttle and the issue with the O-rings was used as one of the examples in one of these classes. I am sure they will now also have added Oceangate Titan as one of the example cases.
Something I saw pointed out in another analysis of this was that the carbon fiber wasn't weaved as most people are used to seeing with the material, but wrapped essentially like a spool of thread. The engineering of this thing is oddly fascinating in a 'what is even going on here' way.
Yes, I saw that somewhere too. Apparently the fibre was 'unidirectional', which made no sense at all, other than the fact that the whole thing was cf, which made no sense at all either. Probably cheaper to make.
This isn't unusual, almost all composite pressure vessels are filament-wound. It's just not what most people imagine when they think about carbon fiber.
I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Any way you do it, the carbon fibers are worthless in compression. Would be interested in hearing a materials engineer's opinion on this.
I have an interesting question: would they have been better off if they made the hull out of solid epoxy and no carbon fiber at all? Not that it is a good idea (probably very dumb) but what exactly is the purpose of carbon fibers in this application where the vessel experiences ONLY compressive loads and nearly no tensile loads?! What does is add? It may actually make things worst by creating layers and opportunity of delaminating the epoxy layers after repeated pressure and temp cycles.
@@bna441 that's a really good question, and I wondered exactly the same thing myself. Making an all epoxy cylinder, and then testing it to destruction, would provide a very valuable 'starting point', to find out exactly how much strength the cf actually adds, and I'm guessing not a huge amount, in stark contrast to where it's used properly, where it produces a material which is both stronger and lighter than steel.
It's frightening to think that people were diving to 3800m in a vessel essentially made of plastic, and not even shaped as a sphere ...
@@richardconway6425 You hit the nail on the head.
That's why deep submersibles aren't made from CF.
A CF tube with titanium end caps essentially glued on...
Anyone who even remotely knows something about composites and their manufacturing knew this thing imploded.
This feels like a movie from 2000s where the ignorant boss gets what's coming to him but also gets a lot of people killed
Events happening in the world recently have been stranger than fiction.
Jurassic Park
@@appa609 An more specifically Jurassic World were the owner of the park piloted his own helicopter to chases down i dinosaur which ended disastrously for him and everyone in the park.
Funny, I had that exact same thought. Like the plot of a made-for-TV feature film.
On the plus side, he got what was coming to him and only got a few people killed. Better than the alternative, I suppose.
A similar story can be found in the documents of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. Management rationalized the use of sealant beyond its tested usable temperature, and it leaked, killing seven crew.
Iirc, the head of safety even refused to sign off on the launch due to concerns but they overrode him and launched anyway. During a press conference shortly after the incident the then current head of NASA (iirc) and PR folks tried to lie about the cause of failure and one of the engineers from a 3rd party company that worked on the rocket spoke up and told the truth, he was fired then after a court case given his job back with extra pay and benefits. I think he eventually became the head of the company (I'm fuzzy on the details, it's been a while since I read/watched the relevant articles/videos).
The same for Discovery accident. They reject the final walk before the Shuttle returned to Earth, so no one found that a large hole was formed on the hull of the shuttle. And even later NASA gaslight everyone and raised the boycott campaign against investigators who said that the accident caused by the foam on the fuel tank contacted and destroyed the heatshield. Crazier, even after be confirmed by the real test that the foam indeed damaged the heatshield and create a hole large enough for plasma to leak to the fuel tank, NASA still tried to deny they are the one who killed every Astronauts on Discovery mission by trying to convinced everyone the company produced that foam trying to sabotage the Space Shuttle program by INTENDED to make the foam puncture the shuttle during separation, many years later the microscopic revision concluded that the flaws are nature of the foam, thus redeemed the company and up till then NASA officially apologize for all of the faults. But its too late, that disaster signaled the end of Space Shuttle program because no one in NASA found a way to fix that. Move cargo and Astronauts to ISS have to rely on super expensive Russia rockets (and they increased 150% of the price for US right after SS program terminated) up until Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon be approved.
That was nasa tho. People “trust the government” this is a private company so everyone and their dog has an opinion.
@@grn1Good on the guy for stepping up and basically saying "Yeah, no. NASA and its PR croneys are trying to talk out their asses, and hide the truth. Here's the truth:"
@@grn1 Yeah. He was the head of safety or something for Morton Thiokol The company that made the solid rocket boosters.
After watching about 6 videos in a row, this is legitimately my new favorite RUclips channel.
It pains me when I hear "We don't have the tools to test it so we don't have to"
This is exactly when they should have stopped using this composite hull.
or invented the tools, tested it, realized it was a paper tube and started again in steel
Yeah it's nuts, if you can't test it then it's not fit for service, it's not an excuse to use an untested concept.
Not even a series of scale models
That's when you have to develop a test that can be done without putting lives in danger.
Even just wrapping the sub in a steel cable net and filling the inside with cameras and microphones before lowering it down to your test depth or at least service depth would be better than just shrugging it off and putting people on board anyway.
"Move fast and break things" means TESTING things thoroughly until they break. With no one inside.
The idea that the sub didn't need testing because accidents are caused by operators reminded me of the story of survivorship bias in WW2 bombers.
The planes showed most bullet holes on the wings, so that's exactly where you don't want to put armour. The planes that got hit in the engines and the cockpit didn't come back to be involved in the study.
This makes me think more of the USN’s Mk 14 torpedo at the onset of the US’ entry into WWII.
@@Assassinus2The one that occasionally hit the submarine that launched it, and then failed to detonate?
@@Ma_Zhongying Not just subs, but also ships... The Mk14 failed because it never had any field testing pre-intro to the Navy, with this being due to cost-cutting & bureaucracy.
@@WT.....drachinifel did an amazing deep dive (heh) on the Mk14
@@Kumquat_Lord Yeah, I've seen it. As a history buff, it was really interesting.
I love that you call out Stockton Rush as a narcissist. As I learned of all the red flags and outright written warnings he ignored, I immediately came to the conclusion that he was a narcissist who simply thought he was smarter than every submersible engineer out there. It’s sad that his delusions got so many people killed, including himself.
A person who knew him thought he might have had a death wish
I've yet to see a CEO that wasn't a narcissist.
@@wenthulk8439he definitely was an adrenaline junkie. Usually those types love to have brushes with death.
His death was a feature, not a bug. Stockton was suicidal, according to a close friend. Oceangate's final voyage was a suicide/mass murder.
i am not sad that his hubris killed him. i am sad for those who did not know.
I love that this video covers DETAILS, and isn't just a media generic gloss over. Great job!
This reminds me of the story of Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned NASA and his company (Morton Thiokol) that Challenger was going to explode. He was sadly ignored because of the huge public interest in the mission, given the fact that Christa McAuliffe was on board.
Safety is secondary to the power of public relations(propaganda)
@Praisethesunson as someone who studied Public Relations, this is often how PR is treated by companies. They don't see us as a tool to spread good, but shut down the bad. Personally, that kind of PR is antithetical to my personal practice (although I'm not an official PR rep, I work in the comms industry). Regardless of which field/industry, we should never sacrifice our morals for money
@@Miss_Trillium I've seen trailers & teasers for war in Ukraine.
*reminds me
Not forgetting the saga of Boeing's 737 Max where safety concerns raised by engineers and test pilots were minimised and swept under the rug by senior management.
I am not trained in composites at all, but the second that i heard the first hand account of people who had been in the submarine saying that you could hear popping and banging noises as you went down and as you went up i knew exactly the failure mode, those sounds were without a doubt the layers delaminating from eachother
Yeah they said it was like fireworks going off
@orange42 I heard someone else compare it to .22 gunshots
If I heard that happening, he'd be getting a 1 star Yelp...
oh jeez, that is desperate. The more I hear about this death trap, the more despair I feel ....
The shuttles from The Cold Equations are the same type of engineering:
Zero margin of error, with deaths guaranteed.
10:57 the acoustic monitoring system in Titan was like a car alarm that alert you right when the car flipped so that the passengers can prepare for the upcoming crash.
Exactly! Because once a sub begins to have a structural failure like the tiniest fracture the whole thing can just implode within a split second. Like squeezing an empty soda can.
They would be dead before their ears registered the sound.
An acoustic emission system is well suited for predictive maintenance, especially in carbon fibre materials. CFRP emits plenty of ultrasound signals long before its failure. It is a rather complicated structural health monitoring system though and the way of interpreting the data is the most important part. It's used a lot on CFRP fuel tanks for rockets, which, to be fair, are loaded under tension and not compression. This video is a bit dismissive about acoustic emission testing in general, although I doubt they had experts to interpret the signals properly, which renders it pretty useless.
This line in their document justifying the decision not to test the vehicle pissed me off:
"The vast majority of marine accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure"
Yeah... maybe because THEY TEST THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY WONT FAIL MECHANICALLY.
I know you addressed this exact point in the video, i just needed to vent
I'm blown away by the quality of Real Enineering videos. One of the highest quality and most interesting youtube channels!
I had the same reaction after seeing the construction.
Four plus decades in aerospace composites design and prototyping, my first thought was WTF. My second was with the TEC's of carbon fiber, epoxy and titanium. Given both the temp and pressure differentials, it seemed insane to combine these materials in they method they did.
I thought the same thoughts! I was of the opinion that the transition between the titanium rings and the carbon fibre shell was the weak point due to the dissimilar physical properties of the rings and shell.
Reading this article showed that the end s of the shell also provided ingress point for the sea water to initiate delamination of the carbon fibre lay-ups.
What I find really inexcusable was the lack of investigation into the cracking sounds during previous dives. To me at least that would indicate carbon fibre failure which is a cumulative failure ultimately leading to catastrophic failure.
Is there a record of the locations where this cracking sound originated in he vessel?
yeah but MONEY
As a technically proficient layperson, my original thought was the C.F. center, and the Titanium endcaps would expand/contract at two different rates as the temps changed upon descent.
It turns out it was insane to combine those materials in the method they did
@@BasementEngineer Apparently the CEO expressly forbid any maintenance testing because it would potentially mean an official report showing a flaw with his design.
This incident is the reason professional engineers need to be so methodical, and is an example of the type of "she'll be right" shit we need to deal with from people that think they know better. Great video.
Engineers were not the problem, capitalism is the issue, it put stupid, spoiled men that have power because of inheritance in power and they can ignore what qualified engineers have said. This company fired and sued the guy that warned that this might happen.
Tesla is doing the same mistakes then this company and everyone is pretending it is all good, elon musk's rocket threw tons of garbage over enviromentally protected area and the real engineering keeps pretending it is alright.
I may not be a materials engineer, but as a mechanical engineer I was immediately concerned about that composite construction. I knew the compressive strength of composite isn't exactly incredible, and that if this hasn't been done before there's probably a good reason since composite is lightweight and inexpensive. This gives the technical knowledge that confirms those suspicions.
Also, one physical test is worth more than a thousand simulations. Simulations are great for cutting down on physical testing by identifying simple failure modes before you ever begin construction, but you need physical testing for more complex failure modes.
Your paper was spot on. My buddy at work did a PhD at a time on detecting destruction in the materials using ultrasound and he stated numerous times, that standard means do not work for composite materials, so they dissected aircraft hardware of different materials and tested each piece individually. Once I’ve heard that it was mostly titanium and carbon, the jigsaw puzzle was in place
When I was in the Navy, one of our instructors was asked, with the substantial benefits given to submariners, why he didn't join the submarine service.
He answered: "there is a natural law that says that what goes up must come down: there is no law that says that what goes down has to come back up."
finally a person who was in the navy with some sense
I guess buoyancy is a myth
@@Ruzzky_Bly4tyeah lol
@@Ruzzky_Bly4tYeah. Every sub that was torpedoed or had its pressure hull crushed by depth charges got buoyant and came back up.
So basically, he was a *ussy. How many US Navy submarines have sunk in the last 50 years? With that reasoning he should have joined the Army instead and stayed on earth.
My friend you inspire the current generation of engineers too. I made my way here from Legal Eagle and kinda surprised I hadn't seen your channel before! I'm a disabled civil/enviro engineer and I love seeing people make this type of content. You do a great service, thank you!
Legal Sméagol. Eww. 🤮
All those ghosts on the titanic probably thought it was weird that a couple more were joining them after over a century
My university dissertation was on how different projectile shapes and speeds effect carbon fibre at high velocity impacts. I did tonnes of research for my literature review on how CF reacts under pressure and impacts. When I heard the body of the vessel was made from CF I knew immediately what the failure was. CF isn’t a magic light weight material that’s just “better” than metal counterparts. At best it’s an alternative with different downsides.
You just said it all 👍
Thomas Sowell said "there are no improvements, only trade-offs" and I throw that around all the time.
I remember when I was a kid and just learned about carbon fiber and how amazing it is. I thought it was indestructible compared to "lesser" materials, and then I got my hands on a carbon fiber badminton racket...
I mean, it didn't break and still hasn't, but I could definitely snap it in half with some force. If little baby 12 year old me can figure that out, there's no excuse for anyone trying to actually build things with it.
As someone who has never had a day of engineering education, I surprised myself by actually understanding this video. All the credit goes to how skilled you are at explaining these high-level concepts in an understandable way. Thank you! :)
well now that one rich guy was trying to do what Stockton and ocean gate were trying to do with deep ocean exploration now knows that the experts telling him he was going to die and kill people if he went for it he is likely now looking at this and thinking thank god I listened to the warnings
The sign of someone who is a master of their craft is their ability to explain it to anyone.
@@mechcommander7876beautifully said
"Correlation does not imply causation" fits here perfectly, how they could even say that most accidents happen due to operator error is beyond me
They were likely talking about aviation accidents. They happen because of operator errors. Yes 737Max was an exception.
They happen because of operator errors, because we're testing machines before using them, we're testing people before using them as well, but machines are more reliable than humans are. Given that you TEST machines. Hence the stats
It's almost like asking "do they want MORE failures attributable to the vehicle itself?"
@@Stratelier It's the equivalent of saying "most 747s crash because of user error, which means if I jump off this cliff wearing two wing-shaped pieces of plywood I won't crash either."
this is the kind of stuff you learn in formal logic 101 makes me want to scream hearing that argument
I applaud your video which is roughly a year old now. Virtually all of my professional materials engineering experience was with metal pressure vessels and piping. Whilst not discounting anything you've said regarding delamination mode failures, I still have to wonder about the dissimilar joint between the titanium hemispheres and the composite cylinder. It looked from the videos that they were simply epoxied together. I have to wonder whether differential thermal expansion or differences in moduli of elasticity may have also been weak links, especially when cycled.
All the best.
Jaw-dropping to find out that someone had actually heard cracking noises coming from the hull in its early testing. One assumes that Rush and his team of yes-men persuaded themselves (with no way of knowing) that it was just the structure 'settling down'.
Yeah, somewhere in the various interviews their reasoning was something like "it's just some weak fibres snapping. once the weak stuff is gone, it's fine."
Snap crackle *POP*
@@Julia68yt I guess they didn't know that a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.
Excellent point that innovation isn't simply doing and hoping, it's doing and knowing. It's about really finding out what the limits are rather than flying blind and hoping it'll be all right.
I can't remember the full quote but Richard Feynman's comment at the space shuttle challenger hearings about how nature cannot be fooled comes to mind here.
Yeah charging in and hoping for the best is not smart.
Thank you for this video. I work in the space sector. Every single component of a spacecraft, every subsystem made up of those components, and finally the entire spacecraft, are tested rigorously. And I work with *uncrewed* spacecraft. The fact that they built a vessel with such hubris and put *people* in it baffles me.
Also in the space industry, and it is a bit surprising (but also not surprising) how much testing is done at EVERY step of the design and building process, even for unmanned craft like you said. And if things go even slightly off (not even outright bad), then at a bare minimum, there is days of deliberation and analysis to see if the outcome was acceptable, or if a fix/re-design, followed by more testing is required.
I work in the offshore industry including on SRS, it made me so angry to see this story. It's the first loss we've ever had as an industry.
"Moving fast and breaking stuff" means you have to break stuff, which is precisely what they didn't. It's a bit weird to blame that one on SpaceX, when what they are doing is blowing up rockets until they know they are save.
If Oceangate worked like SpaceX, they would have built a few hundred subs before putting people on it, while also building a very safe emergency procedure...
you even have a limited safety factor to work within 1.2 ish? (damn gravity). They had a safety factor limited by arrogance and greed.
Your point is so right, and I also notice and appreciate you using the terminology "crewed" instead of "manned"
Can't believe it's been more than a year since this happened and even funnier that some folks on the internet still make jokes about this cluster-f*ck of an incident.
If a catastrophic incident such as this implosion is expected to occur sooner or later, there is no way you can possibly label it an 'accident'!
I completely agree. An accident is ultimately to remove any culpability that OceanGate faces. This was essentially manslaughter.
I agree, but I suspect his legal team will compare them to traffic accidents.
Indeed, high-speed many-laned roads with pedestrian crossings have projected annual casualties too. Funnily enough those were originally viewed as negligent street design or vehicle operator regulation, but auto lobbying (much like with jaywalking) convinced people to think of them as accidents - acts of god, legally.
We're unfortunately quite deep into "you can't let a few deaths hold back progress!" mentality, at least a century. If not two, given all the boiler explosions in buildings and railways in the 19th century.
@@kaitlyn__L You should check the New Yorker article on this disaster. They did all kinds of crazy legal things, like classifying their passengers as workers.
Yup. There were no "passengers" onboard. They were "mission specialists".
Also the waiver included the phrases "injury or death" and "experimental vessel"
Its not an accident, it's a murder-suicide
Let this sink in. The official page of Oceangate Titan Submersibles stated that
"Titan’s unique ability to carry five people allows for multiple Mission Specialists, scientists and content experts to share a *_once-in-a-lifetime experience_* diving in the deep ocean."
let this sink in
What a dumb thing to quote.
Love the puns! You guys are crushing it
truly a once in a lifetime experience
@@rajrigby8385barrel of the bottom humor
"Move fast and break things" works when you're using un-manned ships.
SpaceX blew up many rockets, but all the ones with people on them have stayed assembled.
I remember someone commenting that the Starship being used the transport passengers around earth is never going to happen because it will be too easy for people to die. But if you build 100 ships and transport goods for 10 years with each ship doing a flight every week you would have 52,000 test flights. I can easily see terrestrial human transportation being validated by SpaceX.
And often they blew up after their primary mission has been completed successfully (the failed landing attempts being the most obvious example).
Exactly, the problem is when you get posers like Stockon who pretend to be innovators but they are not and most people are too dumb to figure it out.
Moreover, SpaceX's version of "move fast and break things" is part of a relentless cycle of design iteration - build, test (sometimes to failure), improve, repeat. It couldn't be more different from OceanGate, who didn't get as far as the "test" part, much less improving and iterating the design.
And most importantly, SpaceX work very closely with NASA and FAA, now they even have Gwynne Shotwell, a former Chief Engineer in NASA as the president and COO of SpaceX. Now with Shotwell in charge, i don't see any safety oversight can ever occur
To be fair to the game controller used as a steering device, there's a reason why it's a more widespread practice than you'd think. They are intuitive to use, easy to program to do whatever function they are used for, cheap to order in bulk and are standardized to be very easily replaceable, which makes them perfect for when you need to Steer a thing but don't need to design a separate mechanism for it.
Yeah but using bluetooth is idiotic
An off brand Chinese Bluetooth controller.
He saved maybe $30 on not getting a real Japanese Bluetooth controller like the military use.
A sub having zero backup systems is also insane, but there's a long list of insanity in this story.
As an Industrial Chemical Engineer, my mind immediately jumped to my materials classes I had in college when I heard about the carbon fiber composite used as the material of the hull, and it took me a few seconds of thinking to realize that a sudden catastrophic implosion occurred, and they'd passed the moment contact was lost. And this is a take away that I will always remember from my safety classes, regulations are there because of two possible things: a) we didn't know better and now we do; or b) someone was dumb enough to decide that rules didn't apply to them (basically fck around and find out). This was a clear example of the latter.
I love that you did your thesis on this type of problem and that of rush even reached out to you, he could have avoided murdering those people.
Multiple people tried to talk to Rush, even the employee that was fired for raising concerns.
But he was determined to get himself and his clients killed under the merciless weight of the ocean.
It wasn't that he didn't know; Rush actively ignored the advice he was given. Multiple times. And purposefully avoided hiring people who had lots of experience building this type of vessel.
His ego and desire to cut corners killed four other people and himself.
This wasn't murder, it was manslaughter
I'm so happy you got to use your Masters thesis in this topic! Bet it was hard for you not to make this a ten-hour video though, discussing all the fine details of void propagation etc...
Ok?
im not joking here as i am a boat builder of 4 decade and a marine mech. The younger college/uni levers even at masters level know knothing of composites. They are taught very basic level stuff especially the layup phase. Nowadays a computer tells them whats what they dont understand what they are looking at or how composites actually behave. I'll give you an example, We got a boat in that had been completely refurbished by a start-up company, then fell apart within 3yr. The owner then demanded his cash back and a long drawn out process happened where he had to force them to hand over the blueprints for the refurbishment, materials and all. They were ran by two postgraduates and had a workforce that read as a family&mates list. They were so bad at it they never knew the difference between a layering up resin (aka polyester or vinylester) and a bonding and layering resin (aka proper epoxy resin the amine type) so they had basically used the polyester resin on its own as a transom bonder and to oversize plug all the fitment holes so they could redrill them to accept the new fitting. They used a powder bound 400gm chop strand with a polyester resin not realising the powder bound was for proper epoxy. Then they made a total disaster of the transom from the re-design stage. The boat was originaly outshaft motor that was converted to an outboard transom by them and they didnt have a clue. Bet they could push a mouse about or a pen about and mumble a bunch of figures they got partially right on the subject. Also a vast amount of students now are activist types and you dont want to be in the sea with anything they have designed or made. Infact thats whats happened here.
We are here for the 10 hour video when it comes.
@@bigduphusaj162Thats super interesting, thanks for sharing
@@bigduphusaj162I don't think engineering degrees are infested with the activist type.
No offense but you're a bitter old dude if you think that of the entire younger generation of academics.
It should be noted that some of the critical failure modes are resin dominated not fiber dominated. E.g peel stresses at the edges of voids under compression loads. The resin itself at the peeling edge has a tension component. As the void propogates under this out of plane opening load the margin to catastrophic buckling diminishes. And low temp curing resin properties are poor. This is why 350F curing and higher is the norm in aircraft parts, for both prepreg and resin infusion. Note 787 a350 wing upper skins and stringers are in compression but millions of fasteners !!
I'm not an engineer, but from everything I've seen and read about this, it's hard to call this an accident. The CEO was warned multiple times that this was an accident waiting to happen. He didn't care.
If the CEO is alive right now he would be charged up the ass for ignoring and out right refusing too follow set maritime regulations and safety protocols, plus he would be charged for Involuntary manslaughter, enough to put him behind bars considering the named individuals on the Sub, not counting the CEO himself.
The CEO knew the dive would end in a disaster. That is what he wanted, and he wanted to do down with the ship - literally. There is a reason he put the word "gate" at the end of his company's name. Nothing good has ever come out of a thing called gate. None.
@@morpheus6749 It's hard for me to believe that he actually wanted the result he got. i think he just thought he could cut corners and things would be okay. If he was *expecting* disaster, I don't think he would've gone down himself.