Watched the documentary.

It was the CEO’s owners fault.

He fired all the staff that told him it’s not safe.

Hubris killed him and others.

He registered it out of the United States to avoid our safety rules.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
Sound underwater travels at approximately 1500 meters per second, so to travel 900 miles (which is roughly 1,448,000 meters), it would take around 965 seconds (or about 16 minutes).

Calculation:
900 miles = 1,448,000 meters [conversion]
Speed of sound underwater = 1500 meters/second
Time = Distance / Speed = 1,448,000 meters / 1500 meters/second = 965 seconds

cliffy Claven is that you?

quote:

Originally posted by PR64:
Watched the documentary.

It was the CEO’s owners fault.

He fired all the staff that told him it’s not safe.

Hubris killed him and others.

He registered it out of the United States to avoid our safety rules.

Its a shame that due to the CEO's pride, arrogance and greed multiply people lost their lives. Unfortunately pride, greed and arrogance ends up killing a lot of innocent people in one way or another.

How Oceangate's Titan Ignored 60 Years of Solid Engineering

This was such a fundamentally flawed vehicle that even if a passenger had done minimal research before signing up, they could have seen lot's of warning signs.
Carbon composite construction is an amazing product for appropriate uses but this was the opposite of that in every way.

quote:

Carbon composite construction is an amazing product for appropriate uses but this was the opposite of that in every way.

Yet:

quote:

But a Rhode Island company that specializes in building carbon fiber pressure vessels for submersibles has compiled an impressive record of safety and reliability that says the material can be used in this application, as long as the vessel is designed and tested properly.


Composite Energy Technologies (CET) provides carbon fiber pressure vessels to commercial and government customers such as the Office of Naval Research that have never failed in their dives to much deeper sites than Titanic, said president Chase Hogoboom in an interview with Design News.

So let's stop blaming something that does work when done properly, and focus the blame where it really belongs.

quote:

So let's stop blaming something that does work when done properly, and focus the blame where it really belongs.

NTSB report as of October 2, 2025

https://www.ntsb.gov/investiga.../Reports/MIR2536.pdf

quote:

3.2 Probable Cause

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause
of the hull failure and implosion of the submersible Titan was OceanGate’s
inadequate engineering process, which failed to establish the actual strength and
durability of the Titan pressure vessel and resulted in the company operating a
carbon fiber composite vessel that sustained delamination damage that was
subsequently exacerbated by additional damage of unknown origin, resulting in a
damaged internal structure that subsequently led to a local buckling failure of the
pressure vessel. Contributing were US and international voluntary guidance and US
small passenger vessel regulations that were insufficient to ensure OceanGate
adhered to established industry standards. Also contributing was OceanGate’s
flawed analysis of their pressure vessel monitoring system data, which led to their
continued operation of a damaged pressure vessel.

quote:

Originally posted by a1abdj:

quote:

Carbon composite construction is an amazing product for appropriate uses but this was the opposite of that in every way.

Yet:

quote:

But a Rhode Island company that specializes in building carbon fiber pressure vessels for submersibles has compiled an impressive record of safety and reliability that says the material can be used in this application, as long as the vessel is designed and tested properly.


Composite Energy Technologies (CET) provides carbon fiber pressure vessels to commercial and government customers such as the Office of Naval Research that have never failed in their dives to much deeper sites than Titanic, said president Chase Hogoboom in an interview with Design News.

So let's stop blaming something that does work when done properly, and focus the blame where it really belongs.

Yup, if only EVERYTHING could've been done completely differently!

Nuclear sub hulls are normally made of steel and that should have been a hint.

quote:

Yup, if only EVERYTHING could've been done completely differently!

quote:

Nuclear sub hulls are normally made of steel and that should have been a hint.

If you'd have taken the time to read the report, there's absolutely nothing in it that says that carbon fiber is/was an improper material.

It did cite improper engineering, improper testing, flaws during the manufacturing process, damage caused during use and storage, and improper processes to address that damage as causes which led to the accident during the 88th dive. If those issues were applied to any other construction material, I suspect the results would be identical.

Despite the fact that the investigation did not cite the carbon fiber material itself as the cause, and the fact that there are other successful deep sea submersibles using carbon fiber, some will continue to insist it was the material.

^^ I made NO claim, other than that they did everything wrong!

"Improper engineering, improper testing, flaws during the manufacturing process, damage caused during use and storage, and improper processes to address that damage as causes which led to the accident during the 88th dive"...Sooo, Improper EVERYTHING!

If you look at pictures of the bathyscaphe Trieste that went three times as deep as this craft, the part that hangs underneath is the crew compartment. It is spherical in shape.

The problem with Carbon fiber is that while it is lightweight and very strong, it has very poor impact resistance making it not the correct material for a submersible. So while it "may" be strong enough, if it bumps into anything even relatively small, it would weaken and/or delaminate the carbon fiber and lose a lot of it's strength. If impacted even with a relatively small object, it tends to delaminate and it cuts it's strength greatly.

It's used in my industry on race boats as well as non load bearing panels and such to save weight on high performance and/or low draft boats (flats fishing boats where less weight equals less draft).

Out where the Titanic is, and other places you'd use a submersible like this, the sea state is generally going to be fairly rough, so craning and loading a submersible onto and off of the deck of a ship, it's going to be swinging around on the lifting bridle and chances are at some point in time it will impact the deck or side of the ship or anything else, as the mothership rolls and it's swinging around on the lifting mechanism. Which with steel, aluminum or most other materials it would be a non-event, with Carbon fiber can be catastrophic.

"Carbon fiber offers superior tensile strength (3.5–6.0 GPa) and stiffness (Young’s Modulus up to 800 GPa), but is brittle under impact. It tends to crack or shatter when subjected to sudden force, making it less suitable for high-impact environments."
https://www.fibreglast.com/blo...nd-impact-resistance

"Although CFRP laminates typically made from pre-pregs have many distinct advantages over conventional materials, they are susceptible to interfacial damage from low-velocity impact events (e.g. tool dropping and impact erosion of small external foreign object debris) [4]. When subjected to impact loading, CFRPs degrade through various failure modes, including matrix cracking, fibre pull-out/breakage, and delamination due to inherent brittleness and poor toughness in the resin-rich regions between adjacent plies [5], [6], [7]. Delamination is one of the most critical failure modes of laminar composites, which can significantly reduce the compressive strength and stiffness because laminar CFRPs with delamination cracks can easily suffer from further crack growth under compression. The result of delamination (often not shown on the composite surface) can be catastrophic, particularly in the aerospace industry where structural failures may result in air disasters [8]. Therefore, any potential structural failures should be carefully prevented in design, manufacturing and maintenance processes."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...ii/S1359835X22000124

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