Posted on 06/21/2023 8:43:31 AM PDT by Red Badger
As time runs out for the passengers on the Titan submersible that went looking deep into the sea for wreckage of the Titanic, a last-ditch effort involving heavy machinery and submarines arrived in Newfoundland on Tuesday night.
Three C-17 aircraft from the U.S. Air Force reportedly landed at a cargo terminal in St. John’s, Newfoundland, carrying unmanned vehicles capable of going 19,000 feet underwater as well as two heavy-duty Hyundai winches emblazoned “6000 kg line pull,” a huge roll of cable, and two large machines that said “high voltage” on their sides, The Daily Mail reported. A forklift truck loaded the equipment onto six flatbed trucks.
The equipment was taken to a port where a ship dubbed the Horizon Arctic was scheduled to leave at midnight, although the journey to the area where Titan is submerged would take 15 hours. The Titan may be as deep as 12,000 feet below the surface and weighs 10,432 kg, so both winches would be necessary to pull it out.
Late Tuesday night, “banging sounds” were reported coming in 30-minute intervals near where the Titan went missing with its passengers: billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, and Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Sulaiman Dawood, 19.
“RCC Halifax launched a P8, Poseidon, which has underwater detection capabilities from the air,” the Department of Homeland Security said in an e-mail. “The P8 deployed sonobuoys, which reported a contact in a position close to the distress position. The P8 heard banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes. Four hours later additional sonar was deployed and banging was still heard.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Capt. Jamie Frederick with the Coast Guard’s 1st District estimated that the passengers aboard the Titan had limited oxygen left. “We know there’s about 40 hours of breathable air left based on that initial report,” he said.
Acknowledging that the search area was “larger than the state of Connecticut,” he added that his estimate of the remaining oxygen was based on OceanGate Expeditions saying that the Titan had a 96-hour life support system, meaning the oxygen would run out at roughly 5 a.m. ET on Thursday.
Another concern regarding the passengers comes from the fact that a 2022 report by CBS correspondent David Pogue said the Titan’s hatch is sealed by an external crew with 17 bolts, so they cannot open the hatch from the inside.
And I don’t fly plastic airplanes for that reason either.
Fatigue fracture mechanics is a very difficult and expensive process for relatively homogeneous steel products. I am not sure it can be done or known at all for the characteristics of carbon fiber materials. I have always seen them like the solid state electronics of the materials world. They give little or no warning before failure and they fail completely and quickly with no residual strength.
I can FORTRAN with the best but never learned HTML so here is a link to a carbon fiber epoxy stress strain curve, there is no curve, just linear stress strain until WHAM! failure.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Carbon-Epoxy-Composite-Stress-Strain-Curve_fig1_277640805
They are also good in tension to failure, not so much in compression.
No, of course not, and thought the same thing. BUT, it is excellent for future training, equipment, and knowledge. OJT.
I remember a scene from "The Right Stuff" (1984) where the Mercury astronauts insisted on a hatch to their space capsule. The NASA engineers were going to just send them up in a tin can and pry it open upon splashdown.
But much to the chagrin of the engineers, the astronauts insisted on a hatch so that they would have the ability to blow it out if they felt they needed to. Otherwise, they were not going to go up in it.
The astronauts ended up getting their hatch. It did come in handy for Gus Grissom on a later mission.
This is a phenomenon I observed in both my military and civilian careers. I refer to them as, "square wheel visionaries." They are people so hell bent on being perceived as innovators and, "outside the box" thinkers that they will make sweeping changes merely for the sake of change, even if there are very sound, established reasons for doing things, "the old way."
They are not clever enough to come up with new methods or practices that are actual improvements, they are satisfied with simply abandoning an old practice regardless of the sh!t storm it may cause.
They are people who would state, "Humanity has been using round wheels for thousands of years. This is old tech and outdated thinking. Tomorrow we begin using square wheels."
In Thresher they tried statistical inspection. Statistically it was safe. In practice, somewhere in the welds they didn’t inspect was the same frequency of failure that they found in the statistical limited inspection.
Each generation learns hard lessons the hard way.
In theory, Theory and Practice are identical.
In practice, they are different.
It seems to be a disease born of extreme wealth coupled with stupidity. More houses, more yachts, more extreme vacations or hobbies all in a search for what? Satisfaction? To outdo someone? An obligation because that is just what you do when you have stupid money?
Money is like manure, it does no good unless you spread it around. Maybe this is their way? Seems dumb to me. Dumb and irresponsible, they have made others spend time, money and perhaps lives to compensate for what I see as irresponsible folly. Not the first or the last.
I know HTML and few others, but never did learn ancient languages.
” Just as remote but outer space doesn’t crush you.”
It still ravages your body.
“Dumb and irresponsible, they have made others spend time, money and perhaps lives to compensate for what I see as irresponsible folly. Not the first or the last.”
Exactly. And over the years (or decades), in addition to wasting taxpayer money on rescues like this...I’ve also seen people lose their lives trying to rescue such thrill-seekers. And no, I definitely don’t like that.
Everyone makes their own choices in life. If I choose to put my own life in danger, I don’t expect others to have to pay to rescue me if or when things go south.
If expecting others to take responsibility for their own stupid choices makes me a “bad person”...I’ll take that hit.
This whole “rescue” thing is sure getting a lot of media attention. It’s almost as if they’re trying to distract people from some recent event like an enormous, reeking travesty of justice.
Does the Titan have a cable attachment point?
If they are on the bottom, opening the hatch would be meaningless.
“In Thresher they tried statistical inspection. Statistically it was safe. In practice, somewhere in the welds they didn’t inspect was the same frequency of failure that they found in the statistical limited inspection.”
Related to the Thresher, they totally underestimated to force of the explosions it was subjected to.
“If they are on the bottom, opening the hatch would be meaningless.”
Impossible.
True, anything below 10 feet there is a ton of water above you.
A lot of the comments here are from people who inhabit an imaginary world where your feels can neutralize chemistry and physics.
This is, of course, a growing problem in society.
“Carbon fiber bicycles develop stress fractures over time. The material fails catastrophically as stress fractures form. It happens suddenly, and without warning.”
Not to quality bikes.
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