“He says the crew is now dead, and he seems very credible.”
The CEO had an idea, a vision and the money to carry it out. What he didn’t understand is what he didn’t know. There’s a reason those other companies hired the fifty-year-old white, former submariners. They had a career training for and living in a dangerous environment. There are actually black submariners, but retired ones too are fifty years old.
The navy keeps track of the number of dives and the depth they go to because the stress of those dives adds up and limits the lifespan of the sub’s hull. This particular sub had a carbon hull apparently designed by a former NASA engineer. I’m sure the designer calculated the stresses, but did he take into account the cumulative effect of those stresses? Probably not because he wasn’t, apparently, a naval engineer. Again, someone who doesn’t know what it is that he doesn’t know. I ran into this problem throughout my career; top level managers who had some knowledge about something but did not know what it was they didn’t know. It seemed the less they knew the more certain they were that their crazy idea, whatever it was, would work.
Underwater sonar is picking up sounds like music . . it’s the theme song from Gilligans Island and the refrain “A three hour tour, a three hour tour” increased in volume. Nobody knows what to make of it.