Oceangate Titan: analysis of an insultingly predictable failure
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มิ.ย. 2024
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A preview of a world where 'regulation does not stifle innovation'. I wanted to clear up some points that have been widely misreported whilst discussing how mechanical failures of subsea vessels have been avoided for decades until now. This video could have been hours long if I spoke about everything in length, so consider it a brief summary.
I speak in present tense during the video, but it was made public that the crew are deceased as the video was rendering. Despite the remarkable predictability of this failure, the families of the victims have my sympathy.
Sources used:
2022 documentary showing previous dive
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001...
Dave Lochridge court case against Oceangate
media.wbur.org/wp/2023/06/ans...
Oceangate's youtube channel (I doubt this will exist for much longer):
/ @oceangateinc
James Cameron's choice words about the incident:
• "Titanic" filmmaker Ja...
Alvin DSV abridged operating procedures. The entire WHOI site for Alvin was used for research:
www.whoi.edu/marine/PDF/ATL%2...
SUBSAFE: The US Navy's comprehensive safety program for submarine's. Originated from a broadly similar accident (USS Thresher) in the 1960's):
history.nasa.gov/columbia/Tro...
An informed summary from someone with far far more experience than me:
• The Titan Tragedy
A Review on Structural Failure of Composite Pressure Hulls in Deep Sea
www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/10/10/...
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:40 Communicating Risk
05:10 'The Hull Is Solid'
11:05 'Not Safety Critical'
17:40 Other Factors
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REUPLOAD WITH IMPROVED AUDIO HERE:
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A few corrections. I'll try to keep these updated as and when more info becomes available:
> The audio quality is terrible. Sorry, I'll fix that going forward.
> On reflection, I’m not sure whether my statement that the CBS reporter was ‘not at fault’ is true. I should not have presented that as a fact. Whether it was a case of negligent or irresponsible reporting is a matter for the viewer to decide.
> There is a video clip circulating of Stockton demonstrating smoke hoods. So at least there was minimal contingency in case of fire and contamination of breathing gas. They look quite similar to the ones issued on offshore oil platforms and those provided 15 minutes of filtration. So emphasis on 'minimal'.
> Some more recent footage shows the Titan with protective cowlings around the thrusters. There are still exposed cables but the entanglement hazard may not have been as dramatic as presented here.
> I don't know why I insist on trying to say 'inhomogeneous' when most people just say 'heterogeneous'. I've always used the former for some bizarre reason.
> Steel is correctly referred to as an 'alloy' not a 'metal'.
> It appears the Challenger Deep did have an externally sealable hatch. As this is an entirely different 'class' of DSV, I did not consider it directly comparable.
> There are typos on the last slide: 'Thrusters' and 'navigation'.
Just ask any gamer if they've had a controller give them problems. Then ask if they would risk their lives upon any game controller.
As an additional thought: I repaired computers for awhile. Plug in boards are fine for non life dependant applications. The same for the quick plub designs for units within the systems. Yet, there certain functions that I would insist be specially designed and applied with hard-wiring.
It's interesting that even though I've smelled some BS on the BOP story I still gave you some benefit of the doubt, thus proving your point. In another setting I think I would have pressed for more data. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind for a BOP that almost did not fail...
@@wakcackle3555 My Valve Index had stick drift. And that cost $1000.
really illuminating video, i enjoyed it even if the audio quality wasn't that great.
just wanted to note on your final comment, while i agree with your sentiment that this techbro attitude of "move fast and break things" can be dangerous. i don't believe it has to be. making a lot of prototypes and breaking them can be the faster way to progress (if more expensive and resource-heavy). but it's only fine as long as the things you're breaking don't have people in them (until the design is solidified and certified) or aren't inside people, or ARE people.
i think a good example of this is something like falcon 9 and the dragon capsule, very rapid iteration, multiple test failures, but also a rigorous adherance to safety protocols when human lives are involved.
great video btw, just wanted to play devil's advocate for a bit.
James Cameron said it best: "Now there's a wreck lying next to another wreck for the same damn reason."
Titanic was named after Titan.. How ironic? Lots hubris in both situations.
Never underestimate the power of the sea.
@@penguinsmoviessea is for fishing and is for landing I guess 😊
@@SeanAbbey its the curse of the " wreck of the titan" novel , the same novel that was written before titanic sank in the 1800s and foretold the tale of a liner called the titan that sank due to iceberg in very similar circumstances
Except the Titanic was build solid at the actual state of the art.
This idea that "safety certification is not necessary because accidents are so rare" is peak survivorship bias.
I think it borders racism 😂, that submarine was Rrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecist
yes...not doing the things you need to do to keep it small is cosmic stupidity
more like: "Accidents are so rare because safety certification is so useful"
"Well, I'm alive, so government & regulation is stupid!" Galaxy brain thinking here.
@@mattmanmcfee36😂❤❤❤
The reason why ,most failures were due to operator error is because rigorous testing prevented mechanical failures.
This is a half truth. Humans are lazy, w like to take shortcuts, and sometimes these are unsafe.
Or someone drove the car too fast...
...something is always happening somewhere.
Nuts bolts and... Nuts.
@@thehippiedog5956 Put the bong down.
@@aluisious Put the pills down and learn instead of scoffing.
The news is a foolish thing...
Infact it is and has been proven to be propaganda.
Piss you off and you will keep watching? Glued to the thing?
Brainwashing is not American. But it is a fools endeavor...
Wonder how I figured that out? Hummmmmmmmmmmmm...
Side effects may include so many things that it takes a whole minuet or a whole novel to explain it to ya :-)
As someone who literally drove a military submarine, we do not use game controllers. There is a whole system in place that includes an emergency function
I’m pinning this for a while because I’m absolutely sick of World of Warships players telling me that multi billion dollar nuclear submarines are driven by game controllers.
I can confirm. We do not use game controllers
@@non5566i can’t fathom a professional driving a deep sea vessel with like an xbox controller 😂😂
@@shastamccoy7777 No, they do not. Learn what the fuck context is. "I literally murdered seventeen children and blew up the French sanitation system for concert tickets." vs "You literally know what the fuck they're saying but choose to be a pedantic twat."
Imagine the controller breaks and you can't pilot your billion dollar submarine🤣
the CEO literally said that safety is needlessly prioritized over innovation and then he proceeded to innovate himself and others to death
Pity it wasnt only him
It would probably wins a Darwin Award if he was the only one onboard.
Many of the CEOs comments sound like rewording of comments from Cave Johnson of the Portal games. That is not someone I would want to sound like in any business.
Well he definitely had a point.
If safety was our number one priority then man would never have found the Americas, climbed Everest or flew to the moon.
We'd all be living in padded cell rooms deep underground. In fact we wouldn't be born at all because child birth is so dangerous.
@@icedownjb well, other than acting. or confidence schemes, I guess.
I worked at Boeing up until I retired a couple of years ago. One thing I noticed was a trend of placing and ever decreasing amount of value on experience. The idea was to send people to lots of classes for a few weeks and they would come out ready to show people with decades of experience how planes really gets built. It was a philosophy of "think outside the box" without understanding the box, what's in the box, and why the box is the way that it is. This tragedy as well as other things seems to show this is in far to much of the business world.
I also worked at Boeing
I worked at a sports car manufacturer and it was the same there
even simple concepts such as false positives in testing is beyond their understanding
"planes gets built"? if Boeing is employing illiterate hillbillys this poor sub didn't stand a chance
This plague is not confined to high tech industries, I have worked in the automotive and home interior manufacturing industries, and in both cases, the number of 25 year old girls that come through the door as 'managers', 'consultants', 'seniors', even 'engineers', is ridiculous - and as you say, they just have been through a load of courses, barely any of them even know how to tie a shoelace.
I've worked in production for decades, mainly automotive and PCB manufacturing. Recently, I worked building the Light Rail Transit here in Ottawa. They hired young diverse inspired folk who didn't even know how to use a drill and didn't know what a flat-head screwdriver was, I had to teach them while they rolled their eyes. I then got fired for whistleblowing as they pushed deadlines and skipped steps. They fired 5 of us at once, all 50 something white men.
Now, the train is routinely offline, derailing because of overlooking torquing the wheel bolts, design issues that stop the train in cold weather, etc.
Stockton Rush once said "safety is just pure waste" I nominate this man for a Darwin Award!
Out of context quote, not much better with context, but definitely more understandable with it.
Didnt even get a chance to eat those words
I would be shocked if this cowboy did not win the 2023 Darwin Awards.
@@unf3z4nt do winners need to be present for the award ? Cozz. Uhhhh. Slight issue there
Why do I have a feeling that quote is either inaccurate or wildly out of context?
I'm glad you mentioned the Challenger disaster because that was the exact parallel I thought of, particularly Richard Feynman's admonition that "for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
I like working in fields where if you're bullshitting, reality will call you out. I fix semiconductor fab equipment. If I don't fix it, I'll know.
Banking, HR, management...they're all bullshit fields where you'll either never know if you're doing the wrong thing, or can just argue that you didn't.
@@aluisious The challenger disaster was send em and see what happens. Don't think we can get any closer than that to this debacle...
Crack bang, drop weight blow the tanks and?
Too late...
th-cam.com/video/iMX5wi7Vz0Q/w-d-xo.html
@aluisious Good point. I've been a recruiter and a paramedic. I bet you can imagine which field reality reigned me in.
@@mikeschwartz1764The one where you trade stories of what people stuck up their asses ;)
"He's dead."
"Nah...he's just resting his eyes."@@mikeschwartz1764
Engineer: “But sir, it’s impossible to test for such defects in carbon fiber composite”
Rush: “Great, let’s use that then.”
And that’s exactly how that conversation went..
I remember Rush said some quote from MacArthur about breaking rules.
Like, bruh. MacArthur was a general. He wasn’t held to the rules of Mother Nature. How does an engineer not get that simple logic.
It's not impossible, as mentioned in the video. Defects in carbon fiber structures can be detected. It's not done in the aviation industry because its incredibly difficult to get to the components that need to be inspected with the large and bulky equipment (thought there are many projects working on miniaturisation). Testing a large cylinder would have been a simple and straightforward task. Not sure why Oceangate didn't do this. But I don't understand why they used carbon fiber for the pressure vessel, given that carbon fiber is not well suited to pressure loads, but rather is usually used in situations where traction loads occur.
As if you were right there when the conversation was going on. You were NOT there and I am exactly correct.
@@sebastianbenner977 I'm puzzled why they chose CF. High strength under tension and light weight makes it ideal for aviation purposes, but I fail to see how either property is relevant for a submersible. Can't see it being cheaper than steel either. I'm admittedly only an armchair engineer.
Also, that video of them gluing stuff together... wow. Would it kill them to wear a hair net? I put more thought into keeping my garage projects clean, and most of those don't routinely need to withstand 400 atmospheres.
Carbon fiber parts in the airplane industry are routinely tested with ultrasound on a strict schedule.
100% correct, this narcissist hired young people because he didn't want 50-year-olds talking back to him.
He also said he wouldn't hire old white men because they are uninspiring.... 😂
Not to mention millionaire who wasn't used to being told "no". I'll hazard a guess that the investigation will show the failure happened either at the tube/titanium ring interface, or the tube where they drilled self tapping screws into it to hold the monitors.
@@yammy1000 obviously they are not dumb enough to screw a monitor into the hull. its in insulation. but given how he went home depot or whatever to buy parts i wonder why they didnt bring plastic camping chairs. would it be to heavy? :P
@@yammy1000 Carbon fiber is strong under tension, not compression. I'd wager the entire fiber "hull" catastrophically imploded.
And no Professional Submariners!
theranos also hired young/inexperienced engineers. One older engineer they did hire famously had issues with the way the company was being run. RIP Ian Gibbons.
They hire young because a person fresh into their field from school is much more likely to listen to their superiors without too much question, after all, their superiors have more experience and would probably know more about how things work outside of schooling
They also hire young to save cost, but I think that's less egregious then potentially ruining the careers of up-and-comers by having them work on your bullshit
I was let go from a company known to prefer younger designers and engineers. I was about to turn 40. In America, 40+ is a protected class, and that's one incentive, the other was I was known for insisting on safety over reducing time cost because we were manufacturing structures that could pose risk to life and client assets.
It's a common thread when cutting corners.
Young people also think outside the box and are armed with up to date knowledge since they just got out of school. They also have more stamina and can work for longer, think harder and are payed less than someone with 40 years of experience in the field.
It only logical to hire them who will be with the company for the next 40 years over older professionals who will be asking for much higher pay, aren't up to date on the technology thought in schools and will just retire after a few years anyways.
He was a good man. RIP.
Did they kill him?
Your point about the cheap fins you used is a great life lesson. The risks are not always obvious; the seemingly innocuous can be linked in a chain of events too.
Talking about "small" failings leading to disaster .... the RMS Titanic itself didn't have any binoculars in the forward lookout's crow's nest. The resultant lack of forward visibility is often stated as one of the reasons the 'berg was not seen soon enough.
Swiss cheese model!
@@effylevenand it's wrong because binoculars are great if you **know** where to look. They're great for seeing details, but if you have no clue what's coming you are just pointlessly narrowing your field of vision
@loloblue9646 in addition to narrowing the field of view, they have significantly larger lenses, making it possible to collect much more light from a given object than your naked eyes.
Owning a decent set of large binoculars they can make observations at night better than my uni assisted eyes, but you need good glass, coatings and such@@kyrresjbk7876
The part about getting to 4k depth and then realizing that their thrusters were on backwards gave me chills. That should’ve been a wake up call to the CEO and everyone else that they need to have higher standards for safety and testing. It’s like jumping out of a plane and realizing that your parachute is on upside-down.
In the same documentary….and I cant believe I’m saying this….they all contemplate staying on the seabed overnight and sleeping there. A single member of the crew vetos them and talks them out of it.
@@Alexander-the-ok wow... not even "plan the dive and dive the plan"... something you need to do at 12 feet let alone 12000
@justalex4687 the idea of sleeping next to the Titanic. My skin is crawling now thanks
I always checked my parachute, just in case.... Seriously, the whole story is horrifying. Rest easy people :(
I don't know which is more jaw dropping. The incompetence of the thruster installed backwards, or the incompetence of using the off-the-shelf gaming controller that ironically let them fix the problem to get back to the surface.
There's always a tension between the development engineers and the safety engineers. The kind of resentment that Rush felt is typical in R&D environments. This is a story about a development engineer being allowed to operate without adult supervision.
@adamwhiteson6866 I can understand that, safety costs money, a lot. Takes away from the overall budget, and puts the brake on meeting project completion goals. But better to have a safety culture with cost or time overruns than a ruined company and no job.(Imagine having Oceangate as your sole previous employer on the resume). BTW Rush had nothing much in the way of qualification or experience related to deep sea AQUAnautics. He had an undergrad degree in aerospace engineering, and then only 2 or so years as an entry level test pilot engineer before he left that and went on to get a Masters in business administration, followed by a stint in venture capital investment. So at best, I'd call him an inexperienced and unqualified engineer, whose only real skill was spin doctoring, not managing a project of this type, or managing a company.
@@gailmcn Wow. Of course ! Business admin and 'venture capital investment' . That's what we need to build passenger craft .
So much of the process makes you face palm so much your forehead develops a dent
Except he didn't develop anything.
The resentment in this case yielded an interesting court document: OCEANGATE INC v DAVID LOCHRIDGE (Case 2:18-cv-01083-RAJ)
One of my college professors worked at the company that built the rockets for challenger. When they got the parts of the rockets back to analyze, they realized that the o-rings (specifically the joints of the rockets around them) had failed drastically. Last year when he was lecturing about his experience, he was one of the people most angry about what happened. Allegedly, there had been concerns from the engineers and scientists building the rockets that the launch day should have been pushed back as the day/evening prior it had gotten cold enough to have ice form on the launch pad. This would have heavily impacted the performance of the o-rings. However, the thought is that NASA went ahead (even after being told of the issues) as Reagan’s state of the union speech was supposed to be on the same day as challenger and he wanted to brag at it about successfully launching challenger. I got me quite a little emotional watching my professor talk about bc you could tell what happened was still with him even nearly four decades later.
I bet your professor knew that they tried to shut up the engineers and then used them as fall guys while management branded them as disloyal traitors instead of whistle-blowers.
What I really hate about Columbia was that the exact same “it’ll be fine” attitude caused another accident.
Why don't we go further back to the origins of the STS and realise the whole thing was dramatically different from what it was supposed to be, and as a result, as post 2000 NASA report says, the final form of the shuttle was nonsensical and it would have been far more efficient to invest the same money in single use vehicles and development of Saturn V?
The Soviets came to very same conclusion much earlier. The Soviet evaluation was that the Shuttle makes absolutely no sense unless built specifically for the purpose of kidnapping and bringing back to Earth enemy spacecraft, so they built Buran not because it made sense, but only to have a symmetric response. Yet the propulsion system, the Energia rocket, was designed with ability to use as a standalone launch system.
That’s nonsense. Provide sources.
@@TakeNoteOfThat Me? I can do that!
I like to work with epoxy as a hobby, and I can tell you as a matter of fact that if you do not use a special pump in the process to remove bubbles and just heat it, there will always be bubbles left. They thought that building such a big pump would be to expensive, so they just heat it. (This is my second language, please forgive me if I made any mistakes)
Your English is perfect.
agreed as someone who also does resin as a little side hobby, also your english was perfect :]
Your English is good, as far as I can tell there are only two (minor) errors.
"Such a big pump would be to expensive" should be "Such a big pump would be too expensive"
"So they just heat it" should be "so they just heated it"
The type of epoxy used in aerospace carbon fiber is kind of self-heating via chemical reaction, and it is indeed “cooked” once layered and shaped. I believe Boeing has their own giant autoclaves that heat the material and bond the epoxy to the layers of material.
@@nyanbinary1717Boeing is also under investigation for shoddy construction as well.
I distinctly remember learning about fatigue thresholds and why carbon fiber engine parts are only good for race engines which are rebuilt quite often. Carbon fiber is a miracle material, but only in certain circumstances and with proper maintenance. When I saw how the pressure vessel was made, and learned how many dives they had done seemingly without repair, I knew exactly why it failed.
They are miracle materials because its a miracle when you can use them, they work as you expect them and you come in under the costs of your project.
Usually you fail at step 2 or 3.
The most basic issue is - it's great in tension, terrible in compression. Great for engines or scuba tanks- but mad to use in this case.
I am a mountain biker and have never been keen on carbon fibre, despite the obvious weight advantages. Those frames tend to fail catastrophically when they do fail, which as he points out in the video is no laughing matter if you are hurtling down a rocky trail. Amateur riders obviously aren't getting their frame x-rayed every week.
@@thehillsidegardener3961Having descended more than a few rocky trails on a MTB, I can tell you that catastrophic failure of your carbon fiber frame is just about the least of your worries.
@@wulf67 Having broken the neck of my femur coming off my (aluminium) bike, I am not disagreeing!
The squeegee on the adhesive is what got me. Terrifying tbh.
I work with glue for automotive cameras - controlled environment, cleanroom, positive displacement pump, CNC dispenser, 100% machine vision check, 100% bubble test, 100% height check, 100% min/max radius, sample pull test per shift, closed-loop power controlled UV curing, samples are x-rayed, end of line position testing.
Looks like none of the above was done....
I’ve mentioned in other comments: that installation video was such a shock to me, I’ve been trying to convince myself it was ‘acted’ and they installed the ‘real’ hatch ring off camera.
Would love to see a video about this and this alone. 😂 There’s just a grocery list of things that are totally fucked about this.
You must be one of those White men in their 50s that stand in the way of innovation!
@@johanna006you are confusing innovation with stupidity.
😊
A note on the "Thruster Installed Backwards" incident: the issue *was* identified before the dive. In the same documentary you used clips of, you can see one of the support divers talking about how one of the thrusters was was behaving abnormally moments after the launch. They apparently shrugged it off and did not think about it again until after the vessel reached target depth and the problem reappeared.
I heard that they found out in the water and had to surface....
AND if these differing accounts are from it happening more than once it is even more darmning than a single incident for Rush & the Titan!!!
The first thing I thought when hearing your fictional blow-up preventer story was "Wait, but if the shear ram is considered a last resort on normal BoPs, why is he putting so much emphasis on it being the only necessary part in his design?" And then immediately after "This is going to be one of those 'hubris in engineering' anecdotes, isn't it?"
I'm happy it was fictional because that could have been an epic fail otherwise.
My first thought was "Wait, titanium carbide? Isn't that brittle when subjected to pressure? Are you sure that would hold up?"
His point about it being convincing was also right.
I know next to nothing about a lot of the domains (I think I'm using the word right?) in this video and I was like, "wow that's cool, you should probably get it certified anyways but that sounds like it'd be amazing and really useful!" and then he said it was fake and I felt a little bad, but more than that I knew his point was absolutely true
I was increasingly horrified the further he went on, as it was a perfect case study in how to abuse the concept of safety factor to make things less safe.
I was relieved to hear it was a fictional example.
@@whensomethingcriesagainI figured that it was a carbide cutting edge for a less-brittle seal.
I thought "even if its only got a 0.1% chance of fucking you up, if you use it a million times, youre getting fucked a thousand times, you definitely need other measures"
The loss of the Titan was not a probability, it was an eventuality.
It was not the question if it fails, the question was when it would fail...
They say it imploded. I am not a welder, yet I have done a few construction site welds in the family bis as an assistant, dont know if the craft was welded, but for some reason I just think a weld line was the cause.
@@Lobos222 it was made from two titanium hemispheres, bolted to a cylindrical carbon fiber piece! The problem with carbon fiber is that it's really good in holding up while trying to expand it (it's really good for lightweight gas canisters, like scuba gear, or we in our local fire department have some made of CFK) but when compressed it gives in far earlier! Also water ingress between the individual layers of the fibers will lead to delamination, and over time it'll get destroyed, what it got now! That's what happens if you use an unsuited material
The video literally shows the video of them attaching titanium rings to the carbon fibre cylindrical hull. Epoxied together.
Furthermore James Cameron’s vessel featured a sphere that welded in some spots. Welding if done properly by experts is a smart option.
Not rocket science. Titan's hull was made of carbon fiber instead of industry standard metallic. Viewport was certified to 1,300m depth. Titanic rests at 3,800m. Ocean Gate played Russian roulette with each dive. Not a matter of if but when.
Considering the obvious parallels between this and the spaceflight tourism industry, 'not rocket science' is an excellent choice of words.
Wasn't Titan the name of the fictional ship which sunk in similar fashion to Titanic, hitting the iceberg and all?
@@Alexander-the-ok SpaceX gained lots of experience before they tried manned flight, and knew they had to satisfy NASA. They know the "break things" philosophy applies only to development. But as more companies get into spaceflight I completely see a greater chance of a spacefaring Oceangate. (Jeez, the name itself sounds like a scandal now.)
@@ald1144 I was more referring to Virgin Galactic tbh...though they have a far far better safety culture than Oceangate from what I understand. And to the recent deregulation of spaceflight tourism in Florida.
Spacex 's existing system has a good safety record partially due to the exact reason you mention - adherence to NASA standards. I have doubts about their plans for Starship but I think a lot of what they produce is PR, and the actual system will be far safer than those shown in their concept videos.
@@Alexander-the-ok Absolutely appropriate to bring up Virgin Galactic. I was shocked when I found out why Spaceship Two crashed. Even with experienced engineers, these environments are unforgiving of any mistake.
As a former hyperbaric safety officer, i have been following this tragic loss from the start. Your video is the first to satisfy the many safety related questions and concerns that have been bubbling up in my mind since. Thanks for the solid explanation with creds and sources. :) The exercise at the beginning of your video you pulled, *chefs kiss*
the lack of restraints and fire hazards in a pressurized environment, YES!!
... now i gotta get back into the hyperbaric world, maybe go for the commercial diving end of it over the medical side!
On the challenger disaster: I know a professor who teaches English to engineers and uses this disaster as an example.
It turns out that someone sent an email trying to alert the relevant supervisors about the problem. Unfortunately it was phrased in the kind of dry technical jargon that didn't allow "we're going to get someone killed" to jump out at the reader as the relevant consequence.
Also, I ran across a report that the owner bragged to a reporter that they got the carbon fiber super cheap because Boeing considered it expired and unsafe for use in aircraft (which are subject to much less stress and can continue to land safely with much larger failures.
The reporter would have been in the sub on a mission cancelled due to weather just a month ago. He did question the wisdom of using expired material, but as further evidence of how much confidence matters, he was satisfied by the reassurance he got and still planned on going on the thing after hearing that!
With Challenger, engineers failed to do a good job of presenting the relationship between low ambient temperature and high o-ring damage. Instead of drawing a graph with temp on one axis and damage on the other with past launches as points on the graph, they showed a chronological list of launches with temperature and damage noted for each. Not the best way to get the message across.
Did they have email in the 80s?
@@alexmartin3143 The average citizen didn't have it, but certain specialized government employees had it. I'm not familiar with the NASA story so I don't know if that employee had email or if modern audiences subconsciously insert "email" b/c it's so ubiquitous now. (Could have been a paper memo?)
Yes, military, nasa, and some universities had it. It’s possible it was being used for nearly 10 years before challenger at NASA. Granted it wasn’t like today where everyone had machines, it was terminals and big iron back then.
I’m studying to be an aerospace engineer, the things the guys 3 years ahead of me can do look like magic to me. I can’t imagine what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do. I certainly can’t imagine dismissing their perspective out of hand.
Ah, but you are not an arrogant billionaire who loves to take risks!
I hope there are many more like you!
Also...I am curious about which school you chose for aerospace studies? My son went to UND because I went there, but I'm curious if it is still as popular as it once was for newer aerospace students.
Dismissing out of hand no. But you’ve perhaps also not had much life experience either. Long periods of doing the same thing the same way leads to a serious inability to think differently than what has always been. Couple that with the exponential rate of change of tech and the increasing capabilities that brings, and a fresh perspective is absolutely vital to survival, much less thriving.
For example: I live in an area that is mountainous and desolate. Building a facility that needed high speed internet connection in some of those places used to be flat out impossible, then prohibitively, then extremely expensive. In only the last two years, it has become an economic possibility. That is solely because of a single innovation: Starlink. I still find myself thinking about how to overcome problems, or dismissing ideas due to the cost of data connections. Then I remember Starlink. Now expand that to a thousand things that change every year, and you see the problem.
The truth is you need both. Someone said it earlier: a bunch of people are learning to think outside the box when they were never first taught what’s in the box, why there is a box, and why people have been inside it for so long.
Innovation and progress don’t seem to be the reason why this guy didn’t have seasoned engineers. Rather money and ego seem to be the reasons, which, as has been proven yet again, is a fatal combination.
The thing is that with the big rash of excitement around "agility" "entrepreneurial thinking" and "disruption", basics of diligence get sidelined.
Bro, because he was blinded with money that’s why he forgot what is physics 😂😂😂
Watching how they glued the endcaps to the hull made it for me. They manually applied resin, working in a non controlled environment without even a basic dust protection or even suits is just hilarious. Only one hair can ruin the joint.
Yes, if they end up retrieving the pieces of this craft, it'll be interesting to see what the carbon fibre / end cap joint looks like.
i thought the fiberglass would be woven around the metal ring, perhaps around a lip...that part seemed crazy to watch, i thought they were just adding cosmetic finishes but they were actally bonding (or should i say bondo-ing) the thing
If it is hilarious it is one sick joke.
Or a single bubble. It appears they used less care when applying this epoxy than most people do when making river tables.
No climate control, no clean room, college kids learning as they go... what could possibly go wrong?
I work in a safety critical industry (the railway) and all your points about safety and fire risk freaked me out. We’re so hot on safety that it sometimes feels onerous but it’s been drilled into my head and the lack of care here is frightening.
The only upside I can think of to this disaster is that the occupants didn’t suffer. They likely didn’t even realize there was an issue. As Scott Manley put it, in less time than it takes for signals to reach the brain, “they went from being biology, to being physics”.
The Titan was like the product of an office team building exercise using available items from the storeroom and lunch room cupboard.
pretty apt and equally pragmatic.
...and no old white guys allowed to play, because they ask too many questions.
Reminds me of an old blender I had. It had 12 buttons on it but all it did was spin fast or faster.
LOL !! Good one
That's a good analogy
I said it the second this story emerged: The CEO of the company gives me serious “used car salesman” vibes. I was unfortunately proven right
Just like John Kirby .......he's even worse than a used car salesman!!
That's an insult to used car salesman. Rush was worse.
@@onepoundofcheese8356 you’re actually right. Sorry to all the used car salesmen out there
Rush reminds me of an airline CEO! Thank God for unions.
Snake oil salesmen will always exist.
As a recreational diver myself, glad you were OK with the unplanned accent. My weight belt fell off once on a night training dive, but luckily I was able to grab hold of a convenient rock while my instructor put my weight belt back on. After that, I changed to integrated weights.
Why did it fall off?
.
.
@@007nadineLthe weights can just come in clipped if they are old it’s not common but it happens
*ascent
Very responsibly made analysis, I've watched twice now. As an engineer I feel a responsibility to understand every engineering disaster and this helps big time
Pressure vessels made from carbon fibre are actually quite common for gas storage.
But they only work well because the positive pressure is inside, which puts the fibres under tension. Their tensile strength is excellent.
Needless to say, reversing the pressure which puts some fibres under compression is a pretty ludicrous idea.
But what if, and listen me out here, what if we put the ocean INSIDE the vessel, and the people outside. Oh wai--
I mean, without being a materials expert, it seems like it would be possible to make a proper negative pressure vessel with carbon fibre, but my problem is that everyone I've heard says there is basically no research into carbon fibre being used as a marine pressure vessel. Why would you take an untested and unstudied (in the application) material and make a safety critical structure out of it, still not test it, not perform any inspections and hand wave it away as not possible. Especially when there are other materials like steel and titanium which are well tested. Maybe they wanted the strength to weight ratio, but it seems like in a submarine, the weight is just not as important as in say an aircraft, and I would presume they could have had other buoyancy devices if they really needed them. It seems to me that the major reason is just because he was determined to be the spaceX of deep sea diving and sound cool.
On the subject of the controller. I have mixed feelings about it. I don't mind the idea _soooo_ much that they used a games controller, although using a bluetooth one seems asinine. Considering the non-zero times I have had a gaming controller desync, I'm not sure this would be my first choice for a controller. On the other hand, they are small and light enough that you could possible bring 2, which is some kind of safety feature then. Just have a cord for them. Also, I presume that if they were bluetooth, they also had li-ion batteries... so that is fun for fire resistance too.
Yes, Carbon Fiber has great tensile strength. The problem is that you need something that can withstand great compressive forces to keep your sub from imploding, and carbon fiber is dry spaghetti levels of brittle when it comes to pressure.
Exactly why carbon fibre composites work on aircraft after they largely moved away from aluminium. Aircraft are pressure vessels under inner pressure pushing out. Not millions of tons of ocean acting on a sub from the outside.
@@aenguswright7336 I suspect he wanted to cut weight to make it cheaper to transport and launch/retrieve. Everything about this operation was low-budget.
As a 50-something engineer I agree with your comments. I see many "start-up" companies opting for nearly completely inexperienced young staff to save labor $$ pared only with the founders of the company and nothing in between as their engineering staff. They always fail to understand the cost of such a management decision. You absolutely need young engineers on staff, but there is no substitute for hard won experience in fields where failure is not tolerable.
I strongly suspect he was also lead to find only fresh out of school folks because they are less likely to push back on him with little confidence in their analysis skills as of yet.
not wanting `old White Men` and firing them when he told them it was dangerous was in itself extremely dangerous.
I was a US Army Ordnance Officer. It is the kind of work where your first mistake will be your very last mistake. The very last thing you want around you is inexperience.
He wanted to be inspired by the latest batch of woke college students. Too bad he took others with him. Moron!
@@aVerySillyBilly Go woke, get squished
Your fictitious story about the blowout preventer was a great way to illustrate your point. Among engineers there are a few articulate ones who talk with a certain enthusiasm that make them easy to believe. When you hear them, you say to yourself “ this sounds really good” while telling yourself “it takes far more time and thought to dig into the details to really know if this is legitimate “. And you say to yourself “I hope those listening to him/her are discerning”. Unfortunately, this type of engineer often finds his/her way into marketing or sales or, worse, management. Old guys/gals in their 50s or 60s or 70s usually spot these types pretty reliably. Some things come only with experience.
Great viewing, top take✊🏽
Now retired I spent 30 yrs in the subsea construction industry incl. salvage of the Kursk which was a very disturbing & avoidable event. Accidents are, should be lessons from unfortunate events. Sadly cowboys will be cowboys.
A mechanical engineer & professional firefighter I had a high focus of safety ingrained into me despite my passion in risky, adrenaline filled sports.
My last 10 were as a client rep. who read & listened. I oversaw procedures in all operational areas incl safety & well being with thankfully zero fatalities on watch throughout my career.
100% no way should that sub have been deployed, so many failures on so many levels.
TIP:
Before you go out & buy your new shiny EV take time out to do a safety rating check, it'll be time well spent & a potential life saver.
What was doing salvage of the Kursk like? Did you guys run into a lot of obstruction from the Russian government?
I was reading the wiki article on it and yeah it sounded like a real mess of a tragedy.
I saw a video from a material's pyscisist who wrote her dissertation on the phases changes of carbon under pressure. She said carbon fiber has a very low rating for compressive force and any defect would exacerbate the failure rate. That on top of the story that one of the prospective customers backed out because the CEO told him they sourced the carbon fiber from Boeing at a discount, because it exceeded its shelf life. Aka it was defective...it's the perfect storm of hubris.
LOL seems he liked going around bragging about how cheap this thing was. Ultimately it cost him his life and unfortunately the lives of innocent people who did not understand this man was leading them to their death.
@frankhdz I've heard some conspiracy theories that in the beginning they were just saying it was a pilot. Then they said it was the ceo. Which makes you wonder if he mightve faked his death. Body turned to paste 2 miles under the sea is a pretty solid cover story, and impossible to ever verify....
This story is insane. It's like he was building a garden shed or something.
I mean at this point it's pretty much suicide by Thresher, which is a completely insane thing to have to say out loud
I work in the bicycle industry, while I'm not an engineer I've worked in QA and with carbon fiber long enough to know what the critical failure points are. We've seen for decades, the failure points on carbon are when we use a metal contact point for bearings or rear derailleurs. The two materials heat, cool and flex at different rates, it's consistently and reliably a failure point which is why we've moved away from designing frames and rims that way. Similarly we commonly use ultrasound tools to test rims and frames, this isn't at all new technology, Finally, I've seen first hand the damage that salt water does to carbon frames, I've supported the Iron man in Hawai'i, I've seen what human sweat and see salt does to these carbon components. Obviously carbon fiber doesn't oxidize, everything else around it does and the finish is seriously effected by the temperatures and salt content. Having seen as many catastrophic (but non life threatening) carbon failures as I have, the idea of building anything that is going to be put under these levels of stress is just utter insanity to me.
Yes! Carbon fibre degrades, and disintegrates in a completely different way to metals. I think as it is a relatively new material, not enough is known about its long term reliability and structure integrity. It was extremely negligent not to at least x-ray or ultrasound test the structure after forty or so dives? How it is affected by salt is very interesting though, didn't know that!
@@2760ade when I found out what this thing was made of I immediately knew that these people weren't coming back. I've seen too many frames come apart in races and among semi pro athletes who can't afford to replace their bikes every season to know full well that this thing simply won't hold up.
Thank you for your input. When I was in school (over 40 years ago) these composites were too new to be instructed upon in this level of detail. Now all you guys with years of experience applying the technology coming forward in response to this tragedy is proving both enlightening and interesting.
@@biggaywizard You see, they should have asked someone with your experience of the material! It is stupid not to! This Stockton guy was incredibly arrogant, and it ended in his demise?
@@2760ade One engineer did suggest ultrasound. The CEO would have none of it, due to cost, and fired him.
I had an opportunity to meet with members of the team who did the fault tree for the space shuttle. The result was a probable loss of 1.4 shuttles. That's about as close as you can get to the actual 2 losses.
Those cables hanging around just boil my blood, me being an electrician. If the people hadn't died here, I would call it an absolute joke, but with that on mind, Ill call it an absolute tragedy.
"Subject to physical damage"
That and entanglement holey-o-fack boys
As a 57 year old white haired guy that’s been in IT for years, yes, these lax attitudes towards safety are an absolute outgrowth of the caviler mentality that many have coming from the supposed high tech world.
I noticed it creeping in 30 years ago and it’s rampant now for just about every product.
It’s all about pushing out a product as fast as possible to start making profit with little regard to consequences.
it is called greed
There is a reason for it. If a Google server goes down, the system transitions to a new one. Some queries get lost. Honestly who cares? It’s so low risk that you can make Google servers out of zip ties. On balance it has to work. Somehow this cavalier attitude which works great on non critical issues has been pushed into critical areas where failure = death. Instagram should be cavalier. Not deep sea diving!
It's that way in all fields sadly.
I am a 67 year old white guy, also in IT, and I couldn't agree more. Cost cutting in my company has turned my job into daily mental torture. I worked in electronics engineering before this and it's exactly the same. I desperately want to retire for exactly that reason, but can't afford to right now.
@@deltatango5765I’m so jealous of boomers. They got to play nearly their entire lives on easy mode.
"In a harsh environment almost everything can become safety critical" 👍
Even forgetting the bog roll , especially when one of the voyeurs was on the mexican food and lager the night before .
Homogenous Steel... that should be an object lesson, for ALL WAYS OF LIFE. These PHYSICAL REALITIES, cannot be argued against, Folks. It goes for RACES, JUST LIKE IT GOES FOR METAL. IF you ADULTERATE, OR HETEROGENIZE THE STEEL, YOU WEAKEN IT, JUST LIKE THE RACES(HOUSES) OF WHICH THERE ARE THREE: THE MONGOLOID, THE NEGROID, AND THE CAUCASOID. Why are We so ever-learning, and yet, unable to come to the knowledge of TRUTH...
For example: loose pants due to a belt buckle failure could momentarily impair vehicle operator's legs and cause a collision.
I've been sharing this video as the best source of actual Titan safety analysis. Thank you for your time in sharing this. This video is important; people, notably those making decisions, need to understand the risk in actuality and not play around with lives for the sake of "innovation". Innovation, safety, and ethics are not mutually exclusive.
You are right, however, I think those things are mutually exclusive with cheap. And let's be honest, we know which of those four points was prioritized here.
This was great, I just have one small addition. There was a wildly succesful DSV with a cylindrical hull and domes on each end. Though one material and a metal of course. The 50 ft , 80 ton Aluminaut, could carry 7 standing upright, 3t payload and it went to 4600 m. At one time it held the record and it even rescued poor old Alvin after it sank, hatch open in 1500 m. The name makes the material pretty obvious :)
Its operators were the Aluminauti?
@@Keithustus Well US Navy and Bob Ballard spent a lot of time in the boat. There's an old easy to find Navy movie about Aluminaut, you get to see it in action, just put Aluminaut in YT. It was produced like something by Jaqcues Costeau.
@@user-lv7ph7hs7l cool, I love Robert Ballard stuff
As an engineer who’s worked with carbon fibre reinforcements I just can’t imagine trusting those joints with epoxy given the pressures involved. You have carbon fibre, titanium and epoxy that all act differently under pressure and temperature. Sad ending for all involved. RIP
As a builder of RC airplanes, even I know this. That guy was too handsome for his own good. He was too used to having his way and his good looks finally caught up with his decisions. Too much ego!
@@justanotherguy469lol you got a crush on Stockton Rush ??
As far as I know carbon fibre is immensely strong in things like aircraft wings and it has immense strength in bending but it has very poor strength in compression. To me this looks like a reinforced roll of toilet paper. It is not going to fail on the 8,9, or 10 time. But it is slowly being worked on.
Somehow I feel there is not an engineer on the planet who thinks laminates cycled under constant extreme high/low pressure is a good idea...
@@RandomNooby I ain't no deep sub engineer but I don't like the transition from hull to view port. This looks insanely weak to me. And very suspect. I would go down in this thing to 100 feet. But expecting this joint to hold up at 13,000 feet? FORGET IT!!!! To me this looks like a reinforced roll of Bounty paper towels. The second this joint warps GAME OVER!!!. And what did they find? They found the front view port and the tail segment. The entire centre section failed and imploded. Exactly where the connection joints were. The weakest link in the chain.
My son is actually a Ultrasound and Xray tech who inspects high pressure pipes, oil piping, and even Navy subs looking for irregularities. The fact they used this new material and never had it scanned for irregularities and faults shocked him as well. There are so many new scanning methods, he is training for a new 3D method next month, so if that carbon fiber material couldn't be scanned it shouldn't have been used. Ignoring the experts and his former engineer is a huge red flag. I think he wanted to be first so badly he cut way too many corners. Thanks for this educational video and accidents were rare in recent years due to stringent testing.
Inspection cost. Regulations cost.
He should have charged a million a ticket and built a new one everytime. Retiring one after it had made its first drop. Boot it down in tornado alley and charge people to ride out a storm inside one. Would have been fine in a tornado. Bolted down.
I’m an idiot but even I know that vehicles that go through extreme pressure changes need to be x-rayed. I know from aviation disasters that they will scan aircraft looking for microscopic cracks.
I believe Stockton was just arrogant. He had degrees from top schools and as a result he really thought everybody else were just idiots.
He didn't just cut too many corners, he was flat-out stupid. He was intelligent, but stupid at the same time. When he said that "regulations stifle innovation", it was his arrogance and his ego talking. The guy was an egomaniac and possibly a narcissist. If he had this attitude after all his experience in engineering, aviation, and underwater equipment manufacturing, he absolutely had to be an utter idiot to come to such a conclusion that safety is not paramount. I am truly shocked now no one stopped him from operating.
Any material that you cannot run finite element analysis on is a big no-no in any security-relevant application anyway. Any second semester engineering student could've told him this much.
@@Bob-kk2vg his degree was in aerospace where carbon fiber is used in airplanes. carbon fiber is a one use for deep sea vessels since the pressure damages the carbon fiber over time. the carbon fiber on The Titan crumbled into bits causing an implosion turning all aboard into a mist in a split second.
2:30 96 hours of life support is assuming they had battery power for all that time! According to a TH-cam channel creator named Alenxelmundo who actually made it to the Titanic.. they had 2 batteries on board that were able to power the submersible for the day of the dive…no additional backup. There was never a 96 hour window and everyone at ocean gate knew that.
As a claustrophobe, the whole thing makes me freak out. The fire hazard thing is making it even worse. I enjoyed your analysis.
You knew exactly where culpability lay when they changed from referring to them as passengers to “crew members”
There's always been a loophole for Titanic visits that they had to be scientific in nature, which is just a joke.
More like “mission specialists”
I wouldn't put to much weight on that. For many years, it's basically been the industry standard in "explorer tourism" to have passengers on for instance an explorer cruise, take a small, but non critical part of the daily operations, if they want to of course. And not surprisingly, a lot of passenger actually do want to take a look behind the scene.
@@pippi5000more like "cash cows."
@@pippi5000subway has sandwich technitians. Lol
Well said! In another video about this incident, they said, "He was a master of risk management." The last time I had heard that terrifying phrase, I was working at the Johnson Space Center as an aerospace engineer while people were trying to understand the Challenger disaster. They said it about Larry Mulloy, the NASA manager who is directly, personally, and criminally responsible for the death of the Challenger crew. Mulloy let his personal perception of the political situation drive him to insane decisions. It seems that here, the driver was greed.
More likely never being told NO in his life.
Elites are just built different.
@@restarting9213 well now that one billionaire was turned into paste, along with 4 others who trusted him, while I'm still alive to comment on TH-cam
@@Mububban23 yeah pathetic
they are not dead. they were not on board. it was a scam for nasa to beg for more money again.
@@Mububban23 Congratulations on not being on the sub, do you want a cookie or are you just advertising the kind of person you are?
Excellent, experience laden content. I questioned the integrity of the carbon fiber tube-it might very well had strength in it's hoop diameter axis but I wonder about it longitudinally as carbon fiber shatters like glass when it fails. I've welded and worked with metals in an industrial maintenance career and the first thing I thought when I saw how the titanium caps were epoxied on was 'dissimilar material/different rates of expansion' and also thinking one little air bubble in that open air applied epoxy would definitely become a weak point at extreme depth. The only comfort I take from this was that the victims were vaporized instantly (like being inside the cylinder of a compressed air diesel engine with them as the 'fuel') before they could even register something happened.
I just wrapped up my undergrad in materials engineering, and without a doubt the class that stuck with me the most was the one on material degradation and failure, which I took just a few months before the OceanGate incident happened. In this class, we studied the Challenger case at length because it was a similarly-predictable material failure that doomed the spaceship. All this is to say that I felt sick reading about the OceanGate failure as the details of the incident came out and revealed just how reckless the company leadership was about safety. Thank you for covering this story with the expertise and gravity it demands.
My dad was a chartered production engineer - he was involved in a health and safety case where a worker lost an eye because another worker decided that not having the 400 psi valve my dad had specified in stock it could be substituted by two 200 psi valves in series. That worker had 20 years experience. 😢
Too bad the worker didn't stop and think about that for 10 seconds.
how dumb can someone be lmfao what????? only one valve is receiving the water pressure at a time 😂😂😂😂
@@andyharman3022 Thinking? Ha, no one does that anymore, just follow orders and do it the cheapest and fastest way....or get fired, whistleblowers get fired. Period.
HEy, it work in the electronics world ...... for resistors .....
@@38911bytefree I see what you did there
My recently passed father was an engineer, and you explained this exactly the way in which he would explain things to me, down to the hand-drawn graph. 😢
I'm so sorry for your loss. I lost my dad a long time ago, he was an engineer too. He would have explained this similar too
I’m sorry to hear about your father’s passing. However, I suspect he’d actually have managed to get his hand drawn graph in the frame, unlike me
Sorry for your loss, man. That does makes sense, all of us engineers share a single, high-powered brain cell between us.
Sorry for your loss. ❤ hope you have a wonderful weekend
Feel grateful 🙏 I wish my father would've been like that.
The worst part of this, is it occupied the news at the time a company were sweeping an accident under the carpet and effectively murdering a team of divers stuck in a pipe and barely anyone knows about it.
This actually reminds me of something I seem to recall reading at one point about smartphone design, I obviously can't remember where I read it so my academic education forces me to disclose that it's an unverified anecdote from an unknown source.
Anyhow, the story goes that when new engineers are brought on they often come with suggestions of how they can create a superior model of smartphone that's even thinner than the contemporary design, and the older engineers then have to point out to them that heat management is a thing, or the whole thing will melt like a chocolate bar when placed in a pocket (and probably also explode like a small incendiary device.)
This is basically the same thing. "Those numbskulls put way too high an emphasis on 'safety' and other rot, no safety is needed in my superior design!"
"vacuum degassing for the resin" - I would consider this absolutely essential along, with temperature & humidity control. Tiny bubbles will otherwise be trapped without degassing; the seeds for micro-fractures. Humidity will impact the bonding characteristics between the dissimilar materials, introducing areas that may de-laminate after repeated pressure cycles.
They seemed to have no control of the environment while putting the sub parts together. Nothing was sterilized, covered in plastic, etc.
A former passenger talked about a 2019 dive. The pressure hull made cracking sounds. The CEO/pilot brushed it off as something that it did. But he didn't have a clear answer when sked if he'd take paying passenger down to the Titanic with the sub in such a condition. The passenger had a materials background. And recommended that the company check for delamination. They did, after repeated emails. They found delamination. And promptly rebuilt the hull in exactly the same way they'd done it the first time. BTW, that 2019 dive was only to 300 m.
Well. This wasn't the same hull that imploded. I'm curious what changes were made during the rebuild.
@@edwardorr9439 In aviation we deliberately "pull" on certain carbon fiber parts to cause that creaking and cracking, it is inter-ply delamintation and is engineered for. But everyone is piling on, correctly, that compression is not what carbon is good for nor was hearing that noise and continuing to operate an otherwise unproven system with human life at stake.
@marygoff3332 I found that disturbing as well. That’s a process I’d have expected to be done in a clean room environment.
My background in carbon fiber is in bicycle frames. Four things I have concerns about: 1. carbon flexes under pressure. 2. You cannot really discern failure between the carbon fiber layers. The best way to know if you have a carbon fiber failure is when it fails. 3. It is very difficult to get unilateral and uniform carbon layup across such a large area. There will naturally be stronger and weaker spots. On a plane or bike this doesn’t matter as much because stress moves, but in an undersea environment the pressure across the surface is equal across the whole area. 4. Carbon fiber degrades over time and especially in difficult conditions (extreme hot and cold) add to that the effects of salt water.
what does "stress moves" mean and why does that make the strong and weak points ok
Think of an aircraft wing, the forces applied are constantly moving rather than being a constant uniform Push or pull.
Correct. I’ve had many carbonfiber mt. Bikes and they all broke at some point. When I say broke, I mean broke in half. Like done. Nada. Trashed. Goodbye. And this submersible was made out of the same materials and in those pressures it was inevitable for failure.
I disagree, as a mechanical engineer. Just look at the stress/strain curve of carbon fiber. What he didn’t mention, which is a very important concept in material science, is the different between stress and strain. There’s no need to say anything more if you don’t understand this concept because it’s so important to understand this. Carbon fiber plasticity range is almost none existent. There’s almost no ductility with that material. It’s a horrible material to use for deep sea exploration. Maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make? If so, my fault
To cut costs people who fabricate carbon fiber composite rely on thin cross sections to save money on material. Josh Gates had planned to do a deep sea trip to the sunken Titanic and after he went inside the very small vessel and experienced a brief sea trial he stated that after observing the vessel he cancelled all plans of the trip. He stated that the vessel was not proven safe at pressure depths and the vessel was a dangerous hazard for occupants.
This is the absolute best video I have seen on this topic, or any other review of an accident. The BOP section was so enlightening, so thank you so much if the creator sees this.
I didn't even think about those things you mentioned that probably didn't happen like vertigo or loss of orientation and non-restraints causing injury or worse. I think compressive failure between the titanium ring and composite shell over several pressure cycles in previous dives is what caused the disaster. Thank you for the video.
I remember seeing the video of the manufacturing and having great concern about the open air warehouse environment in which they were gluing the titanium cap rings to the carbon fiber hull. As a manufacturing engineer I was shocked by the lack of environmental controls, and I’m even more shocked people got inside that thing and went to a depth of 12,000 feet.
Be shocked then.....😂
@@Lookup2Wakeupbe quite
I'm no engineer and I'm just an idiot but I don't think that would have mattered. There were so many flaws and so many corners cut. If the process was done perfect would it even hold during one descent at that depth. Nonetheless many
@@RobK-rl6sn maybe not but I was just pointing out one of what was probably many questionable manufacturing practices. The design failure and operational protocol issues are a whole other ball game.
@@RobK-rl6sn well it seemed to hold for the 25 times it went down in the last three years.
Finally a fellow engineer going through this death tube. I worked on some MSC cruisers and i can't believe that thing was even capable of diving. Best analysis so far! Well done
I'm not surprised it was capable of diving. Once.
engineer here too. it was a shiz show.
Barely looks like it can make it to 12 ft.
To be fair, it was capable of diving...
Yeah I think the fact that they assumed this craft would work unlimitedly is the most telling. Even carbon fibre bikes weaken over time. I wonder if Salt water had an effect on the Epoxy's integrity?
Brilliant video, and presented in the sombre way this topic really should be approached. The sort of engineers Oceangate employed is an interesting topic almost to itself. Even right out of school you have engineers ranging from super rigorous, highly detail-oriented in mindset to those with a more applied, get the job done approach. With experience, we know there is a time and place for each. I think we all know the mindset Oceangate favoured, almost to exclusion of any other. The extra cynical part of me just wants to cry sometimes, seeing companies actively pursue the rigorous types of young engineer to never, ever use them in a design capacity because pushing out derivative products faster, cheaper and with expected failure rates makes more money than making an incredible design, while a company like Oceangate who absolutely needs that rigorous mindset to operate in such a harsh environment will actively avoid those with that mindset.
Excellent video. Well structured, clearly presented and with meaningful and relevant supporting video. Many TH-camrs could learn a great deal from this guy.
Back in the early 2000s I worked at Electric Boat, building actual submarines that lasted decades. A coworker and I were talking about building our own mini sub, something one of my great-uncles had done many years ago. The American Bureau of Shipping actually has a huge set of specifications and requirements for submersible manned vehicles, then the NavSea stuff was above and beyond that. In the end, we could not affordably build our own sub big enough to be worthwhile and able to dive more than 50-60ft down.
This company was recklessly negligent in the way they built this sub. It looks like there was very little if any margin of safety, where for something like this you'd want a 3x margin. No internal bracing, a joke of an attachment method for the end caps, and it seems no effort taken to actually verify it's ability to survive.
Back in the early 2000's i worked down the river at pfizer and got to watch your products come up and down river from my office window. Always a treat
When I heard “hull made of carbon fiber and titanium” I assumed it was a carbon fiber shell on a titanium frame. Still idiotic, but at least makes a small amount of sense. Gluing titanium caps onto a carbon fiber cylinder is just completely insane.
I am not a submarine engineer, but I have some experience with composites. What would freak me out is that internal components, like those handles and screens mounts are fitted directly to the pressure vessel.
Let's say the pilot was pitching down when the controller suddenly fails (e.g. battery leak). The craft keeps pitching down, so a bulky crew member could be crashing with his entire weight on one of these monitor mounts. Did they test if the mounts break cleanly without tearing out several layers of carbon fiber with it?
@jaredkennedy6576
What do you think?
@@TheMongooseOfDoom I'm not an engineer either (yet, working on it), but I chose to believe those screws were put into some additional layer rather than wildly run into the structure itself. My brain simply did not accept that someone thought it would be ok to do that.
@@jaredkennedy6576 Yeah, you are right, there is an internal skin. Nothing is mounted into the pressure vessel. It's clearly visible in the other shot of the inside.
The gluing process is astounding , I wouldn't trust that setup in a swimming pool let alone in open sea. Anything involving glue would be a major fear point.
I know you would think that!!
fearing adhesives (in general) isn't really necessary since there are lots of them with advanced engineering and testing behind them. the application (physical) and use case may dictate caution, but plenty of adhesives are as good or better than a bolted connection.
Like building a model airplane?
Major failure point too
Especially at 2500 ft deep
That was the most informative, technical analysis of this incident I have seen. Thank you, sir.
There are photos online of the titanium rings that held the end caps on - how they were shipped to the assembly area. They were on undersized cheap wooden pallets and fixed to the pallets with steel tension bands without any protectors to stop the steel bands digging into the titanium. Because of the undersize pallets any forklift truck driving into the pallet to pick it up could easily have hit the titanium rings causing damage.
I work in logistics and I pack and ship such items as truck engine parts, gearboxes etc,, and I would NEVER send truck parts out on such shoddy pallets with no protection, let alone critical components for something like a submersible. The fact that a supplier was willing to do this and that Stockton Rush was willing to accept it shows what type of supplier he was using - one that cut corners to save a few dollars. I think this speaks volumes about what type of operation Mr. Rush was running and his complete lack of professionality.
I only made it half way through this video before I was struck with a deep sadness. In the medical device industry, we try to engineer every aspect, all the way down to the labeling and packaging, to be as safe as possible while delivering on the intended use. It is an awesome responsibility and it requires teamwork and only people who can give and receive criticism productively should be regarded as professional engineers. The CEO of this company is portrayed as someone who regularly disregarded and dismissed criticism. Disgusting.
I also worked with medical device engineers from Johnson Matthey, they manufactured the roto rooter piece that would be used for angioplasty procedures. Great engineers, great company. To this day, I can't say enough about the caliber of their employees. Every item manufactured was held to extremely tight tolerances and they took pride in their products. I am better for knowing these guys.
The layman following this story are deeply encouraged by all the people who work in safety critical environments that use terms like "Awesome responsibility". Thanks to you and scores of others for caring about your fellow man.
Covid vaccine has entered the chat.
@@roiq5263 fyi vaccines are not medical devices.
I would say the CEO had a blatant disrespect and regard for LIFE. He was incapable of having this responsibility and displayed aspects of Narcissism that lead ALL to their deaths. This tragedy is ANOTHER WARNING about these types of people.
As an engineer, there is not enough money in the world that would have got me inside that sub, it just didn't add up for me, and i am not a subsea engineer. Stockton rush believed his own hype, his own arrogance that he new better than literally everyone else is what killed everyone on that fatefull journey, may they rest in peace.
The final straw for me is being bolted into that thing from the outside with no way out.
Hubris
Same here, forty one years as a sailing marine engineer. His statement that safety is a waste, and the specifics of how this contraption was built were and are appalling. As the video creator says in the title, the failure was insultingly predictable.
His narcissism got the better of him
@@AndrewJHayford right? And there is literally no point whatsoever in doing that over a normal hatch (unless for saving money I guess). If the door opens out then the pressure at that depth will keep it shut, you don't even need it secured.
Old video, so you probably won't read this, but I just want to thank you for immediately giving your credentials and experience. So many people making videos now about complex topics with only surface level understanding, leading to critical errors in analysis, and worse, making their viewers believe them as well, which is quite dangerous, especially when it shapes public perception and understanding. Super refreshing in the age of disinformation.
Thanks. I now put significant effort into making sure I don’t spread disinformation. I’m not a subject expert in every topic I cover so I try to make that clear when that’s the case.
@@Alexander-the-ok Of course, and that's how it should be. I wish more people would take that approach, though I'm in medicine which is the king of misinformation being spread about it in the sciences, so perhaps I'm just extra sensitive to it haha. Again, super cool to see.
This has been the first in-depth video I have cared to watch since the disaster and anything else were just short news clips and I stopped viewing completely when news started about the Navy's early findings which I had questions about straight off, things didn't add up. I didn't have any knowledge of Stockton but a theory about him entered my thinking from the early reports watched and I believe it was his ego driving him to his poor choices plus the lack of funding that really started the clock ticking down. Thank you for making your video it informed me about much about this subject.
Intelligent, well-reasoned, professional analysis. And "insultingly predictable" is probably an absolutely appropriate appraisal. I am a former US Navy submariner with a degree in Materials Science & Engineering who has worked on materials selection for this kind of deep-sea submersible in a professional context. This submarine design was so bad it is at least arguably a crime (and nowadays I can say that in my current career with over thirty years as a lawyer).
Yep - a $250,000 coffin ⚰️.
It was a submersible, not a submarine. A submarine has the ability to leave and come back under its own power, a submersible doesn't. Educate yourself.
As you are a lawyer maybe you can answer a question I had about this whole tragedy. Sorry its a bit long but I feel the detail is needed
1) The New York Times has published a letter written in 2018 by industry leaders in the submersible vessel field, warning Stockton Rush of possible “catastrophic” problems with Titan’s development.
The Marine Technology Society, an industry group made up of ocean engineers, technologists, policymakers and educators, expressed “concern regarding the development of Titan and the planned Titanic expeditions” and warned against the “current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate”.
In reply Stockton Rush told them they were against innovation and trying to shut out a new entrant.
2) The proximate trigger action for this letter was probably a 2018 lawsuit filed by OceanGate’s former director of marine operations David Lochridge, who said he was fired after he raised safety concerns about the vessel.
In turn OceanGate sued Lochridge for breach of contract accusing him of improperly sharing confidential information. The two sides settled their court case in November 2018.
When contacted by Reuters Oceangate's attorney in the Lochridge case, Thomas Gilman, declined comment.
Essentially Oceangate used "lawfare" to see off a whistleblower.
In such a situation where a lawyer is being used to shut down someone speaking out Is there any duty of care on said lawyer to actually see if there is any merit in what the person they are acting against is saying?
You are a lawyer with 30 years experience AND you are an US Navy Submariner with a degree in Materials Science and Engineering? So you were an engineer and then decided ah no I will start from the beginning and go to lawschool to become a lawyer ? Not saying this is impossible but seems like a huge coincidence.
@@Midg-td3ty That's what I did. In the late 1980s the economy was pure shit in places like Texas. Things were so bad that petroleum geologists went to law school with me. Besides, I thought it would be more interesting and pay better and I turned out to be right. I was in the naval reserve before and during college. They paid for it. And finally, I am getting to be older than moon rocks.
If this video has gone viral. You deserve it. Proper old school TH-cam. Knowledgeable guy breaks stuff down. 👍
I second this
Motion carried.
I agree that YT is at its best with intelligent and knowledgeable presenters.
I think that Stockton Rush and Elizabeth Holmes are similar: intentional ignorance masked as a maverick thinker.
woohoo!! commenting to tell y’all that it did
That’s honestly so interesting that you brought up the kaprun train incident because that is also the first thing I thought of when you were talking about none of the monitors or lights etc being fire safety certified!
I work in the aerospace industry for a very large, well known company manufacturing mission critical parts. A few parts of our builds use epoxy. The epoxy is mixed in a manner I can't divulge and applied in a temperature/humidity controlled clean room with various cure times at different temperatures. Air bubbles of any size are not permitted. A tiny piece of dust might be if it is fully encapsulated by epoxy, a decision left to the lead engineer after inspecting under a microscope.
Mixing and applying epoxy with hand trowels in a warehouse is basically going to give you a very hard and dirty piece of Swiss cheese that potentially has thousands of points of failure.
I got PTSD from my Materials Engineering undergrad when I heard the vehicle was a carbon fiber hull. The amount of times I was sternly warned or mockingly threatened that my prof would personally come rip my entrails out if I used carbon fiber for anything other than a tensile load was more than two hand fulls. Your final comments about the silicon valley mindset were spot on and something profs tried to condition us against as Materials Engineers. Everyone wants a wonder material and when you say hey, we found this really cool material that can do this, sales says it can do more, the media says it can do anything and suddenly really cool is a wonder material or silver bullet used in everything.
Lol, well stated. The features & benefits continues to increase as it goes up the chain of lack of knowledge.
Excellent point. Excellent post
Current MSE undergrad here, I heard carbon fiber and I knew they were dead. Only a businessman would put carbon fiber in that thing lol
I dropped out of mech eng in my first year, but even I understand that cf is only strong under tension. WTH were they using it for in a hull under an insane compressive load?
Media is constantly turning new things into the next panacea. Right now it's GPT and Ai.
That the owner and CEO of Ocean gate went with them must have given the passengers a false sense of security.
yes. Like if they asked but what about.. he would just smile and say well I'm going I wouldn't go if I didn't think it was safe, etc. Just hubris. No actual safeguards.
I honestly think that guy was so dumb that he really had no idea about the immense pressure involved.
His main concern was how much profit he gains financially, by sacrificing safety.... and lives.
@@koningklootzak7788 but its a good point that he woudlnt have hopped in himself is he wasnt convinced it was safe. I feel its what happens when someone surrounds themselves with yes men and get deluded into thinking everything is fine.
@@koningklootzak7788not true lol oceangate was not making any money nor was close to making money on any of the trips ceo even explains each trip was actually costing them money
A very professional, informative and well presented video. I certainly would have viewed you as a positive asset in any team I was in charge of when I was Master of diving support vessels. I sincerely hope you gain a mentoring position to pass on your experience and knowledge to others. 👍
A very well done analysis of the ocean gate disaster. I'm a certified PAdI divemaster and I can relate to diving incidents. Thank you for drawing this analogy.
As soon as my teens heard about the controller, they started explaining "stick drift" to me. 🤦♀️ Its crazy how this thing was built.
Stick drift used to absolutely do my head in with my Valve Index controllers. And that was a significantly more expensive controller than the Logitech one Oceangate used here.
@@Alexander-the-ok Oh absolutely it's is shocking that they were charging $250,000 for each ride as well. Yet they still used the cheap stuff and cut corners 🤦♀️ Great job on the video btw. I haven't seen anyone explain it as thoroughly as you did. 👏👏👏
@@NoneYaBusiness01 This probably sounds insane but $750k (ie 3 paying passengers) is frighteningly cheap for a manned DSV trip. I don’t really have a solid comparison but hiring a dive support vessel and saturation divers for a similar length job here in the North Sea would be far more expensive than that. And they can only get to 200m or so.
@@Alexander-the-ok Yea that does sound insane lol but I can see it. I mean I don't think I would pay it even if I had millions. You would just think they would have taken more precautions at least. I mean I'm no expert, but some of this stuff is just common sense. Like I said even my teens were like "Are you serious?!?!" 🤯🤦♀️ This whole accident is insane.
@justalex4687 that's what I thought, that quarter of a million each is a drop in the ocean when you start to consider how much it must cost to rate all the different components, and then test this stuff in real conditions, etc...
It was so crazy to see them working on that thing in a big warehouse. I was half expecting a bloke to roll out from under it on a wheel board like, "Looks like your gasket's gone mate. It'll cost about 70 quid to replace, and I'll have to order it in. Gonna be about two weeks."
What did you expect a lab? With lab coats? It’s not a space vehicle
@@harmankardon478anger issues?
@@harmankardon478 It is going into environments arguably just as dangerous as space, why would you not expect the same prep?
@@harmankardon478 You have to be in a dust-free environment for the epoxy to adhere correctly. And actually, the ocean is more dangerous than space.
@@matthewjackman8410 they have lab environments for space craft assembly because they don't want to be seeding space with microbes.
I'm so glad you mentioned the entanglement hazard. Seeing those cables on the outside of the vessel with no protection stood out immediately to me when I first saw a photo of the Titan. As an industrial safety professional, I couldn't believe that they were so exposed.
Thank you so much for your insightful but humble analysis of some critical shortcuts that seem to have been taken in this vessel.
After watching this I’m less surprised about the failure and actually damn impressed that it managed to make the dive multiple times. The implosion isn’t surprising…the fact that it completed 3-4 dives without imploding is surprising.
Why even use a carbon fibre tube? It's ludicrous. A thick steel tube would almost certainly be cheaper and easier to work with. I wouldn't have thought weight would be an issue when diving, so why carbon fibre?
20-21 dives to the Titanic I think.
@@samuellowekey9271 thats what i dont get as well
@@samuellowekey9271 I just don't understand why they thought carbon fibre was a suitable material. It's incredibly strong when under tension (so great for a light weight pressure cylinder, when the pressure is on the inside), but it's compression strength is much lower, and the way it's bonded together means it can delaminate causing all the compression strength to be lost.
Carbon fiber is not like metal, it has a sharp failure point. So they had no way to predict when the structure became unsafe to dive...
When you watch the video of the titanium collar being mated to the carbon fiber tube via some sort of bonding agent...the fact that there appears to be no "squeeze out" of even a minor amount of bonding agent gives me the sense that there were possibly significant voids in the bonding interface.
It is absurd that the titanium was not machined with a flange to insert into the fiber hull and another on the outside.
Yeah, that whole scene was insane. And it just slid on too. So clearly there was a lot of room (relatively speaking) between the titanium ring and the tube. It looked like they were using JB quick weld to be honest.
The whole scene is unreal. No lazer centering or anything. I wouldn't go on that thing to dive 80 feet
That collar looks almost like the one that goes around the blades of a jet engine.
Ne squeeze out of resin, hmmm, not good. Not vacuumed during this phase (curing), um, common in aircraft manufacturing. Best way to get a strong even bond, no voids. Voids=bad, these areas will fail down the road. Looked somewhat sketchy. Temperature is also critical. Too warm, resin is brittle, to cold, resin is soft. I retired from fiberglass shop working at a submarine repair facility. That would not have passed.
Great overview and thanks for sharing your thoughts! RIP to the persons involved, like most incidents, their 'sacrifice' will hopefully save many lives going forward assuming changes are made to this type of industry. Cheers!
Thank you. Your explanation was stated well, and your candor about where your experience came from was appreciated.
I haven't even finished the video, but your BOP example was phenomenal. As you were describing it, I was like; "Wow, that's really cool. Good for them on designing that." Then you admitted it was fictional. It really goes to show how gullible we as humans are when we hear someone with expertise knowledge discuss something that we aren't familiar with. Blind faith is a real thing that is all too easy to get sucked into.
I thought: OK, good, but... hmm. And then came the spoiler.
I work in software, and even there doing just 1 thing perfectly right is not enough. And the loss in our case is some people not being able to manage their subscription.
I agree with you completely!! And this is true across various fields. We should be able to trust in what true experts tell us, but unfortunately there are many cases where we are either intentionally or unintentionally mislead.
I was thinking, "man this guy is bragging about the exact things he's about to condemn, what an idiot, lol."
aaahh you mean the medical intervention when you were forced to take an untested injection for preventing an 0.05% mortality disease becoming critical..
I know it was made up when they said it can do a job completely and "will always do xxx" lol. I think any engineer worth their salt will not say it in that way. More like "we designed it so it can do this or that". Only CEOs declare in absolutes. Real engineers know that even if their design is perfect on paper 7 million things can go wrong on the field. Thats why there are factors of safety and backup plans.
I'm still surprised that all the hot air from the CEO wasn't enough to resist 6000 psi
They needed some politicians on that piece of shit , just did not have enough corruption to equalize the realities and pressure .
Or a large solid mass of feces proximate the Titanic site
@@jrey6186 hahahaha
Great video and I think you and I would be like minded 😊 Studied Challenger at work and deal with risk a lot both professionally and personally as a trainee pilot. Some of the decisions here were mind-blowing, such a shame it had to end like this. Tha ks for the video
Top marks for graphical communication: the thumbnail inspired me to watch a vid about a subject I thought was beyond my comprehension. Kudos also for the elucidating commentary, which enabled me to at least grasp the basic principles of a DSV's design and operation. However, a newly acquired understanding of the possible failure modes of such a vessel - not to speak of the inescapable reality of Murphy's Law - only makes Stockton Rush's psyche even harder to fathom.
Not to be cruel but I’m really glad the CEO was down there with them and didn’t just send people out and lawyer up afterwards. Kudos to him for being the true captain of his vessel. Easier to believe that he actually trusted his technology if he risked his own life in the process.
True, at least he showed that much responsibility
That's one of the few bright spots in this fiasco. The CEO clearly was not INTENTIONALLY gathering large sums of money with a rickety death trap. If he had anything less than the utmost faith in his vessel(however misplaced), someone else would've been operating it.
Agreed. At least he is dead too. We gotta give him credit putting his money where is mouth was.
I’m certain he’d be going to prison if he was alive. Lawyering up simply wouldn’t have worked. He had nothing to base his scrap of “you could die” paper disclaimer on. Nothing excused him from needing all the system safety artefacts to be carrying out this activity. The only thing he had in his favour was that he was behaving negligently in international waters. A lawyer would have to argue that the principles of safety system engineering don’t apply in international waters. They do, they apply everywhere, all the time.
Being an experimental sub he should have been alone. It sucks he talked the others into trusting his narcissistic ego.
As a non-engineer, I found your explanations concise and illuminating.
i find your comment rather shallow and pedantic..
As an engineer, they were also concise and illuminating
That's what Rush's passengers thought too
.
.
I appreciate the upfront declaration of your experience and background - especially for new viewers like me!
Outstanding - thank you for making this video and real food for thought.
I’m glad someone finally mentioned carbon fiber bike failures. The first time I heard S.Rush had used carbon fiber I immediately thought of all the stories I had heard about carbon fiber bike parts exploding quite spectacularly while under the stress of going real fast. It’s well known with some really horrible injuries. The other thing that’s well known about carbon fiber bike failures, is that they usually fatigue and fail after a lot of repeated use/wear. How on earth did he conclude that this was a good idea?!
Rush the Retard prob thought that "carbon fiber is COOOOL" and that's that of that.
On a serious level, carbon fibers and composites are used in many aircraft and they work fine there, although they are not subjected to extended high pressure cycles. I would love to hear why the FF anyone would use it for a submarine vehicle.
EDIT: CF is fine in tension but not compression. There it is, in the name. NOT compression.
Exactly, cyclists have had a while to build up a distrust of this unpredictable material. It even made a crack sound on a test? FFS. This is the craziest thing I've ever heard.
I read that an engineer or a company told Rush not to use carbon fiber for this reason. And if he would use it, to replace it every dive because of the high stress and wear.
@@Eet0saurus yep a use once material for deep sea. for rovs its cheap since everything else can be reused on the next build so its a cost saver compared to making a steel or titanium hull. but for manned usage hell to the no
Right? I've heard of bike tubes just...shattering with no warning.
I’m no expert but it only takes a little knowledge and experience in safety protocols of any kind to see the red flags in play from the moment this story broke: Hubris; lack of risk analysis and mitigation; absence of redundancy; overconfidence and lack of testing of unconventional material and construction techniques; and a whole host of other basic safety tenets. This is the best, most thorough analysis I’ve seen yet. Thanks, Just Alex.
i watched i video where he showed the joypad and said "we have another one aboard, for safety"...
simple darwin wins again..
Hubris would have been a far better name for the vessel
don''t need to be an expert to know going 12,000 feet under water is crazy especially because there is no reason to be there. want to see the titanic put a camera on a robot
but hey, they didn't hire 50yo cis white ex submarine mechanics/operators right, big win for diversity
As an owner of a Logitech F710 controller, I wouldn't trust that thing with my Dark Souls character's life, let alone my own.
Some fun facts about that controller:
- It doesn't use bluetooth, it's an old-school RF controller with a dedicated dongle
- It has a weak radio, and signal dropout is a significant problem
- Signal dropout can manifest as stuck control inputs
- The controller has no low battery indicator, other than increased signal dropout and input issuese
- The controller is mechanically unreliable, particularly with the analog triggers
I think you may be the first to point out it's just plain old RF and not bluetooth (someone else might have at the time - there were far too many comments for me to read them all). That's hilariously awful....there'd be a non-negligible chance of a passenger's phone/tablet, or any other 2.4GHz device interfering with it.