You have summed up my opinion of the sub. Very "maker" rather than engineered. On beacons yes it should have a EPIRB abut also it could / should have an acoustic "pinger". These are ultrasonic and can be picked up by speciaised sonar. Basically a bigger version of those fited to aircraft accident recorders.
A very unfortunate event.

Robert.

One thought concerning the crews problems is that if the Titan manages to surface, perhaps some distance from the mothership, there is no way that the crew can open the submersible from inside because part of the departure procedure is that the entrance to the craft is securely bolted from outside prior to entering the water. If the submersible surfaces without someone undoing all the securing bolts then they could still suffocate because they can’t access fresh air.

In the information now coming into the public domain is that a previous team member was tasked with carrying out a quality audit of the submersible he came up with the fact that there was no Non Destructive Testing Procedures to monitor the structural integrity of the pressure hull, he was subsequently dismissed from his employment. I realise that all sorts of conspiracy theories will emerge because of media speculation, but having spent eleven years as an NDT technician the comment that I read seemed to be particularly relevant. Dave W

For starters:

• World's largest ship [at the time]
• Maiden voyage
• Second largest loss of life in a single ship sinking [at the time]
• Lots of mega rich big wigs on board
• Hubris [of saying the ship was unsinkable] immediately punished

Edited By Bill Phinn on 21/06/2023 15:16:52

Nor do constructing a deepwater submersible and saying "we did this extremely fast".

Let's hope that the aircraft HAS, and thatm nrescuers can nget there in time to save the occupants.

Howard

The French research vessel, Le Atalante, has just arrived on site. It is equipped with a deep diving, remote operated vehicle (ROV) called Victor 6000, that can reach the depths of the Titanic’s shipwreck. This is the first (and only) asset to arrive, capable of reaching the seabed and conducting a sea bed search.

Bon Chance

Edited By mike T on 21/06/2023 17:06:18

Edited By mike T on 21/06/2023 17:06:57

Apparently it costs about £200k for a seat

– Hey, let's take an experimental submarine called "Titan" to the wreck of the Titanic. What could possibly go wrong?

There were it seems numerous ballast release systems, one had a 16 hour fixing that would disolve ! Fancy having no way to escape from the vessel unaided once on the surface ! I fear that a catastrophic hull failure has occured. God rest their souls. Noel

I thought visiting graves was an acceptable everyday occurrence.

An American journalist who went to the titanic said it has 7 ways to surface and one of those will work even if the crew are unconscious so maybe it is snagged on debris. Another fella on the news this morning said his sub was caught in a current once and got wedged up by the propellers. He thought he was going to die for a few hours but they managed to unwedge it. Seems utterly crazy to me though going down there I wouldn't even get in that thing on the surface.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the people who died on Titanic mean something to a great many people.

The same can be said about the occupants of Commonwealth war graves, which people still visit in large numbers, sometimes travelling large distances to do so, and without necessarily having any close or even distant family member interred or memorialized in the cemetery they're visiting.

Even ordinary civilian cemeteries can have much larger visitor numbers than you might expect; taphophilia isn't all that odd, you see, statistically speaking at least. Whether you or others approve of it is another matter.

In Titanic's case, seeing the wreck in person is surely something countless people would want to do if they could do so reasonably safely and affordably. Having to beat their way to it through bramble bushes and rely on torchlight to see it at all would deter practically no-one if that was all that stood in the way of this particular goal.