The Titan, Redux

[rachelmanija]

Must-read article on Stockton Rush and the Titan.

A few excerpts:

Lochridge’s report was concise and technical, compiled by someone who clearly knew what he was talking about—the kind of document that in most companies would get a person promoted. Rush’s response was to fire Lochridge immediately, serve him and his wife with a lawsuit (although Carole Lochridge didn’t work at OceanGate or even in the submersible industry) for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, and misappropriation of trade secrets; threaten their immigration status; and seek to have them pay OceanGate’s legal fees.

...

As chief pilot and the person responsible for operational safety, Lochridge had created a dive plan that included protocols for how to approach the wreck. Any entanglement hazard demands caution and vigilance: touching down at least 50 meters away and surveying the site before coming any closer. Rush disregarded these safety instructions. He landed too close, got tangled in the current, managed to wedge the sub beneath the Andrea Doria’s crumbling bow, and descended into a full-blown panic. Lochridge tried to take the helm, but Rush had refused to let him, melting down for over an hour until finally one of the clients shrieked, “Give him the fucking controller!” At which point Rush hurled the controller, a video-game joystick, at Lochridge’s head. Lochridge freed the sub in 15 minutes.

Comments

[davidgillon]

descended into a full-blown panic

To quote my gliding instructor, pointing at a large spanner in his cockpit: "I keep that there in case the trainee panics".

Just shaking my head at the depth of stupidity here.

There might not be significant expertise with carbon-fibre in the submersible industry, but there is in aerospace. Voids and discontinuities and delaminations are exactly the things they test for while producing large carbon-fibre parts such as the fuselage of the 787, Airbus wings and spacecraft structures. Equally advanced spacecraft like Virgin Galactic, Space X etc have to go through some of the most rigorous certification testing in the world. There was nothing in Titan that could not be tested, and that is obvious to anyone with the knowledge to build and operate it, which leaves the overwhelming likelihood that Stockton Rush's refusal to submit it for testing was because he knew it would fail.

(I do think there are some serious questions for the Canadian authorities to answer here as to why OceanGate was allowed to operate in this manner).

[recessional]

Not really; the Titanic is in international waters, and the only thing our regulations would have authority over would be whether or not the boat that docked and moved the sub to and from the location was within regulations. The company is American, the thing was built in Washington, and it operated out of our seas.

[davidgillon]

The submersible was itself a ship operating out of Canadian ports, and the article seems to imply it carried out some dives in Canadian waters. Maritime authorities generally have the authority to arrest a ship they consider is not fit for sea. They could probably also have made things awkward over crew status when it was obvious it was being abused to try and limit liability.

[recessional]

No, it wasn't. It was never registered, nor did it operate within our waters. It was cargo, being carried by the icebreaker, as at no point did it actually operate as a boat within our waters. Open seas law does not actually give a lot of leeway for nations to intervene outside of very specific contexts, and as the Polar Prince was not itself engaged in any illegal activity, and was entirely seaworthy, there were no grounds to detain it. Cf this article and this one.

High seas law is very murky, and very hard to hold anyone accountable for anything.

[davidgillon]

This paragraph from the article seems to imply Titan did conduct dives in Canadian waters:

Some people did get to see the Titanic and live to tell about it. Plenty more left disappointed, having spent an extremely expensive week in their branded OceanGate clothing, doing chores on an industrial ship. ... And when Rush offered them 300-foot consolation dives in the harbor, even those were often canceled or aborted

WRT the first article you link to, I'm pretty sure this statement is wrong in detail, if not in its entirety:

The Titan was a small vessel that was launched from another ship, the Canadian icebreaker Polar Prince, a setup that Mercogliano likened to pulling a boat on a trailer, in terms of regulatory purposes.

“The highway patrol has jurisdiction over the car and over the trailer, but not over the boat,” he said. “The boat is cargo.”

It's wrong in general because the proper comparison would be with the trailer, not the thing on the trailer - the car and the trailer things intended to operate in the same environment. And even applying it as intended would leave the maritime authorities with no jurisdiction over the seaworthiness of lifeboats and other auxiliaries. Unfortunately it never came before an admiralty court for a decision, but I think there was a case for CCG to argue they had jurisdiction under the Vessel Safety Certificate Regulations, part 2, Foreign Vessels. I don't know whether Canadian maritime law explicitly addresses submersible operations anywhere, but the UK actively asserts certification authority over any submersible operating from a UK port, or from a UK flagged ship.

He's also wrong in this point in the second article, though it's sort of tangential:

When you look at the commercial space industry, they launch from U.S., land in the U.S., so they fall under the FAA. That’s not happening here more than 12 miles off the coast of Canada.

There have been at least three commercial space launch organisations operating out of the US that operate(d) in a similar fashion to OceanGate, basing in the US but carrying out their operations in international waters and airspace. They were, air-launched: Northrop Grumman with Pegasus and Virgin Orbit with Launcher One (now defunct); and sea-launched: Sea Launch (now defunct). All three operated under FAA jurisdiction, and USCG in the case of Sea Launch, which was a Norwegian/US/Russian/Ukrainian joint venture headquartered in Switzerland and launching a Russo/Ukrainian rocket assembled in California in international waters from a ship, Sea Launch, registered in the Cayman Islands. There is a major difference here in that (IIRC) the Outer Space Treaty makes damage from space launches a national responsibility, so there is a need to exert legal authority that isn't so obvious in maritime law.

On the other hand he's absolutely on the mark when he wonders how OceanGate got insurance without a classification society involved. I suspect that could turn out to be just as murky as everything else about them.

[recessional]

It doesn't matter what environment the thing is meant to operate on. If you don't like the boat comparison, you can also use a literal car, or ATVs, or dirtbikes: the trailer and the truck pulling it are operating on the highway. The vehicle that is cargo - that is not being driven on the highway over which the officer has jurisdiction - is not, and cannot be subject to inspection.

Lifeboats are an entirely different class of thing: they are safety devices, not cargo or independent vessels. Maritime authorities have the right to inspect the safety precautions of any vessel in their waters and require them to meet their laws; ergo they get to inspect the lifeboats. They don't actually get to inspect, eg, some passenger's yacht that's pulled up in the hold and isn't being used in their national waters.

The Titan was not a safety device attached to the Polar Prince, nor was it a working sea-vessel; it was cargo. What they did with it in international waters is not, legally, relevant to Canadian maritime jurisdiction. In order to be relevant to Canadian maritime jurisdiction (or even UK jurisdiction) the Titan would have to go in the water in public national waters and then drive out - that is what "operating out of" means. Until it drives from one place to another itself with passengers in the national waters, it's not "operating out of" - it's cargo.

This is not actually difficult or complicated, and it does apply, and is a frequent problem with overfishing and other poaching in international waters, as well as smuggling and other trafficking, and currently with certain wealthy assholes evading sanctions and seizure. It is difficult to solve, because absolutely nobody wants to grant other countries too much control over international waters or much right to intervene in things. I mean hell: we established, historically, the idea of "international waters" more or less at the mutual points of guns in the name of trade.

If something - even a boat, or a sub - is on a ship and is not a designated piece of safety equipment but is legally designated as cargo, then that something is cargo, and does not have to pass inspection as a working piece of machinery. This is how you ship things both by sea and land that aren't in working order, and there is certainly no law here that says you can't ship a submersible in and out of our ports, as cargo.

That, once he was in international waters, he then decided to use it, is no relevance to our maritime jurisdiction. Or to the US maritime jurisdiction where he built and tested the thing and which is right next door to ours.

The offered consolation prizes were in harbour, which have different rules for what is and is not doable within their shelter, including a vast ways of designating something as a "test" if they reallytry - and I note the references to many cancellations, many of which may in fact have been from port authorities going " . . . no". It's possible the St John's Harbour port authority should, indeed, revise what they allow to go on in-harbour, but given his skill at legal technicalities it's entirely possible he was within legal bounds there, as well - the designation of all people who used it as "specialists" (aka not passengers, who are covered by various laws, but workers who are allowed to "test" things) would cover a lot, short of challenging it in a court of law.

[starlady]

As I've seen quite a few people point out, if carbon fiber has a problem at 30k feet or whatever, where the pressure is lighter than it is at sea level…that's a very different timeframe in which to potentially take action.

[graydon]

Anything-fibre will be better in tension than compression. Aircraft, especially pressurized aircraft, are putting primarily tension stresses on the cross section of their fuselage. (Even if it's not pressurized, the wings are trying to bend or twist it.)

A submersible gets compressed. In former days, the Soviet navy had terrible problems with jammed hatches because the steel hatch and the titanium housing had different elasticity and rebound due to being compressed when diving, and those submarines did not go anything like as deep as the wreck of the Titanic. (And I know that, and I know nothing about this subject.)

The design decision to use carbon fibre construction for a compressed pressure vessel is culpable. (Absent some sort of using carbon fibre to keep the thing from flying apart at STP because you've gone and done something like a hammer forged artillery barrel from the inside so the metal primary hull is only unstressed at depth, but that's not what was attempted.)

[davidgillon]

The timeframe is pretty much the same, instantaneous failure when the stresses catastrophically exceed the material's tolerances, it's just at height the pressure vessel fails outwards and at depth it fails inwards.

[starlady]

My point was, if your plane crumbles at thirty thousand feet, you might conceivably be able to put on a parachute. If your uncertified carbon fiber submersible implodes, you're instantaneously vaporized by the pressure.

[rachelmanija]

Hahaha.

It sounds like Rush picked his places of operation carefully to ensure that no one had any legal authority over him.