June 23, 2023
"The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body..."
"... and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.... When diving below the ocean surface this vessel will be subject to extreme pressure, and any failure of the vessel while I am aboard could cause severe injury or death.... The operation will take place largely at a great distance from the nearest hospital or rescue personnel.... I hereby assume full responsibility for the risk of bodily injury, disability, death, and property damage..."
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62 comments:
It wasn't the Hunley, but then again, it was.
Good language. The form fully discloses the danger before offering for the passenger to assume those risks. Now if they videotaped the passengers reading it out loud and freely signing it then there is no liability.
In space flight, "flight certification" comes from providing the crew a measured likelihood of successfully completing the mission alive. The likelihood doesn't have to be perfect. Shuttle crews were told of a near 1/200 chance of death, but it was less than 1/80 in reality (less than 1/40 for early missions). I wonder if the Titan crew was told any likelihood of success and if that likelihood was based on anything useful.
Perhaps they should have copied all those other submersibles with human occupation which plunge the depths to see the Titanic wreckage?
[there are no regulations when it comes to pushing the limits of human ingenuity - beyond the risks assumed by those involved]
What would their chances have been if they had been driving a Leopard tank in the Ukrainian Spring offensive?
Does the waiver cover “Gross Negligence”?
"Carbon fiber-clad" death waiver.
At near-maximum depth (Titanic at 12,500 feet) the time from structural compromise to catastrophic failure is...30 milliseconds, from the estimate I saw. And, when you compress a gas, it heats up. At these depths, with that pressure and the event time, the temperature in that vessel's crew space could have reached surface-of-the-sun levels. Wouldn't last long (a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second) but it would be toasty.
They should have named the Titan the Icarus.
C'mon. Anyone with a brain knows that if you're in a small submersible 1500 feet under the Mid-Atlantic ocean you're taking a risk. And that if anything goes wrong, you can't call 911 and expect help to arrive. Its funny how people blandly accept 40000 dying every year in Auto accidents, but think experimental deep dives should be 100 percent safe.
WW II subs had a crush depth of about 900 feet. So, traveling at 1500 feet is quite risky. One small crack or weakening of the outer shell and boom, you're dead.
My thought was that you could make it safer by attaching a cable, but maybe that cable would get tangled up and cause more problems than it would cure.
PS - The CEO lost a lot of sympathy by claiming (before his death) that he didn't want a bunch of "Old white guys" on his team with sub experience. Instead he wanted diversity and "fresh ideas". How'd that work out?
People went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. Steel vessel. 35000 feet down. Steel.
Our tax dollars at play.
""The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body..."
"... and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles..."
No shit.
When you build stuff like this you look around and see who else is building habitable submersibles are of carbon fiber and if not you ask why not.
Yeah, no. There's no way that a court is going to let that waiver stand, especially in light of the company's obvious "YOLO" attitude towards engineering and safety.
I think you have to sign the same agreement if you want to go over The Niagara Falls in a barrel.
James Cameron said the composite material had to have a failure after a number of uses, unlike titanium or steel. He guessed at 7. So it was Russian Roulette.
He confirmed it was a certain implosion at 3400 feet.That means our Dictator ordered the drama continued 24/7 the next 4 days to filibuster media screen time until they slipped Hunter’s wrist slap plea past the audience.
What JX governs this release? Some states will void a release if gross negligence can be shown.
The company's biggest protection probably comes from the fact that no government has jurisdiction. I doubt that waiver would be valid in the US for an activity taking place in the US. No matter how carefully constructed the waiver, some things simply can't be waived.
Some are saying this is how cars and airplanes started. I would think cars were so slow, they were unlikely to kill anyone for a while. When they got faster, laws were passed to limit their speed for the protection of horses and pedestrians. In the 1920s and 30s roads were improved, and cars got faster. It was unusual to have any kind of lights on the road for many miles, or any kind of median or divider between opposite directions. Horrific crashes taking several lives, especially at night, became common. This isn't really the earliest days of cars, it is taking advantage of new opportunities and taking on new levels of risk. The 50s may have been the most dangerous car era, until divided highways, interstates, and improvement in the manufacture of cars. People gradually became more safety conscious: seat belts and later air bags, crackdowns on impaired driving.
Airplanes: probably the earliest days were among the most dangerous, and then later when trans-ocean flights became common. As Jay Leno used to say, there's not much point in warning people about a water landing; it's probably not survivable.
Or is the little Titan sub more like rich tourists climbing Everest? I've paid my money, I want you to take me from the last base camp up to the summit. Answer: as I warned you at the bottom, you're not in the greatest shape, and the lack of oxygen will impair your brain function. No one can lift you out of here under any circumstances.
Ann, you missed an opportunity to call the NYP out for imprecise language. That was only a "liability" waiver, not a "death" waiver. I'm sure they would have liked to have waived their deaths, but unfortunately that isn't possible.
I hereby assume full responsibility for the risk of bodily injury, disability, death, and property damage...
so.. How Come *I* have to pay for the naval forces that went down to say; Yep, they're gonners?
If I were the lawyer for a passenger's family, where I would attack the waiver is by arguing that my claims are not mere negligence. Oceangate was on notice of various design flaws, testing deficiencies, and so forth, but chose to disregard those problems.
Put another way, the people signing this release are being made aware of extreme risks, but they're signing under the implicit but reasonable assumption that the company is doing everything possible to avoid a bad outcome. If the company wasn't doing so, I think the waiver may be subject to challenge.
Oh no! It wasn't approved by regulators! They were informed of the risk and they lost including the CEO. We don't need more bureaucrats as a result of this.
They built sturdier-looking submaries in the Civil War.
What is the goal of going too high or too low?
Icarus Shrugged. Hubris rules.
Sad for the father, who watched his son die. A gentle reminder of what Inga has gone through. This must be a hard time for her.
We are not merely our politics.
Those consents and waivers are now under protection even greater than that which the MSM gives to Democrat wrong-doing.
James Cameron is saying the carbon fiber or composite material used for the hull is an inappropriate choice of material. Apparently it does not resist compression well.
That waver does not and cannot include 'gross negligence'...
It is well known that part of it was NOT designed for 4000 meter depths.
The owner's estate can still be sued.
It is an interesting document and I am not a lawyer. The first paragraph states they voluntarily applied to participate in a submersible operation. So, even though they paid it is not clear to me they are “passengers” or”paying passengers”. I have seen articles where they are referred to as crew. Assume that is a liability difference. Operating in international waters but does not state the craft was ever inspected. Or needed to be. Or if the captain of the vessel had any type of mariners license. Again, probably not as not operated in territorial waters. This seems similar to the Mount Everest climbing excursions. Pretty risky and you take your chances.
James Cameron is saying the carbon fiber or composite material used for the hull is an inappropriate choice of material.
You know who else could have told him that?
A bunch of 50-something ex-military submarine white guys.
I've spent more than a year under water in submersibles.
No way I'd get in something made of carbon fiber.
Doubly no way to dive that deep.
So long, and thanks for feeding the fish.
I question the premise. The customers themselves are a regulatory body, under the principle of "caveat emptor". And I guarantee you that all of the people on that ride consider themselves above mere rules and regulations, perfectly capable of - and entitled to! - control their own fate independently of mere government regulators.
Several years before the deHaviland Comets, first commercial jetliners, started falling from the sky Nevil Shute wrote a novel about it called "No Highway" made into a pretty good movie with Jimmy Stewart and marlena Dietrich.
Available on YouTube
The problem the comet had, and that Shute predicted, was fatigue. As the plane cycled between pressurized and un pressurized the metal weakens until it cracks. In the case of the comet due to square windows. Corners are stress points.
The oceangate had been down several times before to even deeper depths. But at some point it just got too weak from fatigue.
John lgb Henry
The other day Brandon was talking about how the string holds a kite up.
This kind of stupidity, the inability to to understand compressive force vs tensile force may have contributed to the disaster.
aircraft need to withstand internal pressure. The force on the shell is tensile. The internal pressure will keep it round but even if it got dented it would not lose that much strength.
The force on the sub is compressive. If it loses its roundness even momentarily it can collapse in on itself.
If the pressure hull was designed by airplane engineers, they are not used to dealing with compressive forces.
Also the composite material is like a really sophisticated fiberglass. It is a fabric of threads impregnated with resin. Thread can withstand a lot of pulling which gives composites great tensile strength. Try pushing on a thread and see what happens. In compression the composite has only the resin for strength.
I am assuming that the composite is similar to pressure vessels of my experience but if not, I may be wrong in that last Para.
John lgb Henry
"People went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. Steel vessel. 35000 feet down. Steel."
Yeah, I've been wondering about that. I read about that when I was a kid. Glass window about a foot thick. Weights held on by electromagnets, so if the power fails, up she goes. Oh, well. That was back when we still had the technology to get to the Moon.
That the CEO was going certainly was a factoring anyone signing that form.
As far as the argument that they delayed announcing the outcome because of politics that seems needlessly paranoid and complicated and not really thinking about the families.
The navy heard something but they also heard banging. Until they found the debris field they couldn't confirm anything or connect what they heard to this specific event.
at minimum these geniuses should have made 2 units and destroyed one to figure out how deep was safe!!
Elon Musk blows up BOOSTERS just to learn ROCKET SCIENCE
How Come *I* have to pay for the naval forces that went down to say; Yep, they're gonners?
Good real life training.
So by conservative anti-regulatory standards it succeeded!
my understanding is that Ukrainian and Russian conscripts also sign similar waivers before being dropped off!!
Crappy engineers, but they knew to hire a good lawyer. Even without the iron clad waiver (Is it? I’m not a lawyer.) it’s not clear that OceanGate has any worthwhile tangible assets left that can be seized in a court proceeding. Up until the early hours of Sunday morning they had a working carbon fiber submersible, but now all that’s left is a large hunk of titanium that had formed one end of the vessel, the balance being loose pieces scattered around about 2.5 miles below the surface.
How Come *I* have to pay for the naval forces that went down to say; Yep, they're gonners?
@gilbar, this will come as a rude shock, it (1) the Coast Guard is not the Navy, and (2) the Coast Guard personnel involved in the search have their salaries paid by us taxpayers whether they are engaged in a rescue/recovery operation or sitting around their base waiting until a hapless yachtsman in a brand new catamaran gets dismantled in a storm.
Blogger John henry said...
Several years before the deHaviland Comets, first commercial jetliners, started falling from the sky Nevil Shute wrote a novel about it called "No Highway" made into a pretty good movie with Jimmy Stewart and marlena Dietrich.
I read that as a teen and he also wrote two other novels that predicted the future. One was "Ordeal," which predicted the Blitz when WWII began. The other was "On the Beach," which scared me so badly that I nearly dropped out of college. I still have trouble reading it.
If the USN SOSUS net (or whatever the acronym is now) did not have that implosion located and identified within minutes then the navy has wasted tens of billions of dollars over the last 70 years while brazenly lying about their sonar capabilities.
at minimum these geniuses should have made 2 units and destroyed one to figure out how deep was safe!!
Elon Musk blows up BOOSTERS just to learn ROCKET SCIENCE
It wasn't just how deep, it was about how much use they could get out of these things. The sub had been used successfully several times prior.
JaimeRoberto said...
"Oh no! It wasn't approved by regulators! They were informed of the risk and they lost including the CEO. We don't need more bureaucrats as a result of this."
You don't need regulators. You need engineers who are willing to test the crap out of it until it breaks and find out why it broke.
John lgb Henry @ 4:05: very good engineering insight. Thank you. Most of us have grown up in a physical world where tension and compression are very very different —and yet we can’t differentiate them. That makes it hard to hold a conversation.
Big Mike: "@gilbar, this will come as a rude shock, it (1) the Coast Guard is not the Navy,.."
Preach it brother.
hpudding: "So by conservative anti-regulatory standards it succeeded!"
The inevitable and unavoidable result of "woke engineering".
Rusty: "You don't need regulators. You need engineers who are willing to test the crap out of it until it breaks and find out why it broke."
Unfortunately, actually testing things to failure and iterating to more robust designs is literal white supremacy.
hpudding can explain....well, not really.
"It wasn't just how deep, it was about how much use they could get out of these things. The sub had been used successfully several times prior."
Thanks, I thought they had been down there before, but wasn't sure. It wore out. This event was a useful engineering lesson.
I used to think airline travel was safe because the pilots who knew the risks the best were on board and would die too. Hmmm? Maybe not in the days of fantasy and cult beliefs. These days saying repeats in my mind that ditching belief in God doesn’t mean you believe in nothing. It means you will believe in anything.
Might not enforce that in Wisconsin.
It wasn't just how deep, it was about how much use they could get out of these things. The sub had been used successfully several times prior.
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for trips to view Titanic closeup?
I did not see that detail in any reports?
Re regulation it is not just the govt that promulgates regulations and standards, it is private agencies.
We talked a bit about UL underwriters laboratories which was owned and run by insurance companies
Pretty much anything to do with fire protection is regulated by nfpa, national fire protection association
Nfpa also publishes the national electrical code
American Society of Mechanical engineers regulates pressure vessels and such. Like your water heater tank.
American society for testing and materials astm sets a bunch of standards
Medicine has all sorts of non-govt boards setting stds for specialties and certifying practitio ets.
All universities are accredited by non-govt accreditation organizations american board of engineering technology for engineering schools, for example
And so on. All private, none controlled by govt.
John lgb Henry
People went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. Steel vessel. 35000 feet down. Steel.
========
Subway is currently having sale on BOGO50
you can get smashed sandwich with Mariana Sauce!
so after Googling ...
Per NBC News, OceanGate Expeditions began offering trips to the Titanic wreckage in 2021 and had only made two previous trips before the June 18 dive.
tim maguire said...
"The company's biggest protection probably comes from the fact that no government has jurisdiction. I doubt that waiver would be valid in the US for an activity taking place in the US. No matter how carefully constructed the waiver, some things simply can't be waived."
What? For hundreds of years maritime law has covered sinkings at sea and the liabilities of the parties who owned those ships and sent them out into deep oceans.
Do you think the relatives of air passengers whose planes that crashed in international waters have no claim against the airline or the planes' manufacturers?
John lgb Henry @ 4:05: very good engineering insight. Thank you. Most of us have grown up in a physical world where tension and compression are very very different —and yet we can’t differentiate them. That makes it hard to hold a conversation.
I am relieved that the people aboard didn't have time to suffer, or (perhaps) to anticipate their deaths.
I'm thinking about the artificial butt that IKEA stores used to have, maybe still do, in the chair section, repeatedly applying the force of a person sitting down to their Poang chair. That thing would operate every day, during all opening hours at least. I didn't make a study of it, but I imagine if the chair in the display case would have failed under this repeated testing, the tabloids would have gotten hold of it: "Poang splinters in full view of customers! Here's how to claim your money back."
My son is studying to be a mechanical engineer and has friends studying materials, both of which would seem to me to be relevant here. I hope and pray that they're always allowed to do all the testing that their training would drive them to do. How awful for the team that worked on the Titan, that either they weren't allowed to test it to failure or they affirmatively decided not to. I can't imagine the guilt they must be feeling.
Waiver aside, even if they had never signed it as an agreement, they signed as an acknowledgement that they had been told of the very high risk. In fact, the document basically says that the sub company was not only grossly negligent, but highly reckless.
In proceeding nevertheless, waiver aside, they assumed the risk.
There is no claim.
some things simply can't be waived
So toss the waiver. Plaintiffs would still need to get past the assumption of risk. Which they can't do.
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