How that book hasn't been made into a mini-series is beyond me. The stories and characters are incredible.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
During a rescue operation in the Arctic ocean, several submariners were tossed into the sea. Some of them were killed by their experimental life preservers, until then untested under real world conditions.
The life preservers were floating devices sewn into foul weather gear and boots. The boots were attached to the rest of the suit and could only be removed using a special tool. When hitting the frigid water, a number of the floating devices sewn into jackets burst, leaving the boots as the only buoyant part of the suit.
While the men's boots pulled their feet upwards, the weight of the rest of the suit pulled them under water. Quickly tiring in the churning sear, several drowned, feet pointing upwards.
Lesson still not learned: Equipment untested in the intended domain of application has not been tested.
I've been trying to find a less breathless, more academic treatment of the subject but haven't had any success.
> “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
So:
* They knew about it and quickly aided in the search.
* They did not broadcast the details of the collection to the public.
That seems like the right call to me.
This counts as a maritime accident so the NTSB will likely be investigating. They'd want the Coast Guard to locate and try to recover any pieces it could for the investigation anyway.
Besides, the vast majority of that money is already spent. The variable cost is actually quite low - largely just overtime and fuel cost. Often the fuel comes out of reserves that have to be rotated out anyway.
And nobody with any shred of PR training would make a "heard a big boom, they're probably fucked" statement with all the world's media and the families listening. Nobody wants to tell the families that its over until they've got hard proof.
Maybe they would have continued to make the attempt. But unless it got snagged, the ballasts were designed to break off after 24 hours and rise to the surface.
Even a hopeless situation, people still want to see, and possibly recover, the surviving wreckage. The whole point of the original exploration was to view the Titanic wreckage. Various military spent enormous resources looking for MH370 for months/years.
Don't quite know what was so great about this story. It was a textbook example of the catastrophic consequences of hubris meeting ignorance, and that was about it. The rest was just milking the drama as timed passed by with decreasing theoretical oxygen reserves.
With that being the case it could be operational inertia. Sonar tech hears something weird, reports it to his boss. His boss puts in a morning update the next day, he sees about the sub on the news, but he can't just go sending this info off, he runs it up the chain, eventually a person with authority hands it off to the USCG who then passes it back down, and eventually someone in media gets ahold of it, or someone in an official capacity makes an announcement.
If I am ever in a situation like this or under a fallen building or whatever I hope the rescue team will continue until death is 100% sure like starving or what and not because of some events happened.
I'd liken it to a space shuttle blowing up, the incident isn't compatible with life.
Obviously, an Orca rave.
hmmm
My other thought was that if they showed up alive then it almost definitely was was a cover but I suppose I was on wrong on that front. Still think the story gave them the opportunity to drop a lot more sonar buoys and increase patrols and ‘look’ for something.
Actually, they probably do like announcing to the world “we heard it”, to hype up their capabilities and spook their adversaries. That’s why you wait, you don’t want to say you heard it and be wrong.
> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official.
"Began listening" -- So OceanGate actually contacted the Coast Guard immediately?
> Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
The commander on site? Like the Coast Guard commander on site? That would imply the implosion happened many hours after the loss of communication.
> “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
This makes it more like they retroactively looked at the data and noted that the implosion happened and then informed the commander.
So I haven't been following this story all that closely, but I would've been somewhat more surprised had there been an implosion or similar it wasn't sitting on a recording somewhere. How quick it is to extract, triangulate, etc are another story.
> The information about the possible explosion was received on Thursday from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, an international body that runs a global network of listening posts designed to check for secret atomic blasts.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-submarine-fligh...
The recordings related to it haven't been released, nor has an official explanation.
Because of that being able to detect anything in the ocean anywhere within a reasonable distance of your coastal regions is a matter of life and death for a strong nuclear power, so the USN definitly new about this. Heck the USN probably knows the location of every single whale in 50% of the Earth's oceans.
I used to think this. But land-based missiles are essential for MAD, as a nuclear sponge and by being cheap. They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. (There is a great scene in The Expanse which contemplates such a horizon.)
What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing [1].
[1] https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Vo...
I guess we were both wrong.
I take everything any country says about stuff like this with massive grains of salt - if they're not providing the information in real-time and then it later turns out to be true then coming back later and saying "oh we knew that all along" is kinda hard to take seriously.
Similarly they claim the implosion was detected and triangulated but the banging went undetected until sonar buoys were deployed.
Wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. SOSUS was highly classified until very recently.
> I guess we were both wrong.
Optimistic.
I think the journalist may have assumed the wrong sequence of events. This makes it look as though the Navy wasn't recording until after the sub lost comms. That would mean that the implosion actually occurred some time after loss of contact.
>> The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,
If this is the statement issued (that the journalist then "dumbed down" wrongly), then after comms was lost they started analyzing recorded data that was being recorded circa when contact was lost, which would make more sense.
Don't they have different sound signatures and so they're able to determine whether it's the former or the latter?
In other words, it's widely known that the Navy has a system for listening. The internal designation, capabilities and limits of operation are not widely known and that information should be kept secret.
> The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns.
And why is it "widely known" that the military has this listening system? If it's really "top secret" then no, the public shouldn't know about it. Seems like everything is "top secret" until someone wants to show off all the cool toys.
Absolutely occurred in under 30ms (upper bound). Possibly as quick as 2ms, and in all likelihood well under 10ms.
The depth of the Titanic wreck is 3800m; down there the vessel would be subjected to 380 times that pressure. So...probably.
Mythbusters did an episode showing what happens to a human body under deep sea implosion
> https://youtu.be/LEY3fN4N3D8
It's ugly.
At their depth, where presumably the carbon fibre let go, it's probably a lot faster too. At least they won't be able to even register what's going on.
Watch how quickly those glass objects imploded as much lower pressures than they would have been at, it would have happened faster than their brains could have comprehended it, so there's some mercy in that at least.
As materials engineers you should strive to intimately know the materials you are working with.
It's in our DNA to gauge and get a feel for materials, like a cat balancing on a thin branch, or a dog finding good spots to crunch a bone.
How does a carbon fibre tube behave when slightly overloaded with external pressure?
When it is "leaked" I assume they heard nothing and don't want to disclose the (in)accuracy of their kit.
Read up on underwater acoustic propagation to see why. Lots of interacting variables that can reflect, scatter, focus, alter affect absorption etc.
I'm the last person to deny the massive frustrating bureaucracy that is the US military, but in this kind of thing, that's not an issue.
Former O-4 17 alpha. I was even less connected to the Coast Guard than the Navy is, but since they do port security, including cyber, if there was an issue there they were involved.
