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You'd think a tether would be a basic safety feature.

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https://defencehub.live/attachments/20220406_133915-jpg.42214/

We seem to have a wide variety of sonobouys. I don't know if they work well for this purpose.

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The sub takes 8 hours to descend to 2.5 miles of depth.
The sub lost contact at 1 hour and 45 minutes.

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'There's no switches and things to bump into, we have one button to turn it on.

'Everything else is done with touch screens and computers


Well there's your problem. Probably sitting on the ocean floor in total darkness with no power or comms.

Contact with the submersible was lost about one hour and 45 minutes into the vessel's dive, the US coast guard said.

He added that because the passengers are sealed inside the vessel by bolts applied from the outside, "there's no way to escape, even if you rise to the surface by yourself. You cannot get out of the sub without a crew on the outside letting you out."

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It's a gravesite of some 1500 people. The ne plus ultra of ghost ships. I wonder if it's a cursed ship, and now a cursed location.

People don't dare approach the USS Arizona for sport. The souls lost on the Titanic should be respected the same way.

The extreme danger of actually doing this makes it very easy for the Titanic to kill again.

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It wasn't anywhere near the bottom when it was lost. It wasn't even 25% of the trip down to the bottom. But that's still like 3,000 feet. Public Seawolf test depth is 1600' for reference.
Either that thing went straight down or it's stuck under the surface.

Either way that is the stuff of nightmare fuel.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65953872

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Not sure if I had the money I would be brave enough to take that trip.

It’s crushing for all those involved.

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If they lost power but the structure was not breached, can you imagine the hell in that thing when they have hours to contemplate their certain death from suffocation?

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https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/19/21/72306589-12210873-image-a-40_1687207487905.jpg

Multiple C-130 aircraft are now assisting in the aerial search for the vessel, which has not been heard from since Sunday morning


https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/19/21/72306609-12210873-image-a-41_1687207548532.jpg

In addition to the C-130s, multiple Poseidon P-8 Boeing aircraft (shown above) have also been deployed and will drop sonar buoys in the water in an effort to detect any sound


https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/19/17/72298941-12210873-image-a-8_1687192369437.jpg

The Polar Prince is the expedition ship used to take tourists from Newfoundland out to the wreckage site. The sub is deployed once out at sea


https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/19/16/72297445-12210873-image-a-1_1687187855727.jpg


Link

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Who is paying for all of that?

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Who is paying for all of that?

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Who is paying for all of that?

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If it was 9000' from the bottom and started gliding down, it could have went several *miles* in most any direction before hitting bottom.

Yikes.

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Jfc, stuff of nightmares. If near the surface can't certain .mil aircraft detect it?

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Yep. They may or may not ever be found. And if they do it’s gonna be by some guy with ROV’s and navy funding who spends a month searching the ocean bottom for miles in all directions

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We are assuming (unless I missed a press release) that they are down there.  What if they did surface but are lost?  Big ocean and it would only require the EPIRB might be damaged or destroyed.

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If it was 9000' from the bottom and started gliding down, it could have went several *miles* in most any direction before hitting bottom.

Yikes.

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https://www.slashgear.com/img/gallery/xbox-360s-red-ring-of-death-cost-microsoft-1-billion/intro-import.jpg

If you've owned an XBox - you know the Red Ring of Death

Bigger_Hammer

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How much is the rescue effort gonna cost the company ?

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12,000 feet of wire line ain’t cheap

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Story hits home to me, as I actually looked at Oceangate when considering diving the wreck myself.  It became financially impossible, however.  The trip used to be like $60k, but they’ve ramped that price up quite a bit over the last decade or so.

I think they’ve got a chance, but the only chance they’ve got is a tether and winching them back up.  I think it’s relatively safe to assume that they did their homework with regard to the CO2 poisoning when they were coming up with that 4 day oxygen supply.  Given the large presence of rescue vessels on site and moving that direction, I suspect that they haven’t heard an implosion.  That implies one of four possibilities, IMO:

1).  The oxygen wasn’t set up properly to begin with (loaded it short) and they went hypoxic and are already gone.  The sub is probably just sitting down there with them dead on board.

2).  Major systems failure impeding their ability to surface.  Given the design of the sub running on all computers, that would seem to be possible though I’m not sure too much about the specifics.

3).  They got hung up on something.  This seems unlikely; they would likely have alerted the ship of it.  

4).  Most unlikely, they surfaced but are just below the surface and can’t be seen and they don’t have comms.  And they can’t open the hatch.  That’s what all the ships and aircraft are looking for.



For those that don’t know too much about this, there aren’t that many manned submersibles that can safely reach that depth and return.  I’m not sure what the exact number is, but I suspect it’s less than 15 in the world.

I find it quite surprising that Oceangate doesn’t have two of them.  They have two other subs, but those aren’t rated for this depth.  I’m not sure what their recovery/emergency procedures call for in this situation “on paper”, but a second sub would certainly have been something I expected.  

Not that you can transfer passengers from one to another.  But another sub could get you eye’s on the missing one and maybe attach a tether.

The trouble is that the subs that ARE out there (I think Alvin might still be at Woodshole) are still pretty heavy.  You can’t get any of them out there fast enough.  Can’t even air-lift one.  If you could get Alvin out there, you could have a three-person team at the wreck in under 24 hours.  But it’s not possible, at least as far as I know.  Even a really fast naval ship would struggle to load and get there in the time allotted.

Another problem is that they probably don’t know where her last position was.  I mean, unless you put a camera on the sub, there is SO much wreckage and metal down there, I don’t think you could identify it with sonar or anything else.  So even if they get a remote tethered robot down there to start searching, they’ll have to scour a LOT of area to even find it (or pieces of it).

Really, if they aren’t already dead, the thing that is going to doom them is not having the assets needed on site to actually formulate a realistic rescue.  If they had a second sub, maybe it could be done.  If they had the right tethered robot, maybe they could attach a winch line.  If they have neither, the odds of them getting them there in time is pretty low imo.

No matter what happens here, this is probably the end of diving it at least as far as tourism is concerned.  It’s apparent to me that Oceangate (from what I can tell) is woefully unprepared for this eventuality.