Titanic tourist submarine is missing.

[TGS]

They lost contact with the sub an hour and forty five minutes into the dive. They waited over six hours before taking action. Six precious hours of oxygen wasted.

I guess the question would be, what would your cut off have been? How long between radio silence and Send In The Navy for you?

From popular news reporting, it appears the sub was not capable of maintaining comms with the mothership throughout the dive, and that it would lose contact on every dive. It appears to not be a tethered submersible. Thus, losing contact an hour and 45 minutes into the dive was not an emergency condition which necessitated immediate notification the Coast Guard as some people are assuming.

Communications are not fail-proof, and that's why in various industries/activities it isn't considered an immediate emergency if communication is lost or a single planned contact is missed. Most decision trees in such situations require additional conditions to be present to be considered an emergency, or several missed contacts over an abnormal period of time...which from initial reporting, seems to be the case here with notifying the USCG about 8 hours into the 10 hour dive, given that the sub would routinely be out of contact for 5+ hours on previous dives.

[MistWolf]

I guess the question would be, what would your cut off have been? How long between radio silence and Send In The Navy for you?

Fifteen minutes. The crew was required to report in every fifteen minutes. That was a carved in stone, no BS procedure. If the fifteen minute check in is that important, you start the clock when the first check in is missed and when the fifteen minute mark is reached, you start the ball rolling.

At the Air Med company I worked for, SOP was a half hour. If the dispatcher lost contact with any aircraft in the air, a timer was set and once the aircraft was out of contact for a half hour, the dispatcher was to start the ball rolling immediately.

[TGS]

Fifteen minutes. The crew was required to report in every fifteen minutes. That was a carved in stone, no BS procedure.

Where did you see that? If that's true, then the company appears to have been violating their own procedures on every single dive.

[MistWolf]

Where did you see that? If that's true, then the company appears to have been violating their own procedures on every single dive.

It was on a Fox News report on YouTube. The Talking Head interviewed a guy who is an expert in the field. He said they crew had to report in every half hour or fifteen minutes which was a pain because the crew would be busy piloting the sub. I figure it was every fifteen because they lost contact at the 45 minute mark, not at the top or bottom of the hour.

[TGS]

It was on a Fox News report on YouTube. The Talking Head interviewed a guy who is an expert in the field. He said they crew had to report in every half hour or fifteen minutes which was a pain because the crew would be busy piloting the sub. I figure it was every fifteen because they lost contact at the 45 minute mark, not at the top or bottom of the hour.

And, it just so happens that the CEO had stated a desire/intent to hire young inspiring people with fresh ideas and no experience instead of seasoned and tested maritime professionals. You know, the people who'd have an appreciation for the importance of strict adherence to safety procedures and wouldn't have a problem pulling the plug without hesitation, even if they personally thought, "Nah, everything's probably okay".

We had a boss at one of my prior assignments that was like that. We had a written policy of requiring certain notifications be made whenever any shooting or explosion happened within a certain radius of our facility, even if it didn't appear to be directed at us. He didn't like having the make those notifications, and would make excuses. He also didn't like it when I rolled people out of bed because one of our personnel missed a scheduled ride, was not answering the phone or attempts to bang on his door, and it turned out that person had just gotten an earlier flight out of country last minute but just forgot to send an update to the operations center. That's when you get the backhanded/sarcastic, "Everything was okay, but of course you did what you were supposed to" comments at team meeting/debriefs, which creates a chilling effect on other subordinates to actually do what they're supposed, instead saying inside their heads, "Nah, everything's probably okay, I can probably just ignore this for now". Breeds that culture of inaction for fear of upsetting some douchebag boss, stakeholder, or customer.

[TCinVA]

Everything I've seen from the CEO gives me a Theranos vibe.

I don't quite get that vibe. The Theranos fraud at least didn't require putting her own physical safety in immediate peril.

This is a kind of hubris I run into fairly often. I am routinely in a position where I have to work on things with self described "idea people". These are people who think big thoughts. They think "outside the box". They've always just completed yet another book by some other huckster about "leadership" or "innovation" or something like that. And they have themselves an idea.

Except that they have absolutely no concept of how anything they have ideas about actually works, and so they invent something that is untethered to any reality we would recognize.

As I have grown fond of saying, the idea to go to the New World requires at least a sufficient grasp of the barriers involved to understand some big boats will be necessary. I'm talking about people who want to go to the New World and think they can do it in a canoe. Or just by walking. I mean, if Jesus and Peter did it...

It takes a specific blend of arrogance, ignorance, and some measure of "success" in something else that feeds both of those things to achieve. When I see it, there is usually an advanced degree in something, usually something non-technical that serves as that fuel.

I'll give an example from a friend.

This friend works at a university. He told me about going to a meeting about teaching spaces in a building under construction. This building was going to have new, innovative teaching spaces in it featuring classrooms that were 100% reconfigurable on the fly. You could write on the walls. And you would be able to project from a computer on all the walls in the space. All this predicated on the idea that a flexible learning space was necessary for true innovation.

To accomplish that, each room was equipped with multiple digital projectors at $30,000 each. Some rooms had 4. Some had 6. A couple of rooms had 9. To project anything, you needed a computer. Their idea of a free-flowing classroom was not compatible with having a podium in the room where the computer could be set up for instruction because computers need power cables and network cables, etc. So instead they put it in the closet. And they expected to run the computer using an iPad. This was a particularly interesting adaptation because at the time not a single one of them had ever actually run any sort of VNC setup to control a PC from an iPad before. Any suggestions that these were not spectacular ideas ahead of time was met with hostility and accusations of racism. Literally.

But their entire philosophy for the dozen rooms that had seen literally millions of dollars poured into them required doing something none of them had done, none of them knew how to do, and none of them had any experience with.

Hence my friend's involvement, because it was a couple of weeks before classes started and they didn't know how to solve that problem. He solved it for them in that he found a way to use the iPads to remotely control the computers entombed in the closets. Hooray! Great success!

...except every single instructor who used the rooms found them to be an incredible pain in the ass because it turns out trying to run a PC from an iPad is a miserable experience. And so was reconfiguring the room after the prior group had done whatever violence to the floor plan they wanted. And if the walls were written on, it turns out that it became kind of a mess to project on the same walls.

Literally every part of what the idea people thought up turned out to be an epic disaster in actual use, but that didn't stop the wasting of millions of taxpayer dollars in pursuit of their bullshit. Nor did it stop them from putting that bit of "innovation" on their resume for the next job they applied for.

That's kind of the vibe I get here. The same sort of "idea" person who gets outright angry when anyone points out practical challenges to those ideas. Practical challenges like physics. My read on Theranos was that she knowingly perpetrated a fraud from the getgo.

My gut here is that the whole thing was the kind of "idea" people my buddy had to deal with on that project. It's a deeper level of arrogance and self satisfaction that tends to produce it.

[wvincent]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/debris-fi...ast-guard-says

"I'll take structural failure for a thousand, Alex."

[ccmdfd]

From popular news reporting, it appears the sub was not capable of maintaining comms with the mothership throughout the dive, and that it would lose contact on every dive. It appears to not be a tethered submersible. Thus, losing contact an hour and 45 minutes into the dive was not an emergency condition which necessitated immediate notification the Coast Guard as some people are assuming.

Communications are not fail-proof, and that's why in various industries/activities it isn't considered an immediate emergency if communication is lost or a single planned contact is missed. Most decision trees in such situations require additional conditions to be present to be considered an emergency, or several missed contacts over an abnormal period of time...which from initial reporting, seems to be the case here with notifying the USCG about 8 hours into the 10 hour dive, given that the sub would routinely be out of contact for 5+ hours on previous dives.

Somewhat eerily similar to how NASA would lose communication with the shuttles during their reentry routinely. They didn't know Columbia was in trouble for a while because the accident occurred right during when they were expecting a Communications blackout.

[JohnO]

https://www.foxnews.com/us/debris-fi...ast-guard-says

"I'll take structural failure for a thousand, Alex."

12,500 feet down / 33 feet/ATM= 379 Atmospheres x 14.7 PSI per Atm = 5,570 PSI.

[Stephanie B]

If I understand correctly, unmanned underwater vehicles, huge winches, and a huge cable will arrive at the site at about 3:00 this afternoon - several hours after the oxygen likely ran out. None of that makes a difference unless they can find the sub. However, if the sub is found, those 6 hours could potentially be the difference between life and death.

Have there been other times where the craft has been out of communication for hours and then returned normally?

If so, that wouldn't surprise me. Underwater comms are notoriously unreliable. I don't remember the underwater telephones as having much of a range. Multipath garbling was a real problem. I was involved in a trial digital system back in the day (what now would be called text messages) and it wasn't exactly impressive. For this case, banging on the inside of the hull with a wrench would have been reasonable. If they had a wrench.

(The most reliable system was a Morse code button on the sonars at about 5wpm, but those had a honking huge signal output and weren't exactly covert.)