Director James Cameron found Titan hull design risky

Ocean Gate shouldn't have been doing what it was doing I think that's pretty clear I wish I had been more vocal about that but I think I was unaware that they weren't certified because I wasn't really studying it I wasn't really interested Stockton Rush asked me if I wanted to go out there and dive this season you know I wasn't interested there was a lot of concern about this outfit and this sub a lot of concern even to the extent that I wasn't involved in it because I was making Avatar 2 at the time but a lot of them got together and wrote a letter to uh to Ocean Gate and said you have to certify you cannot take people down it's irresponsible and it could lead to catastrophe Monday morning when I first found out about the incident got on a whole bunch of calls and emails it's a small community within an hour and a half I had the following information they were on dissent they were at 3 500 feet they lost comms and tracking the last one being the critical one because the the transponder that's used to track a sub during descent and on the bottom is a fully autonomous system it's in its own pressure housing and it has its own battery power so for them to lose comms and tracking at the same time sub was gone there was no question in my mind I for days I tried to run other scenarios that could account for it I could come up with nothing um so the next thing I did was contacted a few more people and uh managed to track down uh you know their acoustic networks around summer research some are some are intelligence um we got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the Subways that's comms were lost a loud bang on the hydrophones loss of transducer or transponder loss of calms I knew what happened sub-employed I I sent emails to everybody I know I said we've lost some friends the sub has imploded it's on the bottom in pieces right now I sent that out Monday morning I never believed in that technology of wound carbon fiber you know wound filament uh cylinder cylindrical Hull I thought it was a horrible idea um I wish I'd spoken up you know but I I assumed somebody was smarter than me you know because I'd never experimented with that technology but it just sounded bad on its face because we make pressure hulls out of contiguous material Steel titanium ceramic acrylic and so you can model it you can do finite element analysis of it and you know you understand the yield properties you understand the number of cycles that it could that it can take um but you can't do that with a composite material because it's two dissimilar materials you know sort of Blended together and so we all knew that the danger was delamination and and Progressive failure over time with microscopic water Ingress and fatigue what they call cycling fatigue and we knew that if the sub passage pressure test it wasn't going to fail on the first dive it might fail on dive seven or I don't I don't know what they're at you know but it's going to fail over time which is Insidious you don't get that with steel with titanium now there's one wrecked line next to the other wreck for the same damn reason

Channel: Reuters

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Id: ZllNJXqTRiE

Length: 3min 38sec (218 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023