“The vast majority of marine accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.” Yes, because the regulators catch the mechanical failures

“This is not innovation; it’s profiteering,” is so succinct, such an apt way to describe the whole thing. Well said.

The fact that hearing cracking noises on several of the descents, which was reported by many different passengers, was just completely disregarded by Rush or regarded as "normal" is absolutely mind blowing. Or the fact that they would lose contact with the mother vessel regularly and this was also regarded as normal and "not a big deal" is insane. Rushs arrogance had reached delusion and the negligence was to the umpth degree.

"Regulations are written in blood" is a phrase that the CEO did not seem to heed. The bitter irony of this is that the Titanic itself (the very ship they wanted to see) caused many, many deaths, spurring safety regulation changes that were very much written with the blood of those who died.

My carbon fiber bicycle frame went through more testing than this freaking submarine. This thing is such an insane story the more we learn about.

Man, you can feel the anger Real Engineering has against ocean gate incompetence, considering his thesis was on Composite materials

Ocean gate reminds me of a lesson from my business ethics class where my teacher showed us seemingly ridiculous OSHA regulations. We all thought why would there be rules on things like waste storage and my teacher then showed us the real life cases that made those rules a thing

I'm an automotive engineer and my company is trying to adopt the "Move fast and break stuff" mentality. It means requirements no longer get written until us testing engineers demand them for us to write our tests (and sometimes not even then) and that flaws can't be removed without undoing other work that's already been done on top of them. Instead those flaws get bought off by upper management even when they're incredibly noticeable for customers. The motto we have for the employees is "take two (minutes) for safety" which I find to be the opposite since it's essentially asking us to take extra time to make sure a situation is safe to proceed with. Other phrases that are opposite are "haste makes waste", "measure twice, cut once" and many more similar sayings that have been around for generations because _anyone with half a brain cell can tell you that rushing through something results in more safety issues_ ...I just remembered I have an external ethics survey I was sent that I should fill out

it blows my mind that this is still considered an accident. this was entirely foreseen, predicted, and warned of. at best, it's negligence. at worst, it's murder.

To those complaining about the "lateness" of this video: this is what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not get to be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you do get to be the best. This is without question the best analysis of this accident on UKposts.

The most important words that anyone can say who is involved in designing something are "I can't do that, it isn't safe". When I'm working on servers that handle the payment transactions of hundreds of thousands of people, and I get told to cut a corner, those are the words I use. Because I can't. It'll hurt too many people if I screw up and people's credit card details get leaked. When my friends who develop software for medical equipment are told to rush something or bodge it, it's the words they use. It's the words my friends, mechanical engineers, use when they're asked to cut corners or rush something without sufficient testing or review.

A similar story can be found in the documents of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. Management rationalized the use of sealant beyond its tested usable temperature, and it leaked, killing seven crew.

I am an engineer (retired now) and still remember what one of university lecturers said - when cooks make a mistake people get stomach ache. When engineers do, people die. Lesson I have remembered all my working life.

"Questionable engineering" should be a new series in this channel! I would devour every part of it!

As someone who has never had a day of engineering education, I surprised myself by actually understanding this video. All the credit goes to how skilled you are at explaining these high-level concepts in an understandable way. Thank you! :)

I love how without really trying, Real Engineering just destroys Oceangates recklessness. My favorite phrase he used was "Safety Theatre". Not sure that is an established term but it is a very accurate descriptor.

Oceangate did real time test runs with live subjects aboard. Problem is, everyone died when they discovered the failure rate.

Oceangate’s brochure answering the question “why wasn’t it classed?” has completely backwards logic. It said that certifications were bad because they don’t protect against operator error and most marine accidents are due to that operator error. No…. the reason most accidents are due to operator error is that certification weeds out all of the terrible designs! If it weren’t for that process we’d probably have way more Oceangate type accidents.

I love this line: "We need more people like David Lockridge, the employee who was fired for raising concerns over safety" Because it can sound like we need more employees fired for being concerned for safety LMAO. Yes, I know this means we need more employees who are willing to risk being fired to maintain safety by speaking up.

Even worse than the engineering was the hubris of Oceangate. They just tuned out everyone that said “that’s probably a bad idea.” Things rarely go right when people refuse to listen to others.

This is exactly what I've been saying with regard to the stress strain curve for carbon fiber. Using acoustic sensors to warn you when a carbon fiber hull is failing is like having a sensor that monitors your heart and warns you that it has stopped. By the time you get the warning, you're effectively already dead.

When Oceangate mentioned most errors are due to operators, my mind immediately went to the survivorship bias example of WW2 planes coming back, and engineers wanting to add reinforcement to the areas where planes were showing damage coming back, before realizing the reason the other planes weren't coming back were because they were getting shot in areas the survivors weren't.

Got to “love” the Cave Johnson-esque approach to safety Stockton Rush had. Went about the same for Cave too.

I took one look at the plans and knew it was a mess. Child of an engineer, married to a sub mariner; I'm not an aquatic engineer but I know enough to recognize it was a death trap at a glance 😭😤

I remember a friend studying engineering in college told me his professor said he was so strict about them making mathematical errors on exams because, “engineering errors lead to injuries and death. You need to take responsibility that a mistake could be deadly.”

My Youngest recently graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering. She passed on the university commencement but attended her engineering school's ceremony. In it, all the engineers were given a steel ring to wear on the pinkie of their dominant hand. It was made (at least in the past) from steel recovered from buildings that failed due to poor engineering practices. The message spoken to all graduates was: "Wear this ring to remind yourself throughout your career that what you do matters. If you f*&k it up, there is a good chance someone will die."

The fact that so many warnings were ignored is truly shocking, as an engineer in training I’m disgusted to hear that an employee who raised concerns was fired considering the fact that during my time in this industry I have been taught to speak up if I think something is wrong even if it isn’t, this project that ocean gate undertook was nothing short of greed and stupidity and as the video perfectly put it “This is not innovation; it’s profiteering” a truly sad situation that could have easily been avoided but has now persisted past the end point into something that unfortunately cannot be undone.

4:32 I've recently learned about *Survivorship bias* which is a logical error of focusing on successes but not failures. They think most errors are operational completely overlooking that mechanical errors weren't even being given the chance to happen since they were already filtered out because of existing certification standards.

i love how the usual "insane engineering" video title was replaced with "questionable engineering" and i would've love it if this was turned into a series, like we had too many videos about good engineering lets shake things up a bit and take a look at the even-more questionable engineering of certain things.

Could you make a whole series of questionable engineering so that we may have other case studies of engineering failures?

Stockton Rush spent more effort in avoiding regulations than he did making sure his craft was safe. He will be remembered all right, the topic in many engineering safety courses for years to come!

I remember a short (I don't know who posted) but a college in Canada for engineers, once they graduate they get a ring that they have to wear forever cause that ring reminds them that what they built and what they make their job can put people in danger if they are not careful.

This video surfaced faster than the submarine

I love when actual engineers report about someone else stupidity. It just savage honesty in every direction.

I’ve been trying to understand exactly what happened with this. Thank you for explaining it in a way someone not familiar with engineering would understand.

I'm not a highly qualified engineer, but I do actually hold a qualification in engineering. During that engineering course, I was required to study an "advanced or space age" material, on two occasions. I elected to study fiber composites (kevlar and carbon fiber), and titanium, as both were relevant to my interest in motorsports engineering, and in particular, aerodynamic device design and manufacture (titanium brackets are commonly used in creating mounting points for carbon fiber aero elements such as wings). When I heard "submersible" "carbon fiber" and "lost contact" in the same sentence, for me, the conclusion was foregone. I knew, as you also attested to in this video, that fiber composites are strong in tension, not compression. It did not take much thought at all to realize that the failure was likely as instantaneous as their deaths, and, due to the common failure modes of fiber composites, destruction was most likely near-total due to the immense forces involved. I also understood from my education that fiber composites suffer terribly from inconsistency, even in ideal conditions for their manufacture. While I was studying engineering, my father worked in motorsports, and I was regularly brought "dead" samples of carbon fiber that had failed (for a number of reasons. The number of samples that never made it to the car, simply because they had failed in the manufacturing process - the bagging and curing method having been used - was not insignificant, and this was with people who worked with the material regularly. Parts where safety was absolutely paramount (such as the driver safety cell) were never trusted to bagging and curing, an autoclave was mandatory. And even in the autoclave, manufacturing defects occurred that resulted in having to re-lay and impregnate an entirely new safety cell. This is the first video I've watched in which I've learned that not only did they use an unsuitable material for this application (carbon fiber), but they did not autoclave their carbon fiber. While using carbon fiber in this application is damning enough in its own right, bagged and cured, to my mind, goes above and beyond gross negligence. There is no room at all for hubris in engineering, and I applaud Lockridge for taking a stand, rather than allowing himself to become immersed in what seems to have been a culture of risk and lack of responsibility. I've long believed that, to be an engineer, one has to place ethics above all else, because there are scant few other professions in which the lives of thousands rely on just one person.

As a materials engineer, he got very concerned about the materials. As an electronics engineer, I freaked when I found out about the wireless gamepad and Bluetooth communications system. Those communication protocols and programming standards are totally unfit for critical to life systems.

As an engineer myself, I found myself fuming mad the more I heard about the Oceangate debacle, to the point where my wife had to be like "you need to chill" lmao

The best part about this is: “Trust me, I’m an engineer” “No” *fucking dies*

With the comparisons of spacex fast production being great, it’s because they do the extreme testing and don’t really cut costs on things unless they know it will work, they won’t put a human aboard unless they know for a fact it will work, this dude just chose the cheapest option for everything and chose one of the hardest and most dangerous areas to get to

"This is profiteering. Not innovation." Nailed it.

To be fair, "move fast and break things" was a software engineering motto, formulated at a non-critical social media company, that was co-opted by other engineers, sometimes working in critical software or hardware applications. It's a perfectly adequate way of doing low-risk engineering. It's not how you would engineer self-driving cars, or, I don't know, maybe a commercial submarine.

Really hope to see more "questionable engineering" videos! I'm sure there's no shortage of examples that could be used for them.

To paraphrase the spanish youtuber "Tri line" who briefly spoke about the incident "There's the reason nobody felt bad about the incident, the CEO was a millionare who called himself an innovator after making things cheaper, sacrificing safety in the process, in that case, go ahead, you can also jump off a plane using a blanket as a parachute and call yourself an innovator, nobody will feel anything"

The difference with SpaceX is that the test and fail cycle is part of the unmanned design stage. They have a completely different attitude with the manned missions.

I love his comment: "As Hanlon's Razor goes “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” on why Oceangate's CEO piloted the craft himself.

the personal experience you have on the topic really drives this video home. Great stuff

The single most lucid indictment of Ocean Gate's Titan, nailed it. Had never heard of Hanlon's Razor, another gem. Love this channel.

I love the tiny detail in 3:00 where the paper at the bottom says "the thing is a f--ing death trap!" Still, super well produced video!

When I was in the Navy, one of our instructors was asked, with the substantial benefits given to submariners, why he didn't join the submarine service. He answered: "there is a natural law that says that what goes up must come down: there is no law that says that what goes down has to come back up."

That blog post is nuts. It's argument is, "Everyone else is taking this safety precaution and then not having the kind of accidents the precaution exists to prevent. It's clearly unnecessary, let's get rid of it."

Great Work. Your video went much deeper and clearer into the actual reasons why the implosion happened. And you provided a lot of facts that made a lot of sense once looked at rationally.

To those who complain about this video being "late": here's what happens when you take the time to do things right. You may not be the first. You may not get all the hype clicks. But you can be the best. This is without a doubt the best analysis of this accident on UKposts.

While i was studying engineering all our professors had zero mistake policy, it could be a simple math mistake or even typo. It didn't matter we would get zero points regardless. We all were crying and criticizing it but as we learned more we realized they were trying to teach us engineers can not do mistakes. So we learned to check our mistakes again and again, verify everything several times. I don't know if im cruel but i can't feel sorry for them, an engineer was fired for questioning them and he even sued them which was a huge red flag. They ignored it because of their narcissism and thought ''everything was fine''. I hope in future wealthy CEOs etc would listen to engineers more...

This is by far the most thoughtful, comprehensive and articulate explanation of the probable failure of the submersible. As a maintenance and reliability engineer, it was easy understand, but I think the lay person can understand that as well. Really exposes ocean gates, hubris. Bravo!!

A video the world needs right now. I suggest watching this video twice to let it sink in. Great content once again!

That chat about raising concerns (and this whole ordeal) has reminded me of something one of my old lecturers told me back in my undergrad days. It was near the end of a lecture in a course on Thermodynamics and Structure of Matter. After discussing a couple of engineering disasters, Primarily the DeHavilland Comet, he told us something along the lines of "during the course of your careers as Physicists you will be pressured by powerful actors both political and from the private sector to made decisions that are counter to scientific rigour. I hope you make the right decisions because if you act and something disastrous happens the people issuing the orders will not be held to account but you will. Not just by any formal investigation but by yourself as well as by others in your field. I hope when these events arise you make the right choice because you will have to live with the consequences and more importantly others might not."

There is a reason why when I was taking intro to engineering we started with going through catastrophic failures. We were taught "if something were to happen and it were in the papers, would you be spoken of negatively or positively?" If an engineer fails people (plural) can die. There are so many stories ranging from a quick overlook of something (like the Missouri City TV Antenna Tower Collapse or Hyatt Regency walkway collapse) to systematic failures that cause deaths and many of these stories are fascinating in its own right... regulations and such are written in blood. Sure they might hamper innovation, but to ignore them and say your "in-house" tests of saying "yup the sub dove once" is enough is gross negligence. SpaceX plays Kerbal Space Program with unmanned rockets, this company did the same with manned subs. There's a difference. Make no mistake, this case will be taught about in intro to engineering courses once an indepth investigation is finished.

I appreciate experts like you explaining things like this to us. Sadly tho, even a non expert could have foreseen that this sub design was fraudulent.

To be fair to the game controller used as a steering device, there's a reason why it's a more widespread practice than you'd think. They are intuitive to use, easy to program to do whatever function they are used for, cheap to order in bulk and are standardized to be very easily replaceable, which makes them perfect for when you need to Steer a thing but don't need to design a separate mechanism for it.

The idea that the crew could have seen and heard their craft coming apart at the seams is terrifying.

I still can't believe they made the hull in an open air area, no vacuum, no one even wearing masks. This is madness.

Love the ad choice, thank you for using your platform this way! 👏

Looking back, this video is a masterpiece, very well done.

In Electrical Engineering we were warned that ethical questions and challenges would come our way. They were 100% correct. Usually the challenges were manufactured by, you guessed it, leadership CEOs etc.

Even Elon is on record saying that for all the destructive testing they do, their crewed vessels absolutely cannot be allowed to fail under any circumstances and stressed the importance of prolonged testing and certification to ensure the safety and reliability of the vehicle before taking a single passenger. I’m not sure that citing SpaceX by name is the shining endorsement that OceanGate thought it was.

After watching about 6 videos in a row, this is legitimately my new favorite UKposts channel.

Imagine being a billionaire and cheaping out on something your very life depended on🤦‍♂️

My training is in materials engineering, and reading through the (lack of) due diligence just had me clutching my hair and going "no no no no no" over and over again. I did more testing in my undergrad labs than they did. My stakes were as high as trying to get an A, but they had actual lives on the line. My final response on this matter ended up being, "what did you think was going to happen!?"

Something tells me this company and their hubris tube is going to be the subject of many engineering classes for quite a long time.

It blows my mind how much warnings he ignored that its almost like he wanted to commit suicide and take people with him

Boeing CEO said the sub was ultra-safe

This feels like a movie from 2000s where the ignorant boss gets what's coming to him but also gets a lot of people killed

Let this sink in. The official page of Oceangate Titan Submersibles stated that "Titan’s unique ability to carry five people allows for multiple Mission Specialists, scientists and content experts to share a *_once-in-a-lifetime experience_* diving in the deep ocean."

„classing only addresses the physical properties of the submersible. most accidents are not caused by technical issues, but operator error“ thats the whole point of classing/testing. these processes are in place precisely to avoid faulty vehicles being out into service. having only operator error caused accidents is a sign of the success of classing, not an argument for skipping it.

There’s a lot of blatant misinformation online about this, especially on TikTok. I was privy to a conversation between friends sharing a video that, frankly, peddled outright lies about the situation to make it sound *spoooookyyy*. I explained, to the best of my recollection, your explanations here and was able to demonstrate just how false the content was. Cited my sources too! They were pretty receptive thankfully, and ended up following my point; the ACTUAL story is far more spooky and interesting than any lies peddled by faux-content creators on social media. I’m paraphrasing a lot here, it’s not like I was some nerdy hero - these are people I know relatively well and had their suspicions of the content already. I appreciate what you do, please keep it up!

Its truly ironic that it was the Titanic they were visiting, since it's sinking was what sparked the growth and importance of classification societies in the maritime industry to prevent maritime accidents due to subpar construction standards, methods and materials

James Cameron's Deep Sea Challenger was designed with the pressurized hull being separated from the rest of the vessel because at extreme depths the vessel would actually compress to about 2 inches smaller from it's default size all around, proving that the human portion of the sub must be built wisely, and patiently

I’m not an engineer but I find the psychology behind this fascinating, the amount of things that would have to line up for this to happen. Not just the psychology of rush either but politics, the US has very bad employment laws, or rather laws that mostly favour the employer, you can be sacked because they just don’t like you for example, whereas in Europe, you can’t do that, and you certainly can’t sack someone for raising safety concerns, Which means that if those employment laws were different or the location was then he would have either been forced to confront those issues or have been taken to court and have them confronted for him.

Wonderful Dear! You have made a rather complex engineering problem...Very simply understandable! keep it up! looking forward to many more such critical real life threatening analyses!

"Move fast and break things" works when you're using un-manned ships. SpaceX blew up many rockets, but all the ones with people on them have stayed assembled.

I love that you call out Stockton Rush as a narcissist. As I learned of all the red flags and outright written warnings he ignored, I immediately came to the conclusion that he was a narcissist who simply thought he was smarter than every submersible engineer out there. It’s sad that his delusions got so many people killed, including himself.

All those ghosts on the titanic probably thought it was weird that a couple more were joining them after over a century

Looks like the people of oceangate upgraded to seeing not only the titanic, but also meet the passengers

It pains me when I hear "We don't have the tools to test it so we don't have to" This is exactly when they should have stopped using this composite hull.

this will go into engineering ethics courses all engineers take during their first year of college. There were Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and now Oceangate.

I would like to take the time to say that this channel opened my eyes to new possibilities during the pandemic... I started to plan out my future during that time and I can say "Real Engineering" did inspire me to be an Engineer that would bring massive impact with the world. Thank you for helping me realize my goals

I'm new to your content but so far enjoy your videos. Would love to see a video breaking down the P38 Lightning, my favorite WW2 plane

Thank you for the clear-eyed and honest assessment.

If a catastrophic incident such as this implosion is expected to occur sooner or later, there is no way you can possibly label it an 'accident'!

It should be noted that some of the critical failure modes are resin dominated not fiber dominated. E.g peel stresses at the edges of voids under compression loads. The resin itself at the peeling edge has a tension component. As the void propogates under this out of plane opening load the margin to catastrophic buckling diminishes. And low temp curing resin properties are poor. This is why 350F curing and higher is the norm in aircraft parts, for both prepreg and resin infusion. Note 787 a350 wing upper skins and stringers are in compression but millions of fasteners !!

This is an putstanding explanation. Thank you. Hubris only works for so long but it never fails to eventually ensure self-destruction.

The idea that the sub didn't need testing because accidents are caused by operators reminded me of the story of survivorship bias in WW2 bombers. The planes showed most bullet holes on the wings, so that's exactly where you don't want to put armour. The planes that got hit in the engines and the cockpit didn't come back to be involved in the study.

I remember seeing a video of the CEO stating “engineers tell you not to mix titanium and carbon fibre - guess what? I still did it.” I went totally ballistic! This guy played with people’s lives. He probably never read the famous appendix F (for Feynman) of the Challenger catastrophe analysis: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

That was incredibly informative! Just subscribed.

The quality of this video is outstanding. Congratulations!

The "crackling sound at aft" from the comms logs still haunts me after reading it. I can't imagine how scary hearing noises when you're so far under water. I'm guessing those sounds could have been the material de-laminating...

When I heard about this case, I wasn't surprised but that they would have the gall to not even autoclave the vessel during curing and not fatigue test it at all is just insane. And aside from a serious lack of redundancies that were also painfully glaring.

This is just my humble opinion on things, I'm not an expert on anything, but I like to learn new things, and I think I'm fairly knowledgeable about what I know. To me, as a general observer of modern society these days, it seems there's an increasing problem with egotism and narcissism with powerful, wealthy CEOs & bosses who think or feel they know what's best for "everyone" and/or know better than everyone, including the experts, etc. though, in reality, it's just all about themselves and what they want, regardless of others think. This seems almost infectious and perhaps even brainwashing from the top down in many corporate and political fields, and while this has always been the case, this seems to be a particularly worse problem with today's society.

Congratulation on this brilliantly produced video and on your channel success. 🇮🇪