The Questionable Engineering of Oceangate

“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.

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

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.

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

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

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"

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!

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.

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

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! :)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.