Submarine expert tried to dissuade OceanGate CEO, from taking customers in Titan
&gt;&gt; &quot;I think it was General MacArthur who said: &#x27;You&#x27;re remembered for the rules you break,&#x27;&quot; Rush told the Mexican YouTuber alanxelmundo.<p>The problem with this approach is that the CEO failed to distinguish between human rules (to which MacArthur was referring) vs. laws of physics.<p>Laws of physics do not know about, care about, or yield to any human action or intention. They are absolute, and will kill you if you get on the wrong side of them.<p>If he wanted to go himself on this device, that is fine, but the way he was actively selling this as safe is just fraud.  He got what he deserved, his passengers were fooled to their deaths.<p>Owning a carbon fiber composites design &amp; fabrication business which builds both aerospace and subsea components, nearly everything I&#x27;ve read and viewed about this CEO&#x27;s practices ranges from creep-me-out to &#x27;looks criminal&#x27;.  Compiling just references to the bad practices and failings would fill many pages, but perhaps the worst is the assumption that &quot;hey, it went down there once, so it&#x27;s good to go as many times as we want.&quot;, and refusal to even get any kind of ultrasonic or radiological testing of the carbon fiber hull.<p>Plus, to think that you can with acoustics, outrun the cascading failure at those kinds of pressures is nothing less than hard stupidity.  The core function of carbon fiber composites is to spread the loads through the matrix with the extremely light and high-tensile-strength carbon fiber.  This works great until it doesn&#x27;t, so the failures are well known to be nearly explosive in rate and 
catastrophic, unlike metals which tend to deform first.  When the load is exceeding the maximum — especially in a well-designed &amp; well-fabricated part — it is spread throughout the material.  When it exceeds the maximum, either by fracturing the matrix between layers, or by fracturing some fibers, the load is now borne by proportionally less material, so is more focused, that material breaks, etc..  Even at normal pressures, this happens in microseconds.  See the standard open hole compression test at about 1:46+ [0].  The pressures at that depth, would only increase the failure speed.<p>The tech guy got fired from the Titan project (w&#x2F;10min to clean out his desk) for pointing out that the acoustic flaw-detection method the CEO wanted to use would not work, and would give them only milliseconds of warning. He was right.<p>What I do find a bit surprising is that James Cameron (himself a <i>very</i> accomplished depth explorer) says he heard from his sources that the Titan had dropped its weights and was ascending trying to manage an emergency, which indicates they actually had seconds or maybe even minutes of warning.  Could mean that it just took longer with the 5in thick hull.  So, it&#x27;ll be really interesting to see the final reports...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u1gHxCt-qv0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u1gHxCt-qv0</a>