[onlyrealcuzzo]

Not really.

He thought it was safer than it was.

But I don't think he thought it was close to a 0% chance of death.

It's clear that he knew it was somewhat risky.

It failed after like 25 dives which means around a ~4% failure rate.

I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

Who knows what the true failure rate is. Maybe they got really lucky, and it actually had a higher failure rate. Maybe they got extra unlucky. Who knows.

I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

[tgamblin]

"It failed after 25 dives" is not a 4% failure rate if the failure was caused by deterioration over time (as it likely was here). It's a 100% failure rate over the full life of any given Titan sub. They'll all implode, given enough trips.

Moreover, both 1% and 4% are horrible failure rates for anything meant to carry passengers. Example: the risk of dying in a commercial plane crash is 1 in 11 million [1]. The risk of dying while skydiving is less than 1 in 300,000 per jump.

This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html

[2] https://dzoneskydiving.com/articles/how-many-people-die-skyd...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

It's easy to agree post-ex, after he went and killed himself and 4 other people.

He probably thought the failure rate might've been closer to 1 in 1000. That still seems WAY too high for me, but maybe for him that was fine.

Either way, he was almost certainly wrong, and it was much higher than that.

Would he have done it if he thought it had a 4% chance of failure? Maybe once. But I doubt 25 times...

[saiya-jin]

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

Rich folks pay upward of 70k for Everest expedition, where local personal Sherpas babysit them from basecamp/Kathmandu all the way to the top with oxygen, unless SHTF in some form. That's 2+ months of more or less suffering, living above 5000-6000m long term ain't fun for most. Metabolism goes to hell, wounds heal slower, body is clearly struggling and so is mind. I did experience empty mindness above 6k myself and you just focus on getting goals done asap and survival.

Everest has some 2-3% fatality rate, consistently. I'd say it may not be the exactly same crowd but similar mindset that gets attracted to these things.

[echelon]

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

1% is horrible. You'd hope for robust systems where individual failures are mitigated by support systems. And even then, five nines doesn't feel so great when the cost could be so severe.

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

That poor kid didn't even want to go. He was terrified of the thing and was going to make his dad happy for father's day.

[Johnny555]

>I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

When failure means instant death that would be a pretty awful failure rate for a commercial product meant to take paying customers from the general public. And even if meant to take well informed researchers and engineers.

If failure meant "Oops, the ballast dropped prematurely, looks like we're going to have to cut this dive short", that's one thing, but when it means "You're going to be crushed by immense pressure in a millisecond", that's quite another.

[babypuncher]

I'm struggling to find real statistics to back this up, but my suspicion is that other deep-submergence vehicles used to travel to this depth (and further) have a failure rate of 0% for manned missions.

My suspicion is based on the fact that I can't find any other stories of deep sea vehicles failing and killing their passengers in the last 40 years. DSV Alvin for example has completed 5,000 dives with 0 fatalities.

[WillPostForFood]

According to this interview with Bob Ballard, there have been no fatalities or catastrophic accidents in the deep sea submersible/exploration world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJ_SSU-ocU

He mentioned since 1960, but unclear if that was because that's when the deep sea submersible exploration started, or something happened in 1960.

That makes OceanGate's sub seem like a uniquely incompetent design.

[babypuncher]

Dr Ballard seems like as authoritative of a source as any.

OceanGate just ruined a 60 year perfect track record for an entire field of engineering.

[notJim]

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

I take your meaning, but I'm just laughing at the idea of a 1% failure rate. If airliners had a 1% failure rate, there would be hundreds of thousands of crashes every year. Experimental craft don't need airliner failure rates of course, but 1% still seems too high for anything with human passengers.