7:13 But even in my own sub,
7:15 which had a steel hull,
7:16 I knew that if I,
7:17 if I drove several two or three times
7:19 it was probably good to go
7:20 because you could cycle steel
7:22 hundreds of times,
7:23 if not thousands of times.
7:25 But that's not the case with composite.
7:26 So it's it's quite insidious.
7:28 And that,
7:28 I think, lulled them
7:29 into a sense of confidence
7:31 and led to this tragedy.
7:33 But these are known things.
7:34 They're known within
7:36 the engineering community and they're
7:39 well, we
7:40 also want to point to Ocean Gates, former
7:41 director of Marine Operations.
7:43 He wrote us an engineering report in 2018
7:45 I think it was
7:46 he focused his criticisms
7:48 on the company's decision
7:49 to rely on acoustic monitoring
7:51 the sounds the hull made under pressure
7:52 as opposed to a a scan of the hall.
7:54 According to him
7:55 the company claimed no equipment existed
7:57 that could perform
7:58 that kind of a scan
7:59 on the five inch thing
8:00 five inch thick carbon fiber hull.
8:02 I know it's
8:03 difficult to say obviously
8:04 without reading the report,
8:05 but I'm wondering what you make of that
8:06 because the
8:08 seems like this company
8:09 was making a big deal
8:10 about the sensors they had that could
8:12 sense a problem with the hull.
8:14 And if they could sense
8:15 there was a problem,
8:16 then they would have time to
8:17 to to turn around and go back up.
8:19 Clearly, they did it.
8:21 It's a bit like saying we have
8:23 we have a bit of a poor design
8:25 for the engine in our jet
8:26 or our rocket ship.
8:28 But we have a sensor that will
8:29 tell us if it's on fire.
8:31 To me, that's cold comfort.
8:33 And I think that if you're
8:34 if you're building a hall
8:36 where you need
8:36 to have sensors to tell you
8:37 that it's failing
8:38 in the process of failing,
8:40 you have no business
8:41 designing subs
8:42 or being in that in that sub.
8:44 They touted it, I believe you know,
8:47 as a as a good thing,
8:48 as a as a safety protocol.
8:50 But I consider it a bad thing
8:52 because it sheds a light
8:53 directly on
8:54 on the fundamental flaw
8:55 of their of their design.
8:57 You have to remember,
8:58 the DNA of this design
9:00 concept goes back farther.
9:02 It goes back to the quest
9:04 to go to the challenger
9:05 deep that I was involved in, obviously.
9:07 And there was another sub design
9:09 that was competing with ours at the time
9:11 that was based on a wound filament
9:13 composite cylinder
9:15 with two titanium caps.
9:17 And I told those guys point blank,
9:19 you're going to get killed in that thing.
9:21 And they ultimately never drove it.
9:23 I literally told the guy
9:24 who bought the sub
9:26 when its owner,
9:27 Steve Fossett, the famous
9:28 billionaire, died in a plane crash
9:30 and the sub was then
9:31 purchased by another guy to operate it.
9:34 And I told him,
9:35 you're going to die down there
9:36 if you dove that thing.
9:37 And I felt very strongly about it.
www.the-sun.com
