Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way

Maybe different zoom levels? I'm only seeing 5 vessels onsite, the westmost blue ship below is the Polar Prince. (The scale on the bottom left shows 10km). Not sure what the fishing boat is bringing to the party but I suppose every extra pair of eyes for the surface search helps.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-49.7/centery:41.7/zoom:10

Bar someone started to panic. If they are alive down there it would be hard to distract yourself, mindfulness would only go so far. I don't know what you'd need, a serious stash of benzos or the like. I'm kinda projecting myself into the situation!

I'd never do it first off, too claustrophobic. I'd hardly get through the tunnels on Army Hell Week.

Even if they found the sub, by the time it's raised to the surface would they not have run out of oxygen. Isn't it a very slow process to raise it?

Similar but you’d be more aware of it with CO2 from my understanding.

What an awful way to die. Poor souls if only they could rewind the clock im sure they would have done everything different. That's sub looked like something you would enter into the red bull competition. Looked amateur and I certainly wouldn't have set foot in it.

I don't think they would.

They had to sign a 'death' waiver just to make the trip. You can bet that came with a long document of possibilities for things to go wrong. Yet they took a look at the odds and went anyway.

I'm not much of a one for karma, but in my opinion, once a wreck that took many lives is found, it should never be explored. Naval ship wrecks all over the World are military war graves and absolutely off limits to diving and submersible. To my mind civilian ships should be the same. Since 1985 the final resting place of 1,200 people had been turned into a carnival side show (not least in Belfast but that's another story).

Maybe the loss of these 5 people, if they are indeed lost, might stop these ghoulish and disrespectful dives forever.

If tragedy does unfold and lives are lost... there may be repercusions due to the status of the passengers eg CEOs. Company finances could be at stake. Im not sure how insurance companies will view the reckless expedition.

By that logic all cemeteries should be closed to the public, military and civilian. I don't understand the desire to see a shipwreck on the ocean floor, especially sitting on the floor of a sardine tin that was cobbled together, but I don't see how it is disrespectful.

Cemeteries are often excavated, all the old bones buried in a mass grave and plots reused. In the UK you can lease the exclusive use a grave for a set number of years, once the lease is up a stranger might be buried beside the original occupant and the headstone removed.

Once all living relatives pass away themselves no one cares about a grave, that's the harsh reality.

The whole point of cemeteries, civilian and military, is that the people interred in them have had a ceremonial burial, presided over by loved ones or comrades.

They have been treated with reverence and military cemeteries in particular are kept beautifully and solemnly by trusts and charities who will see they are tended as long as men draw breath.

The shipwreck war grave is the nearest way that the same reverence can be shown to the remains of victims that will never be recovered for a proper burial.

There are something like 20,000 naval wrecks from the past few centuries known in the World's oceans and all the major powers have legislation covering the protection of their own ocean war graves and also mutual recognition of foreign vessels in their waters and internationally that were sunk in action.

With specific reference to the Bismarck, this is the stated position of the German federal government in the early 1990s, following her discovery in the eastern Atlantic by Robert Ballard:

If the saety features on the sub are so basic, I would assume security and safety protocols are also lacklustre. There are routine and generally boring tasks that have to happen on all manner of complex systems. Anyone with a car, before heading out on a long journey will do the usuals, check tyre pressure, top up coolant etc.

Eddie Van Halen would send a checklist of things he wanted done at a venue ahead of a gig. And near the bottom of the checklist was leave a brandy glass filled with M&Ms on the stage. People think it was one of eccentricities but the reality was he could look at the stage and know they had read the checklist and be confident they have done everything on it. No brandy glass? Then instead of going to the hotel, he and his band and crew need to prepare the stuff straight away.

You would wonder, did OceanGate have a checklist? The pre-flight checks if you will. They talk about it having 96 hours of air in reserve. Were the air reserves checked beforehand? Crucially, were the batteries in the game controller checked? Are they floating somewhere between the surface and the bottom simply because the controller has run out of battery power?

I am confident they will find it. Whether they find it in time, who knows.

Communities are flying aircrafts from the 1930s? Hard to imagine.