Very similar to my one and only time. My jump was near Mt Dora. The pre-jump training on a hot September Saturday morning was like a hard football practice. The silence with nothing but a breeze whistling past was enthralling. To just hang there in the sky, floating down was such an amazing feeling. I got motion sickness sitting on the floor of the plane as we went up. All I wanted to do was get some fresh air. I think that took away any hesitation to jumping. Standing out on the bar under the plane, all I had to do was relax my grip on the strut and I was blown away from the plane. I was supposed to go out with back arched and arms and legs out, but instead I went out as a crumpled ball. Nevertheless, the static line did its job. There was an arrow on my emergency shoot and I was supposed to line it up with the arrow on the ground the guy was turning to guide me down. At one point I needed to correct back to the left, but decided to go to the right and turn completely around, forgetting that the chute had a forward motion of 4 mph. I missed the target, but not by too much. Glad I did it once.
It was 3 of the 4 roommates that went our third year at UF. We did our jump at Zephyrhills. It was funny, one of my roommates had never flown in anything before....he was pretty pale as soon as we got in the plane. It didn't help that just before we boarded they showed us a photo of what happened when an emergency chute was accidentally deployed while the person was still in the airplane. We all had our hands clamped tightly over that handle, no one was touching it. Even though I was the only one with a minor issue, none of us ever jumped again. All 3 of us became lawyers, the 4th that didn't go is now a pediatric cardiologist. It really was an amazing experience and once was enough.
Anyone interested in diving deep sunken ships should read Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson. One warning, though, the language is quite blue in this book. It provides great details on what’s actually involved in deep-sea diving. Their exploration brought closure to the families of the people lost on a WWII submarine.
I wouldn't say he agrees with me. I referenced a claim I can't confirm but recognize the physics of it are plausible. I'm up in the air with if it actually happened but I absolutely believe it's possible with the right conditions of force, oxygen and heat. The pressures required to ignite a fuel source are much less in a diesel cylinder than what that submersible would have experienced. Oxygen was present as well. The question is whether a fuel source was available in enough mix to facilitate a burn. I'm definitely not staking the claim it occurred as definitive fact in this particular instance but it isn't a claim that "makes no sense" in my opinion.
I agree with this. Imagine if they were trying to do this while any of the living relatives or survivors were still alive. Backlash would have been massive.
There are two major differences between a diesel engine and what happened with the submersible. In a diesel engine the space is confined. As the piston moves, it compresses the gas because it has nowhere else to go. Therefore, the pressure and temperature rise. With the submersible, once the implosion began and the crushing happened, there was no confining of that volume. The contents would’ve been crushed and spewed all over the place. This is born out by the fact that the submersible was not found to be all crumpled up into a tiny mess, but rather pieces were found spread out. The tail cone was found 1000 feet from where the implosion occurred. This is like taking a plastic drink bottle that’s empty and putting the top on just enough to hold. Then stomp on the bottle and watch the top go flying off. That’s what happened with the submersible. As it was crushed parts went flying everywhere. Another difference from a diesel engine is that a diesel engine has a pure liquid fuel that enters the chamber atomized and quickly forms a vapor, intimately mixed with the air in the chamber. In the submersible, the fuel was not intimately mixed with the air, and the fuel was mostly water. Imagine injecting into a diesel engine chamber a fuel that was 90% water, 5% diesel, and 5% inert matter. No combustion would happen.
Well they brought a lot of the remains of the vessel back today....more than I thought. I thought I saw the NTSB were going to do the work of piecing things back together and the analysis of what and how it all happened.
So.....the ENTIRE time (days upon days) of the search........all they had to do is get to the bottom....look around....and they would have found it. You would think.....SOMEONE would have suggested THAT immediately after the "implosion" sound was detected the morning of the descent.
The company that owns the remotely operated vehicles that brought Titan’s remains to the surface, Pelagic Research Services, for now has “successfully completed” the offshore work and Wednesday morning was “in the process of demobilization from the Horizon Arctic,” which owns the ships, it told CNN. Crew members “have been working around the clock now for ten days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation, and are anxious to finish the mission and return to their loved ones,” the company said in a statement. Pelagic Research Services deferred questions to the US Coast Guard, adding its team cannot comment on or provide any information related to the investigation into the Titan’s demise. The company will hold a news conference at its East Aurora, New York, operations base after “our team has regrouped,” it said. Who is paying for this? And why?
I think it’s definitely suspect that they just so happened to find the debris field at almost the exact moment we knew they must have run out of oxygen. The whole thing just pisses me off.
Equipment external to the pressurized cylinder should have survived in relatively decent shape. Everything in the cone, the docking structure and propulsion units should have been recoverable.
Fascinating details of the recovery effort. Bravo to this company and the entire operation to coordinate such an involved operation. Impressive beyond words......