Titanic

There are kind of neat tourist attractions (I'd hesitate to call them museums) in Pigeon Forge and Branson on the Titanic. It's a pretty cool tour. Your ticket includes a biography on one of the crew or passengers. By the end you'll find out whether your person made it or not.
 
One of our traditions when flying the International Ice Patrol missions was dropping wreaths on the location where the ship went down on the anniversary of the event. We usually had requests from several groups and we would lower the rear ramp and drop them from 500ft. Hard to imagine the horror and confusion of that night.
 
I worked for a company in Belfast who's office overlooked the dry dock where she and her sister ships were outfitted, massive dry dock for it's day, have some photos I'll post later
 
I've been to the Titanic Museum in Branson once (and drove by the one in Pigeon Forge), where they had some artifacts. It was cool. They had a thing of water that was at the temperature they sank in, so that you could "experience" it too.

I have a feeling my girlfriend will be making me take her to see the Titanic movie in the theatre soon.
 
One of the key items that help save lives was the Marconi's wireless telegraph. Without it there wouldn't have been a rescue for the survivors. I was surprised it was not mentioned on the ABC movie version of the Titanic. The Titanic incident help to promote more ships to be equipped with wireless equipment and 24 hours watch.

José
 
Watched both programs last night about the Titanic - NatGeo and Hist channels. They were advertised as so called "definitive" programs on the Titanic disaster.
It was very interesting, if nothing else just for the sheer amount of excellent and sometimes very unique imagery.

Came out with the following key observations:

1. Cameron's team estimate Titanic reach the bottom of the Ocean in about 2.5 hours, the other team said it was around 5 minutes, pretty significant discrepancy.
2. There was nothing wrong with rivets used on Titanic, found it interesting due to earlier discussion of the rivets and speculations.
3. Titanic broke up in two pieces not because of some design flaw but because of huge forces - frankly this was to be expected.
4. Titanic overall performed much better in her last hours than even much more modern ships decades later during similar disasters.
5. We know there were too few lifeboats on the ship but it was interesting to learn Titanic still had more of them than prescribed by law.
6. The stern section was horribly mangled (the bow was fairly well preserved) - frankly it was never clearly articulated why.
7. They could only spot the iceberg by looking at the horizon and noticing lack of stars - stars that the iceberg covered, there was no Moon to reflect off.
8. Instead of huge gush that was allegedly cut by the iceberg through ship's length, the initial damage was fairly limited in scope.
 
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olasek said:
Watched both programs last night about the Titanic - NatGeo and Hist channels. They were advertised as so called "definitive" programs on the Titanic disaster.
It was very interesting, if nothing else just for the sheer amount of excellent and sometimes very unique imagery.

Came out with the following key observations:


2. There was nothing wrong with rivets used on Titanic, found it interesting due to earlier discussion of the rivets and speculations.
Click to expand...

The glancing collision caused Titanic's hull riveted plates to buckle inwards in a number of locations on her starboard side and opened five of her sixteen watertight compartments to the sea. Had the plates being welded (like on current ship construction) instead of riveted the hull would have dented but not crack open.

José
 
Piloto said:
Had the plates being welded (like on current ship construction) instead of riveted the hull would have dented but not crack open.
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Yeah, my point was not to compare with the current ship building methods but whether the ship was built correctly using the best engineering standards of the day. There were numerous speculations that either (some) rivets were made of shoddy materials or that a slight repair of the Titanic hull only made things worse. Both theories were laid to rest.
 
olasek said:
Came out with the following key observations:

1. Cameron's team estimate Titanic reach the bottom of the Ocean in about 2.5 hours, the other team said it was around 5 minutes, pretty significant discrepancy.
Click to expand...

I watched both and that's not what I understood at all. I understood that it took Cameron's team 2.5 hours to dive to the Titanic, and only 5 mins for the Titanic to get to the bottom.

I really enjoyed both. Some of the same guys were on both teams. It was interesting to see the whole map of the bottom.
 
ausrere said:
I watched both and that's not what I understood at all. I understood that it took Cameron's team 2.5 hours to dive to the Titanic, and only 5 mins for the Titanic to get to the bottom.
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Well, I definitely recall this point vividly.
Cameron was commenting that some people first speculated it took the wreck to reach the sea floor almost 3 days when in fact it took only 2.5 hours. He was not referring to his dive, at least not at that moment.

I tend to believe the other team got it closer.
If they imply that the stern was so mangled because of the impact when it hit the bottom - this force could have easily arose from say 20-30mph vertical speed rather than say 2 mph if it was going down over 2 hours.

I had to flip channels (during commercials) - too bad both programs were aired at exactly same time, fairly stupid.
 
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olasek said:
Watched both programs last night about the Titanic - NatGeo and Hist channels. They were advertised as so called "definitive" programs on the Titanic disaster.
It was very interesting, if nothing else just for the sheer amount of excellent and sometimes very unique imagery.

Came out with the following key observations:


4. Titanic overall performed much better in her last hours than even much more modern ships decades later during similar disasters.

6. The stern section was horribly mangled (the bow was fairly well preserved) - frankly it was never clearly articulated why.
Click to expand...
#4 They made this clear, that either the crew had it together with their pumps to keep her as level as possible, or that they got very "lucky." I'd bet even fewer people would have survived if she listed far enough over to not be able to launch life boats from one side.
#6 I caught "The Final Word," which was Cameron's group. They deducted that the poop deck folded over as the stern sank initially with the props facing the surface, which made sense since that explained why portions of hull essentially exploded apart on the way down. One of their subject matter experts equated it to holding a deck of cards in your hand out the window of a moving car: with your hand in front of the wind, you hold all the cards (the intact bow), whereas if you hold the cards out, they fly out of your hand (the mangled stern). His banana theory was a bit entertaining as well, and made a lot of sense.
 
olasek said:
Well, I definitely recall this point vividly.
Cameron was commenting that some people first speculated it took the wreck to reach the sea floor almost 3 days when in fact it took only 2.5 hours. He was not referring to his dive, at least not at that moment.

I tend to believe the other team got it closer.
If they imply that the stern was so mangled because of the impact when it hit the bottom - this force could have easily arose from say 20-30mph vertical speed rather than say 2 mph if it was going down over 2 hours.

I had to flip channels (during commercials) - too bad both programs were aired at exactly same time, fairly stupid.
Click to expand...

I've still got it DVR'd, now I'll have to go find it, the curiosity is killing me. :D But about 10 mins into the show he distinctly says that it take 2.5 hours to dive to Titanic in a submersible. And at the end when they are finishing up the animation and he's describing the the stern plunge, he says the stern is falling almost vertically (in a corkscrew type motion) at 25-30 miles per hour and is sucking down the cone of water behind it which impacts the stern in a sort of down blast after it hits bottom - which pancakes that part of the ship. Hence, he says, the reason it's so much more destroyed than the bow (which had more forward movement when it hit bottom). So by his own math it can't take 2.5 hours for it to hit bottom. It was interesting that the engineers argued with him about the column of water causing that much damage.
 
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