Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "The Surprising Truth about Titanic's Lifeboats" video.

  1. To large extent, the arguments presented do not make sense. At 5:13: "Launching lifeboats is dangerous for passengers, so let's not worry about having enough lifeboats." That's replacing risk of death with certain death. Later in the video: Using lifeboats to escape in is dangerous due to weather and sea conditions. So let's just use lifeboats to make multiple trips back and forth between the doomed ship and the rescue ship. Yeah, sure. If it's dangerous to make one trip in a small open boat, it's dangerous to make several trips. Also stated in the video: The Titanic had safety features e.g., watertight compartments, radio, so that it should float long enough for rescue vessels to arrive. That makes some sense, but not a lot. What if it is caught in a heavy storm that delays lifeboat launching? What if it is not operating in a heavily used sea lane? Oceanliner Designs says Harland and Wolfe were not seeking to cut costs and were keen on safety. But what is very clear here is that it is a classic case of legal requirements (lifeboat capacity related to hull size) not keeping place with advances in technology - allowing prvate industry to skimp on what they provide. In a more ideal world, Harland & Wolfe would have said to themselves "We are legally required to provide x lifeboat capacity. But we are building a ship that is outside the passenger capacity parameters anticipated by the Board of Trade. Therefore we should honour the INTENT of the requirement, not just the literal words of the rule." But of course, being a profit making company building for another profit making company, that's just what they did not do. Never mind the excuses. Harland and Wolfe in combination with White Star are at fault, for not providing a means by which everyone could be rescued, even under ideal conditions.
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  2.  @DerpyPossum  : Your last sentence: "They did everything they could ....." is very clearly wrong. It's wrong because the sister ship Olympic underwent a major refit as a result of the Titanic loss. The refit was driven partly by loss of public confidence in the Olympic class, and partly because of crew industrial action. Further, the third ship of the same class, had major design changes during its construction, again because of the Titanic loss. If they could do it after the accident, they could have done it before - the only thing stopping them was competitive pressure and lack of ethics. This is self evident. Asking "what if" in regard to safety is a standard ethical requirement of professional engineers, and has been since before Titanic. As I explained, it is not part of BoT ethics - such boards cannot anticipate technical innovation, such as the advent of 50,000 tonne liners carrying 3,300 people. Your smartphone analogy is not a good analogy because under no circumstances can smartphones be lethal - unless you use one to batter someone to death, and that would clearly be criminal action. A better analogy is airliners. When Boeing started to make jumbo jets, they asked "what if" in a formal process called FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis) and that told them if the flight control cables failed the airplane would crash and all people would die. So their triplicated the control system with separate routing. There was no legal requirement to do so. They did it anyway, because their engineers were professionals. Unfortunately, Douglas only complied with industry norms, and several Douglas plane-loads of people died. Lastly, as I said before, the concept of using lifeboats as ferries between ships on the open sea came from the industry, not the BoT. You are wrong there. The BoT just accepted it, until the Titanic accident showed they could not.
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  3.  @DerpyPossum  : I did not dispute that H&W etc complied with LEGAL requirements. But they did not comply with MORAL requirements. They were the ones at fault by having poor ethics - they created a ship outside what the rules were written for, and thus should have gone beyond requirements. The concept of using lifeboats as a transfer means between two ships was a commercial excuse and not a Board of Trade idea. But the Board of Trade by 1870, under pressure of ship owners, accepted not having sufficient lifeboats for all passengers and crew in regard to high passenger density steam ferries working between Britain and France. (See Parliamentary Debates, London 1870, page 323.) In open sea in any ocean in the world that an ocean liner may go is quite another thing. It is often the case in the British system of governance that legal requirements usually don't keep up with advances in technology - in fact legal requirements get updated or created when deaths occur making the need very obvious, and such deaths often occurred, as with Titanic, when competitive pressure inhibits engineering thought. It is not reasonable to expect that those who make the laws and rules anticipate future technical developments. They are law makers and not engineers. Thus, while the lifeboat rules were eventually shown by the Titanic to be insufficient, the Board of Trade cannot be held to be at fault. Nor can the entire shipping industry be held at fault over Titanic - that's ridiculous, as most ships were nothing like the Titanic. The Board of Trade, when they set the rules, did not anticipate the construction of 50,000 tonne ships carrying 3,300 people across the Atlantic on a routine basis. When they set the rules, ships had much lower passenger density and nobody would have thought of such a thing. Modern history abounds with hazards, not anticipated by those who make laws and rules, being created by technical innovations. Mostly, though, the design engineers ask themselves "what can go wrong?" and do the right thing and self-implement what needs to be done to make it safe. Nobody but the design engineers have the specialist knowledge and can do this. The Titanic engineers did not ask themselves "what can go wrong?" They were unethical and at fault.
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