Orville Wright piloted a flight that crashed and killed a passenger, the first air passenger fatality ever. (Obviously, not counting e.g. people who strapped wings on their back and jumped off of steeples in the Middle Ages, and the like.)
Titanic tourist sub missing
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Orville Wright piloted a flight that crashed and killed a passenger, the first air passenger fatality ever. (Obviously, not counting e.g. people who strapped wings on their back and jumped off of steeples in the Middle Ages, and the like.)
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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Well, the fundamental difference is that Apollo didn't take paying passengers, and they had extensive training to actually be qualified for the mission.
But yes, the more I read about it, the more I wonder not about the owners but about the people who signed up for it. To the point where it sounds like, well, a Darwin Award, fair and square.
And I'm not saying anyone DESERVES death for being stupid. (We tried it in WW2, got bombed for it
) But, you know, quoth Baofu from Persona 2: "They call this the logical results" 
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
Okay, good. I didn't want to assume an investigation was going to take place without someone having definitively announced one.
quadraginta
Becoming Beth
And a fundamental similarity is that no amount of training would have made any difference, unless it was enough training to say, "Hell, no! I'm not getting in that thing.".
Hard to say. All that "dream of flight" lore probably helped motivate spirit of enterprise, but the failed manned experiments were useless or counterproductive.
"Why don't you try out those wings attached to a hundred pound sandbag first?"
"Well, without my arms to flap them they'll be unable to soar into the sky!"
"Show me how high you can soar up this ladder using just your arms."
Reminds me of this:
"The Infamous Eiffel Tower Death Jump of 1912"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUYPrKKM5M
A Frenchman by the name of Franz Reichelt felt he needed to both test and demonstrate his own parachute design by jumping off of the Eiffel Tower with it, and apparently after multiple failed experiments using test dummies at lower heights from buildings. As is the case with more reliable modern chutes, he felt that it just needed greater height and time in which to open. It doesn't appear to have worked out so well for him with his own design, however.
It sounds like quite a few people tried talking him out of making the jump, but he couldn't be dissuaded, placing his faith and hope in his own invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt
"The Infamous Eiffel Tower Death Jump of 1912"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUYPrKKM5M
A Frenchman by the name of Franz Reichelt felt he needed to both test and demonstrate his own parachute design by jumping off of the Eiffel Tower with it, and apparently after multiple failed experiments using test dummies at lower heights from buildings. As is the case with more reliable modern chutes, he felt that it just needed greater height and time in which to open. It doesn't appear to have worked out so well for him with his own design, however.
It sounds like quite a few people tried talking him out of making the jump, but he couldn't be dissuaded, placing his faith and hope in his own invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt
dirtywick
Penultimate Amazing
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can you recklessly kill people if they sign a release?
TellyKNeasuss
Illuminator
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The Titan was not built with state of the art technology. Submersibles have gone much deeper without imploding. Which of the examples in the article similarly were not state of the art?⁹
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
All this talk of comparing Rush to the Wright Brothers is just hogwash.
Firstly, the Wrights were trying to do something no-one had done before (arguments re: Alberto Santos-Dumont, Gustave Whitehead, Richard Pearse and Shivkar Talpade aside). However, DSV's are known technology, going right back to 1964 and "Alvin", which is still in operation and currently run by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There are literally dozens of other DSVs including - Sea Cliff, Turtle, Trieste, Aluminaut, Nautile, Archimaede, Striver mand many others. Building DSVs out of steel and/or titanium is a tried and trusted technology - building on out of wound composites was pushing a boundary that didn't need pushing, and one that yields no tangible benefits.
Secondly, the only lives the Wrights risked were their own. They didn't carry a passenger until over four years after their first flight.
Firstly, the Wrights were trying to do something no-one had done before (arguments re: Alberto Santos-Dumont, Gustave Whitehead, Richard Pearse and Shivkar Talpade aside). However, DSV's are known technology, going right back to 1964 and "Alvin", which is still in operation and currently run by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There are literally dozens of other DSVs including - Sea Cliff, Turtle, Trieste, Aluminaut, Nautile, Archimaede, Striver mand many others. Building DSVs out of steel and/or titanium is a tried and trusted technology - building on out of wound composites was pushing a boundary that didn't need pushing, and one that yields no tangible benefits.
Secondly, the only lives the Wrights risked were their own. They didn't carry a passenger until over four years after their first flight.
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
The Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe Trieste has reached a depth of about 10,911 metres (35,797 ft) in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific.
Prior to the Titan, no bathyscape or DSV has ever imploded (at least, that I know of). That is because they are all over-engineered to blazes. Titan was a death trap, and a catastrophe waiting to happen. As Boeing found out recently, cutting corners to cut costs in engineering results in penalties, and the payments are usually in lives.
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Puppycow
Penultimate Amazing
Will their life insurance policies pay out?
Did they have any? If they did, a copy of their signatures on "a release that (...) explicitly mentioned the possibility of death no less than three times on the first page" would be great evidence in court for the insurance companies.
You should ask Sam Howe Verhovek. Or maybe it has already been mentioned in one of the, at this point, 2.9k comments.
The most recent ones:
jeremyp
Philosopher
The article is nonsense. Rush is not comparable to the Wright brothers or the Apollo astronauts for various reasons.
The obvious one is that deep sea exploration is not in the pioneering phase. As James Cameron pointed out, more time has passed since the first DSV's and now than between the Wright brothers and the Boeing 747 first flight. Engineers know how to build DSV's. Rush ignored them.
Secondly, Rush's objective was not to develop a new kind of transport or to explore other Worlds for the first time: he was making a tourist attraction. Rush was John Hammond, not Sir Stamford Raffles*.
Thirdly, the Wright Brothers did extensive testing of their designs before ever putting a human in them. NASA started off with a fairly relaxed attitude to safety and they lost three people as a result. That completely changed their culture, at least for a bit.
*in his capacity as founder of the Zoological society of London.
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P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
TBH, if it gets wet you're almost certainly already dead. As I mentioned before it's battery powered & my concern would have been that their level of preparation would make me worry they didn't have spare AAs let alone a spare controller.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
Or, I suspect, "Ignore it, it always does tha..."