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OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Korkki@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] TommySoda@lemmy.world 167 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (16 children)

Jesus Christ that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The submarine in the game Iron Lung was safer to drive than this thing.

But Wilby said that for the Titan, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook by hand and then entered into Excel before loading the spreadsheet into mapping software to track the sub’s position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.

The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages.

Updates every FIVE MINUTES?! I wouldn't even trust this thing in a damn swimming pool.

[–] Korkki@lemmy.world 93 points 2 months ago (10 children)

I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can' be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.

When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 102 points 2 months ago (4 children)

To write a script, you need someone who can write scripts.
If all you have is someone who can write VLOOKUPs in Excel, and the CEO is too cheap to hire someone, then that's what you use.

[–] lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago

Sounds like they did the lookups by hand actually

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