Titanic Engineering Disaster Essay

First, will look at the sinking of the Titanic of 1912 and well this is not the first ever engineering disaster it is normally where most people start. “RMS Titanic was a British passenger ship that sank after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton (United Kingdom) to New York City, in April 1912. Titanic was at the time the largest ship ever built and was considered to be unsinkable. The tragedy claimed the lives of over 1,500 people. Many factors contributed to the catastrophe: removing half the amount of lifeboats originally planned for the ship, and cruising in high speed in an iceberg-prone environment. As for the engineering point of view: several rivets of the 3 million rivets that held the Titanic together were recently recovered and tested, and found to be made of low quality iron, which on impact caused them to fall apart. This might have contributed to the event. Another engineering fault was that the 16 watertight compartments that kept the boat afloat, were not individually sealed, but rather connected near the ceiling. This enabled the water to spill from one compartment to another and sink the …show more content…
“The LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German passenger airship that caught fire and crashed during its attempt to dock in New Jersey. 36 people died in the disaster that was caught on video. Decades of research and tests all came to the same conclusion offered by the original German and American investigators: The airship caught fire because of an electrostatic discharge that ignited leaking hydrogen from the 200 million liters (7 million cubic ft) of hydrogen gas. The Hindenburg disaster marked the end of commercial passenger airships” (Engineering Disasters, 2017, p. 1). This lesson seems like an obvious yet still very prevalent one. Whenever operating a transport of some type the vehicle should be checked over before launch. This is also why the use of gauges are so important within a