Author: Captain

The lifeboats are a focus by many as the cause of the high death rate during the sinking of the Titanic. From my readings I have found at least 4 issues related to the Titanic lifeboats. The most obvious is that there are not enough lifeboat seats for all passengers and crew of the Titanic. The cause of this shortage of seats is due to out dated regulations that White Star even exceeded on the Titanic. There is some discussion about White Star’s and/or Harland & Wolff’s decision to not put more lifeboats on the Titanic. It is suggested that putting the full complement of life boats on the Titanic would clutter the boat deck for passengers. Mr Carlisle, the chief designer for Harold & Wolff, may have resigned over this issue.

The second issue was that the lifeboat drill was cancelled for the day of the sinking. This meant that passengers wouldn’t know where to go to get to a lifeboat. This also lead to most of the Titanic’s crew who were new to the ship and were unfamiliar with the lifeboat system and their place on a lifeboat situation.

The third is the time and process needed to deploy the lifeboats. It was 50 minutes (1) from the time of the collision with the iceberg and the first lifeboat was lowered into the ocean. The two officers, Murdoch and Lighttoller, were assigned to manage the deployment of lifeboats. From what I have read it takes about 8 men to deploy a lifeboat on the Titanic. There were some issues that occurred during deployment. The men found the pulley/rope system was very stiff and hard to work because it was so new and had never been used before. As the crew were new to the ship there were cases when lifeboats didn’t go down level, almost landed on top of each other, started to fill with water from a bilge pump discharge and in one case the ropes had to be cut to release the lifeboats. Besides the 16 lifeboats there were 4 Englehart collapsible with only 2 were successfully deployed. The reason two were not deployed was they needed special equipment to deploy the collapsibles from on top of the officers quarters but that equipment was in the bow and underwater by the time they were deployed.

The forth is why they didn’t load the lifeboats to capacity. None of the lifeboats that were launched had all seats full at launch. There were some that had capacity for 60 people and had less than 10 people on board when launched. There seem to be two reasons for this. One was they were worried that the lifeboats would break in the middle if lowered with all seats full. Harland & Wolff had tested these lifeboats to twice their design capacity without failure so not filling the lifeboats was a training/communications error. Near the end of the loading period there were lifeboats lowered that took all passengers that were on the boat deck and were still not full. Not practicing lifeboat drill may have contributed to people not coming up to the boat deck.

If one could go back in time and make the decision to install all 48 lifeboats on the Titanic would it have made a difference? As I understand the system for more than one lifeboat required that one life boat had to be launched and the rope/pulley system returned to the boat deck to pick up another lifeboat that was on a wrack behind the first lifeboat. Based on this I would assume that deploying the second and third lifeboat from any lifeboat station would take at least as long as the first lifeboat. Based on records it took 95 minutes to launch the first 16 lifeboats that were at lifeboat stations. If you divide 95 minutes by 16 it took 5 min and 30 seconds to launch each of the first lifeboats. If you add 30 seconds to each subsequent lifeboat to accommodate bringing the tackle up, it would take a total of 6 minutes to launch each of the remaining 32 launches. At 6 minute each it would take an additional 32 X 6= 192 minutes or 3 hours and 2 minutes to launch all the never installed lifeboats.

Captain Smith didn’t issue the command to lower the lifeboats until 40 minutes after the impact with the iceberg. With the current 16 lifeboats taking another 95 minutes to launch all 16 lifeboats. there was only 15 minutes left before the Titanic sank. This would mean that even if there were 48 lifeboats they could only launch 3 more lifeboats before the Titanic sank.

Loading the existing 16 lifeboats at full capacity and launching the Englehart collapsible correctly would have been the best way to save as many people as they could based on 1912 technology.

Reference 1

National Museums: Norther Ireland

White Star and Harland & Wolff had decided from the start of the ships design that they were not going after record crossing speeds and compete with Cunard on speed records. They were looking at speeds of 21-24 nautical miles per hour rather than speeds of 26-27 knots.  One of the differences that White Star saw as a benefit was they used less coal to cross the ocean than Cunard did.

The whole propulsion system of the Titanic was far more complex than I had thought possible in 1912.  Based on information on the web site titled “Titanic’s Prime Mover – An Examination of Propulsion and Power”(1) the 29 boilers and 3 primary steam engines provided 59,000 horsepower.  This equipment required over 450 men to keep it running 24 hours a day for up to 8 days.

I was looking at this site to try to find out how these engines were operated on the evening of April 14 as the bridge was dealing with an iceberg dead ahead.  This article indicated that if the men were in place ready to take action (they were not on April 14) they could stop the primary reciprocating engines in 60-90 seconds. They would need an additional 60 to 120 seconds to get the propellers turning in reverse at the speed indicated by the bridge telegraph. This may be why there seems to be some confusion if the ship was actually moving in reverse in the few minutes after the iceberg was sited.

In one article I was able to find information that the time from reporting the iceberg and hitting it was 37 seconds (2). Based on the information on how the Titanic engines worked by the time of impact the best that the engine room would have done was begin the process of stopping the reciprocating engines. The slowing of the engines would have cause the propellers to provide small slowing effort as they dragged through the water.

I didn’t consider the centre propeller, driven by a turbine engine, as it didn’t have the capability to revers it’s rotation.

I did find a reference to the sea trials of the Titanic where they did an emergency stop with the ship. I assume (with care) that they used the reverse capability of the two reciprocating engines. In this case it took about 1/2 a miles to stop. The ship’s chance to stop before hitting the iceberg is very unlikely on the evening of April 14.

Reference

(1) Steam Power System on the Titanic

(2) https://www.thoughtco.com/little-known-facts-about-the-titanic-1779209