Titanic

The Titanic's hitting the iceberg was a factor in the incident but it would not have sunk:

• If the Captain had paid attention to the potential for icebergs in the area and slowed down
  
• If the steel in the hull was not brittle and pro to propagate damageI
  
• Even with the improper steel the proper design of the water tight chambers would have confined the flooding.
  
• The poor design and inferior steel resulted from uncontrolled cost cutting.
  
• The cost cutting resulted from poor management decisions
  

Even given the damage lives could have been saved if:

• There were enough life boats
  
• The life boats were calculated based on passenger capacity, not just "the rules"
  
• The rules would have been argued if the drive to save money was not so over riding
  

This process is called fault tree analysis or base cause analysis. It lets you avoid the obvious answer to find the true answer.

In this case all problems lead to poor engineering and faulty management.

It was widely believed to be unsinkable. The design and construction were supposedly such that the risk of sinking was considered virtually nil. See the Snopes page linked below.

Not only did they not have enough life boats, but they were not filled properly. For example, lifeboat 2 had 28 people when it could hold 65.

The life boats were actually designed to be able to be stacked inside of each other, but the people who put them on board thought that the deck would look too cluttered if they put the required number of life boats on board.

there was not any space on the titanic to fit all the ship.!!!!
Today, it seems baffling that the number of lifeboats on the Titanic met maritime standards. Representations about the Titanic's then-advanced design have been reduced to misleading sound bites and conflated with details of a strangely-prescient 19th century novel about a strikingly similar disaster befalling a purportedly unsinkable ship ("The Titan"). This has led to the meme that because the Titanic was considered "unsinkable," she didn't carry enough lifeboats.

The Titanic was actually claimed to be disaster proof rather than unsinkable. The notion was that even if the Titanic sank, it would take so long to do so, and proceed in such a way, no lives would be lost apart from any lost in the initial collision, explosion or other incident leading to the event. Her sister ship, the Olympic, had collided with a Royal Naval warship and made it back to port. (The warship fared far worse.)

The reason the Titanic's maiden voyage became a famous disaster nonetheless was because of lethal miscalculations in a literal, mathematical sense. Had the Titanic's structure coped with the impact as engineers were certain it would, the famous tilt into the ocean and rapid submersion would never have happened. Both the rate at which she sank, and as importantly the stability and level of the ship as she went down, would have been far less drastic.

Because she was steaming through well-traveled waters, carrying flares and the most advanced distance communication equipment available, it was assumed that a number of other ships would be on the scene quickly after anything went so terribly wrong. In that case, there were more than enough lifeboats to transfer the passengers and crew.

Summarily, the principal error in judgment was made when the engineers over-estimated the genius of their design. The rapid decay in the ship's viability was later traced to specific flaws in the compartmentation of its sub-structure. Loss of life was therefore inevitable absent the greater number of lifeboats that their calculations deemed a waste of space.

Secondarily, they made the classic engineers' error of assuming that the interaction of human beings is purely mathematical. (Only military engineers are trained to cope with this under the rubric of the "fog of water.") Two series of stumbles resulting from human fallibility occurred that night. As well documented elsewhere, there was substantial confusion within the sea lanes leading to tragedies such as the nearest vessel either misinterpreting or ignoring the distress flares. Even more lives were lost as a result.

Second, many life boats were launched hastily, with ample room left for other passengers. In fairness to the crew, which by accounts performed admirably, they had been trained to expect a rapid response from nearby vessels and had been told the ship would take long enough to sink that several trips would be both possible and necessary.

Assigning either evil intent or pure stupidity as the cause of any disaster is tempting. It is comforting, in a way, as it removes the cause from the likes of ourselves and suggests such things are rare and avoidable. The truth makes such events even more tragic, yet more readily understandable.

The Titanic was launched in Southampton, England on April 10th, 1912.

She made addition stops along the way, such as her stop at Cherbourg, France at 6:30 PM. She left again at 8 PM.

She also arrived at Queenstown, Ireland the next morning at 11:30 AM on the 11th of April, 1912. She raised anchor for the last time at 1:30 PM [GMT] on April 11th, from Queenstown.