Eastern and its unions worked on that for years before Borman.

I was commenting based on reports the balloon was 20 ft in diameter. A 20 ft cylinder 6 ft tall would lift about 100 lb. This was a prism with average height less than 3 ft.

I call BS on the "kid on balloon" story. From the size of it, no way it could lift a person, even a 6 year old. I saw NOTHING in the press questioning if the envelope was big enough to perform as feared.

Find the airline "club" and free wifi usually leaks out...

Looks like a killer opportunity for Linus!

The "attitude" of a large displacement ship wouldn't change much with speed, and the leak made her even heavier and less subject to motion or thrust influence. Of course another option would have been to steam toward the rescue vessel for an hour or so, but then even less time would have been left to load the boats. The biggest lapse of judgment (after steaming full-bore through the ice-field in the first place) was shoddy boat training that left the lifeboats far below their capacity. When the crew started loading the boats, they didn't know the ship would sink, so they treated it as a formality like a fire drill, just going through the motions. After an hour or two, it became obvious the situation was dire but most of the boats were already away half empty.