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Originally Posted by August

Something that has always intrigued me about the Titanics sinking is why nobody used the 2.5 hours to build some rafts. There was plenty of wood aboard. Me I'd be ripping off some door frames and lashing them to deck chairs. No shortage of either yet they seem to have been ignored.

Yeah, and there WERE some survivalists who built rafts from deck chairs, doors, and anything else they could find. Chief Baker Joughin threw 50 deck chairs overboard to be used as life rafts, and there is little doubt many of them were used by swimmers. But did it help in saving lives? No. Not at all. The water was 30°F, nobody lasts in there for over an hour, even on a raft they get frosted by small waves and the icy air. The 4 people who were pulled out of the water by lifeboat 14 may consider themselves VERY lucky.

The lifeboats were calculated on the weight of 1178 people in total, and there was the theoretical possibility to 'overload' them until there were about 1400 people in the lifeboats. This still left 800 men depending on wooden rafts for their survival.

You did get it right about the launching of the lifeboats. Captain Smith ordered to abandon ship about midnight, and Senator Smith carried out a test with Olympic's lifeboats as part of the US Inquiry. He concluded that the 16 non-collapsible lifeboats could have been perepared, loaded (not overloaded) and launched within an hour. Calculate 10 minutes overall to 'overload' the boats with additional passengers and crew and another 30 minutes to lower all collapsibles, it would be 1:40 A.M. when all 20 lifeboats were gone in the ideal scenario.

The problem is, there are many obstructions to this ideal scenario. The passengers were scattered throughout a 400 m³ ship and stewards would need time to collect them all to the boat deck, eating valuable minutes. And what about 'women and children first'? It would make women and children even more reluctant to board tiny, creepy lifeboats, leaving their beloved ones behind on the largest ship ever built and considered unsinkable. Many women refused to board the first lifeboats, and even more valuable minutes were eaten.

With all life jackets been confiscated from women and children who entered the lifeboats, one could install those life jackets underneath rafts to give them more floating capacity. If Jack & Rose carried this out on their raft, they both could have made it out alive. Jamie and Adam tested this in the Mythbusters episode about the Titanic film, and they told Cameron that life jackets underneath rafts could have saved additional lives. But they also said the film got the hypothermia part right: if you didn't board a lifeboat and failed to find a raft, you're doomed. So each of those 800 men would need a raft to survive. I'm not talking about 800 rafts, I'm talking about enough rafts to save 800 men.

So what would be the situation?

• 800 men who had been busy escorting their beloved ones into lifeboats and did not have any time yet to focus on their own survival. They now completely depended on wooden rafts, enforced with life jackets.
• 3000 life jackets to enforce the rafts.
• 4 officers (Smith, Wilde, Murdoch and Moody) who had been busy with launching lifeboats up until now and did not have any time yet to focus on the men. The other officers manned lifeboats.
• 11 seamen who didn't man lifeboats.
• 40 minutes until the ship foundered in the ideal scenario, even less in a more realistic scenario.

• Interesting but futile the chill would have killed the 'rafters' as surly as just being in the water with a donned buoyancy device- The particular case of 'collapsible A' illustrates the point as it was essentially a big raft

  Titanic collapsible lifeboat A. This collapsible boat was never launched as such from the Titanic. After boat C had been lowered from the starboard side, the crew tried to fasten boat A to the davits, but there simply was no more time. The boat was washed over the side of the ship and the canvas sides had not been put up, so it was soon awash with icy sea water. People started climbing into it from the water (and there may have been some in it when it was washed away as well) and some people said that it was full of people within a rather short period of time. According to some survivors, it turned turtle and the people in it were thrown out of it, but many scrambled back. Finally, it drifted away from the wreckage area and fewer people came near it. When the last swimmer arrived, there may have been about 30 people standing in the frail craft with water up to their knees. In the extremely cold water, people started dying and Richard Williams, who had seen his father disappear when they were swimming in the water and the funnel fell near them, estimated there were eleven who finally were rescued. Olaus Abelseth believed ten or twelve were saved including two Swedes. William Mellor also thought there were ten or twelve saved (out of 30 or 40 original survivors on the boat). Third class passenger August Wennerström (listed Andersson) estimated twelve survivors. He noticed a Swedish man holding on to his wife, who was in the sea and did not have the strength to get into the boat. The wife grew numb and drifted away and the husband died in the craft (according to Wennerström, he died on the Carpathia). Their wedding ring was left in the boat, however. After hours of suffering, the ten or twelve survivors were rescued by boat 14 who spied them and took them in.

  http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org...urvivors-list/