The five design flaws that sank Bayesian superyacht and killed seven

A bombshell investigation has revealed how a series of flaws with the design of the ill-fated $40 million Bayesian superyacht may have caused it to capsize and sink, leaving seven dead.

The New York Times probe, which included accounts from experts, schematic diagrams, and computer models, concluded that there were five main faults – including the unusually tall mast.

Survivor testimony further revealed how the deadly event unfolded in real time when a squall suddenly blew in off the Sicilian coast during the early hours of August 19.

The boat capsized and sank within just minutes, killing tech mogul Mike Lynch, daughter Hannah, as well as Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, Christopher Morvillo, Neda Nassiri and Recaldo Thomas.

Fifteen others on board survived after scrambling aboard a life raft, with the report laying bare in terrifying detail the horror they experienced.

Scroll down for video:

A photo made available on August 19 by Perini Navi Press Office shows the ‘Bayesian’ sailing boat, in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. An in-depth investigation conducted by the New York Times has found some of the flaws that may have sank the $40 million Bayesian superyacht

The boat capsized and sank within a matter of minutes, killing tech mogul Mike Lynch and 18-year-old daughter Hannah

Tad Roberts, a naval architect with 40 years experience, was one of more than a dozen experts interviewed.

He said: ‘We can look at it in hindsight and say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, that’s not true.

‘This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened.’

‘When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it,’ he added of design decisions such as putting the yacht’s keel toward the back of the boat instead of evenly across the bottom, as is commonplace.

‘It made no sense to me.’

One of the main functions of a yacht’s keel, he pointed out, is to provide stability – adding weight low in ships to give it a center of gravity.

Without such a center, the boat would have been susceptible to capsizing, he said. Other naval engineers also agreed with his remarks.

Many experts also said that the decision was likely made to offset the weight of the boat’s single, heavy mast – a 237-foot structure set slightly toward the ship’s front.

The placement of the mast itself was also unusual, several others claimed – before painting a picture of a compromised vessel seemingly doomed right from the start.

Consisting of expert accounts, schematics, and computer models, the probe found five major design flaws

The ‘Bayesian’ sailing boat is seen here in Palermo, where it sank in a matter of seconds on August 19

‘We can look at it in hindsight and say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, that’s not true,’ Tad Roberts, a naval architect with 40 years experience, said of the still-shrouded event

‘This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened’, he said. A photo of the ill-fated superyacht is seen here, taken minutes before it sank

The mast was far the ship’s most distinguishing feature and may been simply too big, the seasoned engineers interviewed all said.

They explained how the more weight put on a yacht up high, the more weight was needed down low to stop it from tipping over.

Revisions to the boat’s original ballast – a boating term that refers to the balance brought by the keel – were therefore necessary in an apparently fruitless bid for stability.

Meanwhile, the mast measured in at an astounding 237 feet – more than 40 feet more than most others of its kind.

It was also comprised of at least 24 tons of aluminum rather than the much lighter carbon fiber more commonly used in yachts today – despite its inherent, higher cost.

Moreover, the boat only boasted one mast instead of the more standard two.

The Times also uncovered startling data from a ‘stability book’ for another 56-meter vessel from the same Italian yacht-maker responsible for the Bayesian in 2008.

Specifically, it showed a two-masted ship can lean at least 10 degrees farther onto its side that one-masted counterparts before taking on dangerous amounts of water – something that proved fatal in the case of the Bayesian.

Meanwhile, two Spanish naval engineers interviewed by the Times, Guillermo Gefaell and Juan Manuel López, calculated that the sheer size of the mast effectively made the yacht a wind catcher.

While not damning on their own, these alleged design flaws combined to create a perfect storm of compromises, experts said – before pointing to at least three other problems that also played a crucial part.

Survivor accounts further revealed how the deadly event unfolded in real time, when a squall suddenly blew in off the Sicilian coast

Morgan Stanley boss Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy were among those who died

Lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda (both pictured) did not survive the superyacht tragedy

Recaldo Thomas, chef on the Bayesian, was the first person to be recovered after the yacht sunk

These included how close the boat’s four air vents were to the waterline and a sunken deck that drastically reduced the boat’s buoyancy – decisions that, when faced with a sudden storm of great ferocity, proved fatal.

The storm that stuck Lynch’s boat during its second voyage would definitely be included in that class, boat Captain Karsten Borner said – recalling wind gusts that reached nearly 70 miles an hour while out on the same stormy sea as the Bayesian.

Such speeds are just below hurricane strength, and saw the boat pushed to its side about 15 degrees, the Times report discerned.

Gefaell noted how if the gusts were as strong as Borner estimated, such a force would have pushed the boat to an even more severe angle, knocking it all over within a matter of minutes, as witnesses described.

At that point, Gefaell insisted, ‘the boat was certainly lost.’

This happened at around 4:05am, Borner and others confirmed – and within two minutes, the boat was knocked to its side.

Such an occurrence is completely of the ordinary for a boat like the Bayesian, Borner insisted – calling 15 degrees a serious lean but nothing close to capsizing.

A sea captain recalled how he pulled the wife of the tech mogul who owned the vessel, Angela Bacares, out of the water, as her husband and daughter remained trapped below deck

Captain Karsten Borner, seen here, described the rescue in-depth, after his old sailboat managed to stay afloat despite the storm

However, in the instance surrounding the Bayesian, it was enough to tip the vessel over – an occurrence that was immediately worsened by the low-lying vents and recessed deck, both of which brought in water at a startling rate, other experts said.

Other basic design choices, such as putting two tall doors on either side of the deck, caused even more water to come in, they all said – citing how the boat sank just 16 minutes after the storm emerged hundreds of miles from where it had been forecast.

Borner’s old sailboat managed to stay afloat, and he was able to rescue the 15 bloodied survivors huddled in a twelve-person lifeboat.

He recalled how among them was Angela Bacares, the wife of the tech mogul who owned the vessel.

‘Are you OK?’ Borner remembered asking her.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I am not OK at all.’

Her husband and 18-year-old daughter were among those did not make it into the lifeboat and perished.

Survivors described what occurred to a doctor who went on to treat them – and was also interviewed by the Times.

Dr. Domenico Cipolla, the head of pediatric emergency at Di Cristina Pediatric Hospital, recalled accounts of a mother and her one-year-old child being hurled into the sea seconds after being jolted awake by the storm as the boat capsized.

The Times report – which included consultations from more than a dozen naval architects, engineers and other experts – found that they failed to do so when a surge of water knocked them backward, due to the litany of design flaws

The doctor said the woman told him how her baby nearly slipped away, before she grabbed her and swam to the just deployed life raft.

The boat would then fall beneath the water’s surface, as the seven remained trapped inside.

On the first day of a subsequent search, divers found the body of yacht chef Thomas – the only victim found floating outside the boat.

Over the next three days, they found the bodies of Lynch and the four other victims all in a cabin opposite the main staircase they could have used to flee.

The Times report – which included consultations from more than a dozen naval architects, engineers and other experts – found that they failed to do so when a surge of water knocked them backward, due to the litany of design flaws.

The last victim, Hannah, was found trapped behind furniture in another cabin nearby.

With the boat flipped on its side and without power, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone below deck to escape, the experts all said – pointing to the abnormal rate at which the water must have poured in and a lack of light.

The wreck, still 160 feet below the surface, is now set to be raised by Italian officials in the coming months for a more in-depth inspection, as the makers of the Italian-made vessel continue to insist the ship’s design was not the cause of the catastrophe.

Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns the firm that built the yacht, Perini Navi, told the Times the Bayesian was ‘unsinkable.’

He blamed the tragedy on the ship’s crew, and a series of unspecified errors that left it at the storm’s mercy.

‘I know, all the crew knows, that they did not do what they should have done,’ he said, as surviving members reportedly remain under a still-shrouded ‘gag order’

He said the design was not at fault and that the towering mast did not create ‘any kind of problem’ – contrary to the experts’ claims.

‘The ship was an unsinkable ship,’ he said. ‘I say it, I repeat it.’

A rescue boat last week searches the waters of Sicily where Mike Lynch’s super yacht Bayesian sank in a freak storm. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics called Everything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

How did we get here? In statistics, total probability is calculated by multiplying together all the component probabilities. So let’s look at the individual parts of the case.

The name

Mike Lynch was something of a black-swan event in himself. Until he came along, the U.K. had never before had a software billionaire. The son of a fireman and a nurse who had immigrated from Ireland, Lynch grew up in England, then rose above his humble roots by attending Cambridge University. After graduating, he returned to Cambridge to earn a Ph.D. in signal processing, then stayed on to conduct postdoctoral research in neural networks, the data-processing technology that underlies machine learning. In 1990, while still a student, he founded his first company at the age of 25 with a loan of £2,000 from an eccentric acquaintance he made in a bar.

His research had led him to understand that by using neural networks computers could sift through unstructured data to find information that a user wanted. To do this, a program needed to assemble a vast number of interrelated probabilities and then update these probabilities as new information came in using Bayes’s formula. In 1996, he founded a separate company, Autonomy, to do just that.

Lynch was way ahead of the curve in seeing the technology’s commercial potential. At the time, the field was struggling through a so-called AI winter: Research had stalled, and the processors hadn’t yet been developed that would allow for the creation of the large language models of today. But Lynch’s foresight served him well. By 2000, the company was worth more than a billion dollars and Lynch was being lauded as the U.K.’s answer to Bill Gates. In 2011, he sold Autonomy to Hewlett Packard for $11 billion. It was a tremendous coup for a former scholarship boy.

He used some of the money to buy a 184-foot long yacht named Salute from a Dutch property developer named John Groenewoud, who had bought it new for nearly $40 million in 2008. At the time it was built, the yacht’s 237-foot-high aluminum mast was the tallest in the world. Lynch renamed it after the kind of statistics that had made his fortune: Bayesian.

The rap

Lynch’s luck soon turned. After the deal closed, HP realized that Autonomy’s revenues were largely fictitious and that the deal it had staked so much on was in fact a dog — what one analyst later dubbed “the worst, most value-destroying deal in the history of corporate America.” HP wrote down the investment by $8.8 billion. The company fired its CEO, and the company broke up into two parts.

A lot of people were pissed. HP blamed “willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors.” These suspicions were the basis for a series of legal actions, and in 2019 U.S. prosecutors indicted Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice-president of finance, on fraud charges that carried a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison. Lynch’s own lawyers called it “one of Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud cases.”

The trial took a long time to unfold in part because Lynch waged a yearslong battle against extradition from the U.K. to the United States, a battle he finally lost in 2023. This past March, his trial began in San Francisco. The New York Times noted that “Mr. Lynch’s odds do not look good.” (Former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain had already been convicted on similar charges and sentenced to five years in prison.) But Lynch and Chamberlain beat the odds. On June 6, a jury found both men not guilty on all counts. “Lynch’s win is extremely unusual in federal criminal cases,” as the New York Post reported. “In fact, only less than 1% of federal cases ended in acquittal in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.”

The sinking

Lynch decided to celebrate with a Mediterranean cruise aboard Bayesian. The yacht was to carry its full complement of ten crew and 12 guests. Invited along with Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were several people who had helped secure his freedom, including lawyer Christopher Morvillo of the firm Clifford Chance and Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, who had testified to Lynch’s good character at his trial. Not on the guest list was his co-defendant. Three days after Bayesian set sail, Chamberlain was back in England and jogging near Cambridge when he was struck by a car. Severely injured, he was taken to the hospital and put on life support.

Bayesian was off on a meandering course through the Tyrrhenian Sea. It wandered among the Aeolian Islands of Pecorini, Malfa, and Lipari, then stopped at the port of Milazzo on August 14. From there, it sailed westward along the northern coast of Sicily toward Palermo. On the evening of Sunday, August 18, it anchored about 300 yards from the harbor of Porticello, where severe thunderstorms had been forecast. “We all knew that a storm was coming and that during that night it was better to keep the boats inside the port,” a local fisherman later told the BBC.

Under certain very specific conditions, thunderstorms can yield tornadoes. When these occur over water, they are called waterspouts, but in every other regard the phenomena are identical, says Wade Szilagi, director of the International Centre for Waterspout Research. Tornadoes are measured according to the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with EF5 being the strongest with winds of up to 300 miles per hour.

Like tornadoes, waterspouts are more likely to be found in areas where the meteorological conditions are favorable for their development, such as the Florida Keys and Lake Erie. As for the region where the Bayesian sank, “I wouldn’t say that this is a hot spot” for waterspouts, says Szilagi.

Shortly before dawn the vessel was apparently struck by a waterspout of unknown size and intensity while it was riding at anchor. Violent gusts slammed the yacht from side to side, forward and back, before ripping it from its anchorage. Bayesian tipped on its side, filled with water, and sank below the waves just 15 minutes after the storm began. While nine of the crew and four of the passengers escaped, six of the passengers remained trapped in the hull, including Mike and Hannah Lynch, Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy, and Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda. Their bodies were later recovered by divers. The body of the yacht’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, was found floating on the surface.

Even given the intensity of the storm, the speed with which Bayesian sank was shocking, nearly incomprehensible, to the yachting community. “I have never seen a vessel of this size go down so quickly,” Karsten Borner, the captain of a sailing ship that came to the survivors’ aid, told the Guardian. “Within a few minutes, there was nothing left.”

In interviews with Italian media, Giovanni Costantino, chairman of the company that built the Bayesian, said that his firm’s sailing yachts are “unsinkable” and among “the safest boats in the world.”

It won’t be entirely clear what happened until Italian authorities are able to complete their inquiry, but many, including Costantino, have speculated that the crew failed to prepare the yacht for the storm, for example by remaining at anchor and leaving hatches open to the weather. Italian prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation into the captain, James Cutfield, who survived.

Even assuming gross negligence on the part of the crew, the sinking of a vessel as large and robust as the Bayesian by a waterspout is vanishingly improbable. Such events are simply exceedingly rare, and none has been so deadly in centuries. In 2004, a waterspout in Greece picked up a boat and flung it onto a 10-year-old boy, killing him. And last year, a waterspout struck a 50-foot boat on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, killing four. The last reported time a waterspout claimed as many victims as died on the Bayesian was back in the 16th century, when one struck a crowded harbor in Malta, killing hundreds.

The same day that the Bayesian sank, U.K. police reported that Chamberlain had died in hospital of his injuries. He became one of the 165 pedestrians between the age of 25 and 59, out of a U.K. population of 42 million, to be killed each year by vehicles.

The bizarreness of this string of unlikelihoods has been lost on no one. “This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely,” Chivers notes. “There is this Bayesian-probability aspect to it, this building of unlikeliness upon unlikeliness.”