Submersible expert who took 2019 trip on Titan heard cracking noise of ‘hull breaking down’
An American submarine tourism expert who took a trip with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush on the Titan submarine in April 2019 said the hull made ominous creaking noises during their 12,000-foot journey, and warned Rush to delay his Titanic plans.
Karl Stanley, who runs a tourism sub business in Honduras, said he was invited by Rush to try out his sub, Titan, in the Bahamas.
Rush, 61, had founded the OceanGate tourism company in 2009 and designed the Titan ship’s carbon fiber hull himself.
He was one of five people who died when the Titan lost contact on Sunday morning as it tried to reach the Titanic’s wreckage. It is now believed that the submarine imploded during its descent: on Thursday, debris from the ship was discovered on the seabed, just 500 meters from the bow of the Titanic.
Stanley told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday night that he wasn’t too worried about the noise on the April 2019 trip because Rush had warned him it was creaky. Rush was at the controls.
But afterwards he realized it was probably dangerous.
Karl Stanley, a tourist submarine operator based in Honduras, has described taking a trip on the Titan in April 2019 and being concerned about the creaking sound
Stanley spoke to CNN Friday night and described the email he wrote to Stockton Rush
Submersible pump expert Karl Stanley tells CNNs @andersoncooper about asking questions about a possible “malfunction” in an area of the Titan submarine in a 2019 email to OceanGate CEO and Titan submarine pilot Stockton Rush. Watch: pic.twitter.com/us1HlZnW61
— CNN (@CNN) June 24, 2023
The submarine, Titan, is depicted descending. It was the only five-person submarine capable of reaching Titanic, and the only tourist submarine not independently certified safe. Debris from the submarine was found on the ocean floor on Thursday
Rush is depicted in a submarine. He initially wanted to explore space, but then moved on to the deep seas
Stanley said that the day after the trip, when he had processed the experience, he wrote an email to Rush outlining his concerns.
He said the sound they heard during their dive “sounded like a fault/failure in an area that was reacted to by the enormous pressure and was crushed/damaged.”
He wrote in an email obtained by The New York Timesthat the loud, creaking sound indicated that “part of the hull is breaking off.”
And he urged Rush to take his time developing the submarine, to make sure it was safe.
Rush had started promoting Titanic tourist trips in 2017 and had already collected fees from some potential passengers.
Early press reports said tourists would pay about $105,000 each, a price OceanGate set because it was the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic in 1912.
In 2018, the company fired their Director of Maritime Operations after he clashed with OceanGate executives over safety protocols.
Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its acrylic viewing window were subject to several warnings and James Cameron cited them as “potential points of failure” on the ship
OceanGate Expeditions offered ‘the unique opportunity as a specially trained crew member to dive safely to the wreck of the Titanic’
In the Titan, which is built to carry five people
David Pogue, a CBS journalist, is seen in the submarine with Rush. He descended last year to see the Titanic
Weeks later, several experts had a tense exchange with Rush at a conference of manned underwater vehicle specialists in New Orleans, Stanley said.
“People were actually converging on him in that room,” Stanley said.
And in March 2018, more than three dozen industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers warned Rush in a letter that the company’s “experimental” approach could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.
“We suggested, ‘Look, you’re going too fast, and the idea of bypassing the existing classification process could have serious consequences,’ said Will Kohnen, the head of the Marine Technology Society’s committee on manned underwater vehicles.
‘You do not know what you do not know.’
OceanGate said their demands stymied innovation and the industry was overcautious.
Stanley said he wrote his thoughts in an email after the dive because he knew Rush was defensive about his business.
In his April 2019 email, Stanley wrote, “A helpful thought exercise here would be to imagine the variables of the investors, the enthusiastic mission scientists, your success-hungry team, the press releases announcing this summer’s dive schedule. already announce, will be removed.
‘Imagine that this project is self-funded and runs according to your own schedule. Would you consider taking dozens of other people to the Titanic before you really knew where those sounds were coming from?’
This is the latest sighting of the submarine Titan, which launched on Sunday. It can be seen in a photo shared by Hamish Harding’s company. He and the four others on board perished in the disaster
Five people were on board, including British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, who was just 19
French Navy veteran PH Nargeolet (left) sits in the submarine with Stockton Rush (right), CEO of the OceanGate Expedition
Rush didn’t respond.
But Stanley said OceanGate canceled the Titanic dive for June 2019 because it had failed to obtain permits for a research support vessel.
The first tourist trip took place in 2021.
Rush was killed along with French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; British billionaire businessman Hamish Harding, 58; and British-Pakistani father and son Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman.
The search and rescue vessels are now all returning to port in Newfoundland.
Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), underwater robots, continue to search for the submarine’s debris as investigators try to definitively figure out what went catastrophically wrong.
Some said the fact that the Titan imploded on the first dive of the season may have been relevant.
Salt water trapped in the ship between different materials during dives in 2021 and 2022 worked its way through fibers and softened it.
Who was Stockton Rush?
San Francisco native Rush, 61, founded OceanGate Expeditions in 2009 — after he tried, but failed, to buy explorer and businessman Steve Fossett’s submarine after the adventurer died in a plane crash in 2007.
As a young man, Rush was more interested in outer space than the deep seas: At age 19, he became the world’s youngest jet transport pilot and qualified at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute.
For the next three years he flew for Saudi Arabian Airlines during his summer vacations from his aerospace engineering degree from Princeton.
Beginning in 1984, he worked in the United States Air Force on F-15s and anti-satellite missile programs, with the goal of eventually joining the space program.
Rush received an MBA from Berkeley and went on to work for multiple companies specializing in sonar, submarine technology and radars.
Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate
He built a Glasair III experimental aircraft that he flew regularly, and his own Kittredge K-350 two-man submarine.
Rush always intended to take tourists on the Titanic: In 2017, he said he planned to then expand to include tours to hydrothermal vents or deep-sea canyons, and underwater battlefield tours.
He then hoped to work with oil and gas exploration.
In 2018, the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, a 60-year-old trade group, warned that the company’s “current” experimental “approach” could lead to problems “from minor to catastrophic.”
The company too fired David Lochridge, who was Director of Marine Operations for the Titan project, after disagreeing with his demand for stricter safety checks on the submarine, including “testing to prove its integrity.”
In addition, the company chose not to have the vessel ‘classed’, an industry-wide practice whereby independent inspectors ensure vessels meet accepted technical standards.
The first trips to see the Titanic began in 2021. Rush was killed in the June 18 disaster.