Karl Stanley has done more than 2,000 dives in submersibles that he’s built himself, so he was intrigued when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush invited him down to the Bahamas for a test dive in the company’s Titan sub in 2019. But by the end of that dive, Stanley’s curiosity turned to concern.
“In retrospect, there were a lot of red flags,” Stanley said today during a Coast Guard hearing into last year’s loss of the Titan sub and its crew as it was descending to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Rush, who was the sub’s pilot, and four other people lost their lives in last year’s tragedy.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, meeting in South Carolina, is looking into the causes of last year’s tragedy and is expected to recommend measures to head off such tragedies in the future. Part of its job is to review OceanGate’s missteps during Titan’s development.
Back in 2019, Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate was testing the sub in the Bahamas, in anticipation of taking its first trips to the Titanic later that year. Rush had made a solo trip to more than 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) in depth the previous December, and Stanley was one of three people set to accompany him on a follow-up dive.
Stanley, who operates a submersible tour company in Honduras, had come to know Rush through the tight-knit community of sub operators. He recalled traveling to Everett to help out with the construction of Titan’s landing and recovery platform — and said he was “excited” about OceanGate’s plan to use a lightweight carbon-fiber hull for Titan.
For the test dive, Titan was brought about 10 miles offshore, and made a gradual descent into the depths. Stanley said he had been warned to “be prepared for noises” — but even with that warning, he wasn’t prepared for what he heard on the way down.
“It’s making noises,” he recalled. “The sound of a carbon-fiber band breaking in a 5-inch matrix is a lot of energy being released. We were all clearly a little disnerved, but he had warned us, and I think nobody wanted to be the one to say they wanted to go up first.”
Stanley said the cracking sounds got louder as the sub neared the Titanic depth of roughly 12,500 feet. “At some point, I don’t remember who — we were all like, well, that’s probably close enough. We’ve been down here long enough,” he said.
“There was kind of like a grand finale of cracking sounds as we were getting close to the surface,” Stanley recalled. He speculated that the sounds were caused by a release of energy that was stored in the carbon fibers during exposure to the extreme pressure in the deep ocean.
Stanley was so shaken by the experience that he voiced his concerns about the hull in a weeks-long email exchange with Rush. “The only question in my mind is, will it fail catastrophically or not,” he wrote in one email.
Stanley argued that Titan should undergo at least 50 tests before paying clients were allowed on board. Rush insisted that OceanGate’s testing routine was sufficient to ensure safety — but Stanley also got the message that he shouldn’t talk to others about the cracking sounds he heard.
Although Stanley agreed to keep mum, he told Rush in a follow-up email that he wasn’t comfortable about it. “The fact that you indirectly told me to not speak about the noises I heard on the dive, to me says a lot,” he wrote.
“I kept trying to tell him, ‘You do not have a marketable product,'” Stanley said at today’s hearing.
Stanley said he didn’t know at the time that the Titan sub had been struck by lightning during an earlier series of tests, or that OceanGate’s engineers had identified a crack in the hull a month and a half after his trip. OceanGate canceled that year’s planned Titanic expeditions. However, the company blamed the cancellation on regulatory problems having to do with a support ship — and never mentioned the crack in the hull.
In 2020, OceanGate ordered a new hull to be manufactured by two Seattle-area companies, ElectroImpact and Janicki Industries. In 2021, the company began conducting Titanic expeditions with the replacement hull. Titan’s second hull gave way in June 2023, killing Rush as well as veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet, aviation executive and adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
One leading theory for the carbon-fiber hull’s implosion is that repeated trips to the Atlantic’s depths, plus exposure to the elements between trips, weakened the hull or the seals between the hull and the sub’s titanium end caps.
If Stanley knew everything he knows now, would he have gone on that test dive five years ago?
“There’s a lot of things that, if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone,” he said. “People have told me that I was, you know, stupid, naive. But really what it came down to was, at that point, I had no reason to believe that Stockton was a liar, and I had no evidence of any lies on his part. When he said that he did a proper amount of testing — he’s a trained engineer, he’s not an idiot.”
Stanley’s perspective has changed since then. “A lot of the things I’ve learned in the last 18 months have been very shocking,” he acknowledged.
Other highlights from the hearing
Did Stockton Rush have a death wish? Stanley said his evolving view on “Stockton’s psychology” led him to believe that Rush went ahead with the dives to the Titanic — even though he knew about the problems with the sub — because he wanted to “leave his mark in history,” and because he was feeling pressure from OceanGate’s investors and clients. Stanley noted that Rush came from a famous family, with two signers of the Declaration of Independence among his ancestors.
“He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable, but he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives,” Stanley said.
OceanGate’s staff shrunk from about 30 employees in 2019 to 14 or 15 employees in 2023, said Amber Bay, who served as the company’s director of administration during that time frame. Bay said the COVID pandemic was a factor behind the cutbacks. “Any kind of operations at sea were then halted, obviously getting into a submersible and onto ships,” she said. “So we had to get rid of many of our operational staff … because they were no longer needed.” After the pandemic, “we were still in recovery mode.”
Bay confirmed that Stockton Rush occasionally had to put more of his own money into OceanGate’s account to meet payroll. “He increased his investment by making a deposit,” Bay recalled. When asked to identify the main revenue sources supporting OceanGate, Bay replied: “Investors.”
She also confirmed that OceanGate asked employees to delay getting paychecks at the beginning of 2023, because “the finances were just getting very tight at that time.” She said she deferred her own pay, as did Rush.
Bay was asked about the dismissal of Antonella Wilby, an employee who raised concerns about a loud bang that was heard at the end of a Titan dive in 2022. Bay said that Rush fired Wilby because she had “behaved erratically and disturbed the crew.” She said she didn’t recall telling Wilby that she lacked an “explorer mindset,” which was something Wilby said in her testimony last Friday.
In the wake of the accident, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations.
Bay concluded today’s testimony with an tearful statement about the tragedy. “I had the privilege of knowing the explorers whose lives who were lost — Stockton, P.H., Shahzada, Suleman and Hamish — and there’s not a day that passes that I don’t think of them, their families and the loss,” she said. “It’s been a difficult year for them, and for all of us.”
Previously:
- Former top engineer says cost concerns shortchanged safety
- OceanGate client recalls a tricky Titanic tangle
- Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science
- Videos show the shattered remains of Titan sub
- OceanGate whistleblower traces the roots of his concerns
- Hearing reveals the last words sent by Titan’s crew
- A new chapter in the OceanGate probe, but not the end