A submersible expert said he heard “cracking noises” while aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in 2019.
Karl Stanley was part of the second dive the Titan made. He said that OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush warned him and others ahead of the dive that the carbon fiber made cracking noises, NewsNation reported.
“He actually let me drive,” Stanley said. “At one point I was able to drive the submarine toward deeper water by the sound of the cracking getting louder.”
Stanley emailed his concerns to Rush the next day, according to CNN.
“What we heard, in my opinion … sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email, obtained by CNN.
“From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never totally stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxing of stored energy, would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down/getting spongy,” Stanley stated.
Rush never responded to Stanley’s email, but the rest of the dives scheduled that year were canceled. Stanley said Rush spent around one million dollars building a new fiber carbon [hull] for the submersible.
“He never got into the nitty-gritty with me about exactly how many model tests he had done, exactly where they failed. But my impression was that he had done enough diligence that lives were not at risk,” Stanley told CNN.
In 2018, OceanGate expeditions fired David Lochridge, the Titan project’s director of marine operations, after he called for more safety tests for the sub.
The ‘race against time’ rescue mission for the five passengers ended after the United States Coast Guard announced the vessel had suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” Breitbart reported.
Now an investigation is underway by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the United States Coast Guard to determine the cause of the implosion.
“Our mandate is to find out what happened and why and to find out what needs to change to reduce the chance or the risk of such occurrences in the future,” Kathy Fox, chair of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said Saturday at a press briefing.