Dive expert raised safety concerns after trip on Titan in 2019

During a trip aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in April 2019, Karl Stanley, an expert on submarines, knew immediately that something wasn’t right: he heard a creaking sound that only grew louder over the two hours it took for the submarine. to dive over 12,000 feet.

The next day, Mr. Stanley wrote an email expressing his concerns to Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, who was also aboard the Titan for the dive, urging Mr. Rush to stop the expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic planned for that summer.

“A helpful thought exercise here would be to imagine removing the variables of the investors, the enthusiastic mission scientists, your success-hungry team, the press releases already announcing this summer’s diving schedule,” wrote Mr Stanley , according to a copy of the email seen by The New York Times. “Imagine this project is self-funded and runs on your own schedule. Would you consider taking dozens of other people to the Titanic before you really knew where those sounds were coming from?”

The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that a remote-controlled vehicle found debris from the Titan near the Titanic wreckage, ending a four-day, multi-national search for the 22-foot watercraft that had killed people around the world in the had been banned. Mr. Rush piloted the Titan and was one of five people on board to die. Titan’s final voyage would have been its 14th expedition to the Titanic wreck.

Mr. Stanley has operated a tourist submarine in Honduras for 25 years, though his ship only descends to about 2,000 feet, far less than the 4,000+ feet the Titan was supposed to reach. Mr. Stanley accompanied Mr. Stanley on his dive on the Titan in 2019 with Mr. Rush, OceanGate’s program manager, Joel Perry, who Mr. Stanley said shared his concerns about the Titan in his email to Mr. Rush. Mr Perry, who left OceanGate in 2019 months after the dive, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr Rush had been heavily promoting his plans for the Titan for its first dive in 2019. The previous year, at a conference of manned underwater vehicle specialists in New Orleans, several experts directly confronted Mr. Rush about their concerns about the Titan being in a tense state. exchange, said Mr. Stanley. Shortly after the conference, more than three dozen industry experts sent Mr. Rush a letter urging him to put the Titan through a certification process.

“People were actually fighting him in that room,” said Mr. Stanley.

Mr. Rush was determined to build a submarine with a greater capacity than other similar craft, which are metal spheres that can carry up to three people, Mr. Stanley said, recalling conversations he had with Mr. Rush in person and by phone.

In the April 2019 email to Mr. Rush said Mr. Stanley that the loud cracking noises they had heard during their dive “sounded like a fault/failure in an area that was reacted to by the enormous pressure and crushed/damaged”. He wrote that the loud, cracking sound indicated that “part of the fuselage was breaking off”.

Mr. Rush never answered that email directly, Mr. Stanley said. But he made some changes to the Titan, including building a new hull, and called off the planned dives for that year.

Experts said one explanation for what could have caused the Titan to implode was water seeping in where a piece of titanium was was glued into the end of the ship’s cylinder. “It could have been anywhere you seal the carbon fiber to the titanium, or it could have been around that porthole,” said Capt. Alfred McLaren, a retired Navy captain and friend of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, was one of the people aboard the Titan when it imploded this week.

“At that depth you could have a leak not much bigger than the diameter of one of your hairs and you’d be dead in a fraction of a second,” said Captain McLaren, a submarine commander for nuclear strikes. “They really wouldn’t have even known they would have died. They would have been dead before they knew it.”

That the ship imploded during the first dive of the season may have been relevant. Saltwater that was trapped between different materials in the ship during dives in 2021 and 2022 worked its way through fibers and softened it, making it more susceptible to leakage, experts said.