Titan sub hearings live: Haunting new photos show mangled wreckage of OceanGate vessel after it imploded
After hearing evidence from Stockton Rush’s friend, Karl Stanley, yesterday, engineers will give testimony to the US Coast Guard today
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The hearings into the Titan submersible disaster resumed today after a friend of the OceanGate CEO who said the boss “knew it was going to end like this" testified yesterday.
Today’s hearing featured testimony from Dr. Don Kramer, National Transportation Safety Board engineer, who analyzed photos of the Titan sub wreckage for the investigative board. Additional specialists are slated to testify today.
Yesterday’s hearing featured Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Stockton Rush. He went on the doomed submersible with his friend in April 2019.
The Titan sub imploded last June, killing all five people on board, including Rush.
In a previous interview after the disaster, Stanley said: “[Rush] definitely knew it was going to end like this. He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with.”
Yesterday Stanley testified hearing cracking noises on the submersible and that he could pinpoint where they were coming from. He told the board that Rush was “scared” during the 2019 dive.
“It was unnerving and then when it kept happening,” Stanley testified, referring to the noises.
“It’s also a clue to me about Stockton’s psychology...he was scared,” he added.
Karl Stanley emailed Stockton Rush about concerns
Karl Stanley’s previously reported e-mails describing his concerns about Stockton Rush’s sub were read at today’s hearing.
“I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse,” Stanley told Rush via e-mail. “The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not.”
Stanley also complained to Rush, saying he felt he was indirectly told not to discuss his concerns.
“The fact that you indirectly told me not to speak about the noises I heard on the dive, to me, says a lot,” Stanley wrote in the email. “As you know, my subs have had many issues and incidents over the years, at no point did I find it necessary to tell anyone not to speak of what I saw or heard.”
Karl Stanley says he would not have gone on 2019 dive in retrospect
Karl Stanley, who went on a 2019 test dive with Stockton Rush, said he would not have gone on the dive in retrospect.
The comments came after a member of the panel asked Stanley if he was aware there was a lightning strike in the vicinity of the sub in the Bahamas just before the 2019 dive.
“The first time I heard of a lightning strike was reading about it..There’s a lot of things that, if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone,” Stanley said. “People have told me that I was 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.”
Stanley earlier testified that the sub made noise when it dived in 2019. The sound happened so clearly and frequently, he said, that he could “localize where it was coming from.”
“It was unnerving and then when it kept happening, I remember I was the one that was able to isolate the area where it was coming from and told them, ‘this, this is the area,’ and was listening right there,” Stanley said.
“It’s also a clue to me about Stockton’s psychology...he was scared. Because if he wasn’t scared, he would have already isolated where the noises were coming from him on his first dive,” he continued. “When I isolated the area, that was new information to him, but he was down there by himself, scared, and he kept going.”
Karl Stanley went on dive with Stockton Rush in 2019: ‘There were a lot of red flags'
Karl Stanley testified that he helped build a vehicle with Stockton Rush for free.
Rush then invited him on a dive in April 2019 in the Bahamas. Rush, Rush’s childhood friend, Stanley, and a sonar technician were on board.
“He told us to be prepared for noises. He had recently done the solo dive on his own, and basically just said, ‘this is going to make noise’ and ‘brace yourselves,’” he added.
Stanley said there were “a lot of red flags” during the dive.
“Another clue in retrospect, is he didn’t tow out,” Stanley said, adding that not towing out deeper showed Rush did not have “a lot of faith” in the sub.
Stanley also noted Rush did not drive the sub.
“He didn’t do any of the driving...I believe I was the first one to drive, but he basically insisted it was his idea,” he said. “Nobody asked to drive...I think that was his kind of sick way of if we had imploded, we were a little bit in control of our own destiny.”
Stockton Rush and Karl Stanley knew each other for at least a decade
Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Stockton Rush, said he met the former OceanGate CEO at least 10 years ago.
“My relationship with Stockton goes back at least 10, possibly up to 15 years,” Stanley testified on Tuesday afternoon.
Stanley said he saw Stockton regularly at underwater intervention meetings.
“When I learned that he was making a carbon fiber sub, I was excited about it,” he added.
Stockton Rush was ‘playing the game,’ friend says
Karl Stanley, a close friend of Stockton Rush, said the former OceanGate CEO was “playing the game” by bringing scientists on his Titan sub.
“It’s only recently that, now that these submersibles are mostly being operated by billionaires on their yachts, that the billionaires are courting scientists,” Stanley testified. “Because when you have a billionaire saying, ‘Hey, come on my yacht, my chef’s going to cook you food, you have a private cabin and a hot tub,’ because they want the tax breaks.”
“You could have a 500-foot yacht, and if you have a scientist on board that published the paper, now, all of a sudden everything was a tax write-off,” he continued.
“So to some extent, Stockton was really just looking around and seeing what other people were doing and playing the game. But I mean, obviously, the way he said ‘mission specialists,’ you know, I don’t agree with the terminology, mission specialist. But by giving scientists dive time, this is something that’s being done across the industry now, which is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s not something that I do. I charge scientists. “
Karl Stanley begins testimony
Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Stockton Rush, has begun testifying to the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation.
Stanley went on an expedition in the Titan sub in 2019. He reportedly described concerns about the submersible to Rush afterward.
“I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse,” Stanley wrote. “The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not.”
Amber Bay gives emotional statement as first half of hearing adjourns
Amber Bay, OceanGate’s former director of administration, gave an emotional and tearful statement at the end of her testimony on Tuesday morning.
“I had the privilege of knowing the explorers whose lives were lost: Stockton, P.H., Shahzada, Suleman and Hamish,” Bay said through tears. “There’s not a day that passes that I don’t think of them, their families and their loss. It’s been a difficult year for them, for all of us.”
“I would also like to thank the board for the work they’ve done and continue to do,” she added.
The hearing has adjourned and will resume at 1 p.m. EDT with testimony from Stockton Rush’s close friend, Karl Stanley.
Director of administration says former contractor who raised safety concerns was let go because she was ‘erratic’
Amber Bay, former director of administration for OceanGate, said a former contractor who raised safety concerns was released from her contract because Stockton Rush said she acted erratically.
“I was asked by Stockton to release her from her contract, as she had acted erratically, unprofessionally, and had disturbed our crew during a challenging situation in the communications pit,” Bay testified on Tuesday morning.
She was referring to Antonella Wilby, who testified last week that she reported a customer’s safety concerns following a dive in 2022, PEOPLE reports.
“I felt the customer’s concerns were not taken particularly seriously at that meeting,” Wilby said. “So, following the debrief, I went to Amber Bay, the director of administration, to raise my concerns about what I had just heard. I told her, ‘I am really concerned about what this customer just said and that there was a bang as loud as an explosion.’ I asked, ‘What’s being done?’”
Wilby claimed Bay responded with: “Yes, many people are concerned about you. You don’t seem to have an explorer mindset.”
“I was kind of taken aback by that because she didn’t acknowledge what I had just said and what was going to be done,” Wilby added.
OceanGate struggling financially, director of administration says
Amber Bay, former OceanGate director of administration, said CEO Stockton Rush would sometimes increase his own investment to help the company when it was struggling.
“He increased his investment by making a deposit, and we were able to meet payroll,” she said.
At one point, employees were also asked to defer their paychecks while the company struggled to meet payroll.
“We could delay our paychecks and be paid a small amount of interest and recaptured it at a specific time,” she said.
ICYMI: Final messages revealed from the Titan sub before tragic implosion
“All good here.”
Those were some of the final words that the doomed Titan submersible crew communicated before the submersible imploded on its mission to the Titanic wreckage site in June 2023.
Read more on the chilling last messages from the Titan sub ahead of this afternoon’s testimony from Karl Stanley, a close friend of Stockton Rush:
Titan sub’s haunting final messages before tragic implosion revealed
The anticipated two-week-long hearings kicked off with testimony from a former OceanGate engineer, who said he was fired after warning about the ship’s carbon fiber hull years before its catastrophic voyage
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