A friend of the late OceanGate founder, Stockton Rush, has testified the late co-founder knew that there was a great risk of implosion during a dive.
Karl Stanley, a friend of OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush, testified that Rush knew that the voyage to the ruins of the Titanic could end in failure. Appearing before the U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday, Stanley said that he and Rush had exchanged a series of emails about how the expedition might be fatal.
Stanley, who owns a diving expedition company in Honduras, revealed that he once accompanied Rush in 2019 on a test run on the doomed submersible and reportedly heard a large cracking sound while on the dive. The dive occurred in April and only three people were on the voyage: Rush, Stanley and a sonar technician, reports The Independent.
Karl Stanley testified on Tuesday that his late friend, Stockton Rush, knew that there was a great risk of implosion ( Image: CBS)
“He told us to be prepared for noises,” Stanely said. “He had recently done the solo dive on his own, and basically just said, ‘this is going to make noise’ and ‘brace yourselves.'”
Stanley said that during the 2019 voyage, there were “a lot of red flags.” According to the businessman, the fact that Rush didn’t launch the sub into deeper waters showed him that his friend did not have “a lot of faith” in the sub. Stanley also told the panel that Rush did not really drive during the test.
The U.S. Coast guard released a video showing the sub’s outer hull during the public hearings this past week ( Image: US Coast Guard / Pelagic Researc)
“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.”
During his testimony, Stanely told the inquiry panel that, given a chance to repeat the dive, he would not go. “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.
Stockton Rush reportedly did very little during a test dive in April 2019 ( Image: OceanGate Expeditions/AFP via Ge)
“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,” he added adding the noise that he heard on the voyage happened so often that he could “localize where it was coming from.”
“It was unnerving and then when it kept happening,” he told the panel. “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.”
Looking back, Stanely has said that he would not dive again and that there were many red flags ( Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Stanley, who claimed to have known Rush for at least a decade, said the man was constantly “playing the game” by allowing scientists onboard the 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,” he said.
“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,” Stanely added. “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.”
Stanely’s revelation comes as the newest bombshell in the public hearings ( Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The statements made by Stanely during his testimony echoed ones made by the businessman when he recounted his tale to 60 Minutes Australia last year. “He definitely knew it was going to end like this,” he told the broadcaster. “He literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you can go out with.”
Shortly after the expedition, the two friends exchanged a series of emails about the submersible. “I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse,” Stanley warned. “The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not.”
The incredible testimony comes after several people including the former OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein, who claimed that the Titan sub was made out of a cheaper material so the company could build a fleet of submersibles, said that Rush knew all about the dangers of sending people to the ocean floor.
