Karl Stanley, a friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, isn’t surprised the Titan submersible fatally imploded last month. A prior passenger on the doomed vessel, Stanley told “60 Minutes Australia” that 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,” Stanley told the outlet in an interview published Sunday. “And who was the last person to murder two billionaires, at once, and have them pay for the privilege?”
“I think Stockton was designing a mousetrap for billionaires,” Stanley added.
Rush brought four customers with him on the fatal 2.5-mile dive to visit the RMS Titanic wreckage, only to lose communication within hours of descending. Debris from the imploded sub was recovered days later.
Stanley was one of several people who warned Rush about the dangers of his shoddy construction. Titan was the only deep-sea sub with a hull made of carbon fiber, which — while light — is incapable of reliably withstanding atmospheric pressures of the deep sea.
Stanley, a submersibles expert and deep sea explorer himself, experienced this firsthand during a Titan test dive in the Bahamas in 2019. He said Sunday there were “loud, gunshot-like noises” every three to four minutes that he said were coming from the carbon fiber tube breaking apart.
“That’s a heck of a sound to hear when you’re that far under the ocean in a craft that has only been down that deep once before,” Stanley told the program.
Perhaps most troubling was a series of messages he sent Rush and shared with “60 Minutes,” which showed Stanley warned him in April 2019 about “an area of the hull that is breaking down” and later ominously added, “it will only get worse.”
“I literally painted a picture of his wrecked sub at the bottom and even that wasn’t enough,” Stanley told the news program.
While the implosion is still being investigated by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Transportation and Safety Board of Canada and the U.K.’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch, Stanley suggested it was inevitable.
“The only question in my mind — the only question is — ‘when?’” Stanley told “60 Minutes.” “He was risking his life, and his customers’ lives, to go down in history. He’s more famous now than anything else he ever would’ve done.”