In April 2019, while aboard the Titan off the Bahamas, submarine expert Carl Stanley quickly realized something was wrong. He heard a crackling sound that only grew louder over his two hours as the submarine sailed. Plunge to over 12,000 feet.
The next day, Mr. Stanley wrote an email detailing his concerns to Stockton Rush, chief executive of Oceangate Expeditions, who was also on board the Titan for diving, and sent Mr. Rush an email. He urged us to call off the expedition to the wreck. The Titanic was planned for that summer.
According to one copy, Stanley said, “A helpful thought exercise here is imagine weeding out variables such as investors, mission-hungry scientists, teams thirsty for success, and this summer’s dive schedule already announced. will do,” he wrote. Part of an email reviewed by The New York Times. “Imagine this project was self-financed and done on your own schedule. do you want??”
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that a remote-controlled vehicle had found fragments of the Titanic near the wreckage of the Titanic, ending a four-day multinational search for the 22-foot-long vessel that fascinated people around the world. . Rush was piloting the Titan and was one of the five crew members who died. The Titan’s final voyage was to be her 14th expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic.
Stanley has operated tourist submersibles in Honduras for 25 years, but his ships only descend to about 2,000 feet, far below the 13,000-plus feet Titan was designed to reach. Oceangate program manager Joel Perry, who accompanied Stanley when he dived Titan with Rush in 2019, said Stanley shared his concerns about Titan in an email to Rush. Perry left Oceangate in 2019, months after diving, but did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rush had touted Titan’s plans ahead of its first deep-sea dive in 2019. The year before, at a conference of experts on manned underwater vehicles in New Orleans, several experts confronted Rush directly about their concerns about Titan. In a tense exchange, Mr. Stanley said. Shortly after the meeting, more than 30 industry experts sent letters to Rush urging him to go through the Titan certification process.
“In that room, people were basically huddling against him,” Stanley said.
Stanley recalls conversations he had with Rush in person or over the phone, noting that Rush had a larger capacity than other similar submersibles (which are metal spheres and can hold up to three people). He said he was determined to build a submarine.
In an email to Rush in April 2019, Stanley said the loud cracking noise he heard during the dive was “a defect/defect in some area being crushed/damaged under tremendous pressure. It sounded like there was,” he said. He wrote that a loud cracking sound indicated that “part of the hull was broken.”
Stanley said Rush never responded to the email directly. However, he made some changes to the Titan, including building a new hull, and canceled the diving activities scheduled for that year.
Experts said one of the possible causes of Titan’s explosion was the ingress of water into the piece of titanium. It was glued to the end of the cylinder of the container. “It could have been anywhere you sealed the carbon fiber to the titanium, or it could have been around the porthole,” the captain said. Alfred McLaren is a retired Navy Captain and friend of Paul-Henri Narjolet, one of the people on board the Titan when it blew up this week.
“At that depth, a leak not much larger than the diameter of a hair could occur, and you would be dead within a matter of seconds,” said Captain McLaren, commander of the attack submarine. “They didn’t actually think they were going to die. They would have died before they knew.”
It may have something to do with the ship blowing up on the first dive of the season. Experts say that during the 2021 and 2022 dives, seawater trapped between various materials inside the ship softened through the fabric, making it more prone to leakage.
