Titan sub hearings live: Friend says OceanGate CEO was ‘scared’ over strange noises during 2019 dive

The Titan submersible hearing will begin again on Wednesday, September 25.

Wednesday’s hearing will feature testimony from Don Kramer, National Transportation Safety Board engineer; William Kohnen of Hydrospace Group Inc.; and chairman of the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee; and Bart Kemper, prinicpal engineer of Kemper Engineering.

This blog will resume on Wednesday morning.

A hearing into OceanGate’s Titan sub, which imploded during an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic last year, revealed that its navigation system allegedly relied on team members manually inputting the coordinate data into a spreadsheet in order to track the vessel.

The incident last July killed all five people on board, including OceanGate’s CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.

Karl Stanley, a long-time friend to former OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, described his fears and why he was interested in submersibles.

Stanley testified hearing cracking noises on the submersible when he was on board in 2019 and that he could pinpoint where they were coming from.

“It was unnerving and then when it kept happening,” Stanley testified, referring to the noises. “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 Rush was likely scared during that dive.

“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.

He also claimed Stockton kept diving because he wanted to go down in history.

“The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history,” Stanley testified.

“I think that’s why he kept diving, and he knew that eventually it was going to end like this and he wasn’t going to be held accountable, but he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives,” he continued.

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 Wednesday’s hearing:

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.

Today’s Titan submersible hearing has come to a close after testimony from Stockton Rush’s close friend, Karl Stanley, and OceanGate’s former director of administration Amber Bay.

Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Stockton Rush, said the tragic 2023 Titan sub implosion was expected.

“The definition of an accident is something that happened unexpectedly and by sheer chance,” Stanley testified. “There was nothing unexpected about this. This was expected by everybody that had access to a little bit of information.”

“And I think that if it wasn’t an accident, it then has to be some degree of crime,” he continued. “And if it’s a crime, I think to truly understand it, you need to understand the criminal’s motive. The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history. “

“I think that’s why he kept diving, and he knew that eventually it was going to end like this and he wasn’t going to be held accountable, but he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives.”

Karl Stanley said he was not aware that Stockton Rush had taken his sub more than 3,000 meters below the surface before their April 2019 dive.

Rush took Stanley and the others below 3,000 meters on their dive as well.

“Mr. Stanley, were you made aware that you were one of the first crew other than Mr. Rush to be in the submersible to a depth of over 3,000 meters?” a panelist asked.

“I’m actually surprised…to see all the dives before this,” Stanley responded. “He really wasn’t transparent kind of information.”