Titan submersible mastermind Stockton Rush knew his risky venture would end in disaster — but carried on anyway because that meant he’d never have to face accountability, according to one of his closest friends.
“He knew that eventually it was going to end like this and he wasn’t going to be held accountable,” Rush’s longtime friend Karl Stanley testified Tuesday during the US Coast Guard’s inquiry into the catastrophe.
“But he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives,” Stanley said, offering a morbid and twisted take on the mindset of Rush, who was a descendent of a pair of Declaration of Independence signers.
Stanley, himself an expert in the commercial submersible field, was friends with Rush for more than 10 years and eventually joined him on one of the Titan’s test dives in 2019 — during which he recalled hearing loud cracking noises, but had his concerns brushed off by Rush.
“The definition of an accident is something that happened unexpectedly and by sheer chance,” he said. “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. 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,” Stanley said.
Four years after that dive, Rush and four passengers were killed while diving to the wreck of the Titanic when his submersible’s carbon fiber hull imploded.
Newly released photos from the Coast Guard’s hearing into the disaster showed the mangled pieces of the Titan’s hull discovered about 1,500 feet from the Titanic’s wreck where it lies about 12,500 feet underwater in the Atlantic Ocean.
Earlier testimony from the hearings presented a chaotic picture of Rush’s company OceanGate, which was constantly strapped for cash and routinely ignored glaring problems with the submersible in the name of paying the bills.
“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” OceanGate’s former operations director, David Lochridge, testified Monday. “There was very little in the way of science.”
Lochridge testified that he tried to point out “appalling” faults with the submersible’s design — and was later fired for doing so.
He and others have testified how the Titan was constantly facing technical problems, and even experienced a dangerous ballast malfunction that tossed passengers about its cabin during a dive just days before the disaster.
Despite such problems, Rush insisted on going ahead with dives to accommodate his paying customers.
The Coast Guard’s hearing continues through Friday.
