The submersible expert who once warned OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush against taking passengers on the Titan submersible told Business Insider that viewers of two upcoming documentaries on the 2023 fatal Titan implosion will see how Rush was a man “hell bent on glory.”
Karl Stanley, who rode inside the Titan in 2019, told BI in a recent email that he is a “major participant” in the upcoming BBC documentary “Implosion.” The documentary will give an in-depth look at the events leading up to the submersible’s catastrophic implosion.
The BBC documentary is set to premiere on May 27. Netflix will also premiere its own documentary on the Titan on June 11. Stanley said he consulted with the Netflix team and sold images for the documentary.
Stanley, who operates a submersible company in Honduras, said he anticipates both documentaries will examine Rush’s possible motivations and explain why the OceanGate CEO was determined to proceed with the Titan expeditions despite warnings from some colleagues and industry experts, including those from Stanley.
On June 18, 2023, five passengers including Rush dove somewhere in the North Atlantic to visit the site of the Titanic wreckage. The crew was crammed inside a 22-feet long, carbon fiber vessel that many deep-diving experts argued was an unconventional materal that led to the implosion. All five passengers were instantly killed, including the OceanGate CEO.
“I think initially people were very focused on how this happened, what part failed, is it even possible for carbon fiber to make a hull,” Stanley wrote to BI.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Kate Kilroy/U.S. Coast Guard
With the documentaries, Stanley wrote that he hopes the public perception will be less that submersibles are “unsafe/scary” but rather Rush was a man “hell bent on glory that should have been stopped, not by laws, but by the people around him, and surely not funded to the tune of 10’s of millions.”
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Stanley was one of the early passengers of OceanGate’s Titan submersible.
In April 2019, four years before the implosion, Stanley, Rush, and two other passengers took a 12,000-feet plunge in the Titan. The crew made it back safely, but Stanley left with several concerns about the ship.
Stanley previously shared with BI his email correspondence with Rush, dated around a month after the 2019 expedition. The emails showed Stanley trying to dissuade Rush from taking on more passengers for the Titan before running more tests and identifying possible hull defects on the ship.
Stanley told BI in a 2024 interview that, although he was already skeptical of the hull’s integrity, he didn’t realize the full extent of the vessel’s issues until he read about them in a Wired piece published one year after the fatal dive. The report said a crack was discovered on the Titan’s hull during an inspection conducted around June 2019, which forced Rush to build another version of the submersible and delay the Titanic expedition.
“The doomsday clock got a little bit closer to midnight,” Stanley told BI at the time.
A trailer for the coming Netflix documentary showed how former staffers similarly believed that Rush sought fame in his pursuit of the Titan expeditions.
The trailer shows a former OceanGate advisor, Rob McCallum, saying Titan’s failure was a “mathematical certainty.”
Stanley told BI that he believes the Titan implosion “was not an accident.” He wrote that “the biggest hanging question is who else should be held responsible and to what extent.”
“People that stood by and did nothing/kept giving him funding should be held accountable,” Stanley said.
In August 2024, the family of French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, one of the passengers who died inside the Titan, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against OceanGate and Rush’s estate. The lawsuit alleged the incident was the result of “carelessness, recklessness, and negligence” of OceanGate, Rush, and others.
“We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragedy.” OceanGate said in a statement to BI. “After the tragedy occurred, OceanGate permanently wound down its operations and focused its resources on fully cooperating with the investigations being conducted by the United States Coast Guard and the NTSB.”
Attorneys for the Rush estate did not respond to a request for comment.
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