A submersible expert said he heard “cracking noises” while aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in 2019.
“He let me drive,” Stanley stated. “At one point I was able to drive the submarine toward deeper water by the sound of the cracking getting louder.”
“What we heard, in my opinion … sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email, obtained by CNN.
“From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never totally stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxing of stored energy, would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down/getting spongy,” Stanley stated.
Rush did not respond to Stanley’s emails, and the remaining dives that were scheduled for the year had been canceled. Stanley said Rush spent around one million dollars building a new fiber carbon [hull] for the submersible.
In 2018, OceanGate expeditions fired David Lochridge, the Titan project’s director of marine operations, after he called for more safety tests for the sub.
The ‘race against time’ rescue mission for the five passengers ended after the United States Coast Guard announced the vessel had suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” Breitbart reported.
A joint investigation by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) and United States Coast Guard is now underway to find out the reason for the ship’s implosion.
“In a Saturday press conference, Kathy Fox, Chair of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said, “Our mandate is finding out what happened, why, and what changes need to be made to prevent such incidents in the future.”
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