“ “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.” ”
That was James Cameron, the director of the Oscar-winning film, “Titanic,” speaking to ABC News late Thursday about a suspected an implosion of the tourist submersible Titan that likely killed all five men on board, after debris was found on the ocean floor.
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“And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing, It’s really quite surreal,” said Cameron, who added that he was finding it “impossible to process” one of those five dead — longtime friend, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French deep sea explorer and Titanic expert.
Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the shipwreck himself, gave interviews to several media outlets, in which he spoke of concerns over Titan, operated by Oceangate Expeditions. Recently uncovered allegations suggested there had been significant warnings made about the vessel’s safety prior to its disappearance.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and it needed to be certified,” Cameron told ABC.
The Hollywood director explained that certification protocols are adhered to by all other such vehicles that carry passengers into tropical waters.
“The safety record is the gold standard, not only no major fatalities but no major incidents, because implosion is first and foremost in our minds. The pressure boundary the hull of the sub that the people go inside is obviously first and foremost in our minds as engineers,” said Cameron.
“We worked on our sphere for our deep deep vehicle that went to the Challenger Deep [the deepest known point of the Earth’s seabed] for over three years, just in the computer before we even made the thing. and then of course we pressure tested it over and over and over and so on,” he said.
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Cameron said his Titanic dives were made with Russian submersibles that have “a flawless operating record,” and used a two-sub system which mean there was always backup in case something went wrong.
“The Titanic wreck site is a very hostile place. It’s a dangerous site to dive…you’ve got this 8 story, 10-story high structure with overhanging metal structures. It’s a twisted mess, and you can get entangled, and entanglement was always a concern of ours,” he said.
“This sub had no backup, didn’t have a lot of backup systems from what I understand and it was predicated on what I think was a fundamentally flawed design principle — a carbon fiber hull,” said Cameron.