Acclaimed Hollywood director and Titanic researcher James Cameron has likened the tragic loss of the Titan submersible to the very thing that might have led to Titanic’s own sinking: hubris leading to disaster.
Cameron, director of the Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic, told ABC News on Thursday he saw parallels between the sinking of the British passenger liner in 1912 and the sinking of the submersible specially designed to tour the sunken ship’s remains .
“I’m struck by the resemblance to the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned of ice ahead of his ship and yet he crashed into an ice field at full speed on a moonless night,” said Cameron. “And a lot of people died as a result, and for us, a very similar tragedy happened, with the warnings being ignored, in the exact same place.”
Cameron, who is himself a submersible designer and has designed ships that can dive three times deeper than where Titanic rests, called Titanic’s carbon fiber construction “fundamentally flawed”.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was among the five passengers who died on the sub, had previously defended the decision to use the material to make the Titan, saying he believes a carbon-fiber submarine would have a better one Strength to buoyancy ratio than titanium.
The Titan submersible, used by OceanGate Expeditions to explore the wreckage of the sunken SS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, dives in an undated photo.Oceangate Expeditions via Portal
Cameron said he was particularly surprised at how modern-day tragedy unfolded, given how many dives around the world happen without incident.
The global safety standard for submersibles is the “gold standard,” especially given that no one has ever died on a submersible, Cameron said. While there were a few accidents in the 1960s, there have been no major incidents since and standards have improved drastically since then, he added.
The Russian submarines that Cameron used to tour Titanic were built to “very well understood design methods” and piloted by pilots with “impeccable operating records,” Cameron said, adding that he still had “great confidence” in those vessels the hostile environment of the Titanic.
Other deep-diving environments that may contain marine life and other organisms but are mostly open don’t pose the same hazards as the Titanic shipwreck site, which offers ample opportunity for a submersible to become entangled, Cameron said.
Cameron described an eight- to 10-story building with overhanging metal — essentially a “twisted mess.”
Part of Titanic’s bow seen in the Atlantic Ocean north of Newfoundland in 1996. Xavier Desmier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
However, because Cameron always dived with a two-submarine system, with another submarine submerged in parallel, he was certain that in the event of a stuck situation, there would be life support, communications, and power.
“We’ve always felt like we’re pretty safe,” he said.
Similarly, Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist at Oregon State University who has participated in at least two dozen deep-sea dives in the Pacific Ocean, compared Titanic’s sinking to Titan’s implosion, calling it “underprepared” to ABC News. Vehicle.”
The Titan, which is operated by OceanGate, a privately held company that provides manned diving equipment and expertise for commercial, research and military applications, had no other submersible in the area or the amount of backup systems that other vessels use, Goldfinger said .
Cameron said that members of the deep diving community have been ringing alarm bells about the safety measures taken for Titan for some time.
“It’s a mature art and a lot of people in the community were very concerned about this submarine,” he said. “And some of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified, and so forth.”
In 2018, a former OceanGate employee claimed in a counterclaim that he was fired for raising concerns about quality control and testing for potential defects on the experimental submersible. OceanGate initially sued the engineer and submarine pilot for breach of contract, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets – all allegations he denied.
In the complaint, OceanGate also claimed that the employee “was not an engineer and was not hired or asked to provide technical services on Titan,” according to The Associated Press.
The dispute was settled out of court. OceanGate has not issued any statements on Titan’s safety since the search for the missing submersible began on Sunday.
In a statement in 2021, OceanGate said, “Built and designed in consultation with experienced engineers and manufacturers, Titan includes multiple redundant security systems.”
Deep sea explorer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron sits in a scale model of the Deepsea Challenger’s pilot cabin in this May 28, 2018 archival photo at an exhibition in Sydney celebrating his historic deep-sea expeditions.Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Most submersibles have “multiple self-rescue capabilities,” such as the ability to detach the ball holding the passengers from the rest of the vessel, which then allows the vessel to float to the surface. “Titan didn’t have nearly as much redundancy and self-rescue capability,” he said.
“The same classic thing that got Titanic into trouble in the first place was overconfidence and overconfidence in an underprepared craft,” Goldfinger said.
Five people were aboard Titan when she made her final dive: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and celebrated Titanic explorer and former commander of the French Navy. Paul Henri Nargeolet.
Through their shared passion, Cameron was friends with Nargeolet for 25 years and nicknamed him “PH” when referring to the five victims who lost their lives on the submersible.
Nargeolet was a “legendary French dive pilot,” Cameron said, describing the diving community as “small.”
James Cameron speaks to ABC News on June 22, 2023 about the submersible lost during a tour of the Titanic wreck.ABC News
On Thursday, OceanGate issued a statement that all five passengers had died.
“We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet are sadly lost,” OceanGate said in a statement.
“These men were true explorers who shared a strong spirit of adventure and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the statement said. “Our hearts go out to these five souls and each of their family members at this tragic time. We mourn the loss of life and the joy they brought to all who knew them.”