James Cameron says Titan sub disaster is reminiscent of Titanic tragedy

Hollywood’s most famous deep-sea explorer, James Cameron, has joined the chorus of people weighing in on the Titan submersible tragedy. The Titanic The director of ABC News, who also has visited the wreckage 33 times of this famous ship and directed and produced many deep sea documentaries spoke about the incident and his concerns, along with those of others from the community of undersea exploration, and some of the guidelines and rules that weren’t properly followed in the Titan vehicle.

Cameron’s most recent film was Avatar : The Way of WaterDuring his interview, expressed disappointment that passengers were on board the submersible. According to the director, the design of submarines is very safe due to strict standards and guidelines. This process is one that the famously meticulous director, who designed his sub to explore Mariana Trench a few years back, knows well.

Cameron did note, however, the Titan Sub is an exception for safety dives, because it wasn’t held to these guidelines and was therefore not deemed fit by the deep sea exploration community. Cameron also said that OceanGate (the company that built the sub) was contacted by members of the community to alert it to these deficiencies. (The New York Times also notes this in its reporting on OceanGate’s safety issues.)

“A number 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 it needed to be certified, and so on,” Cameron said.

Since Sunday, the Titan submersible had not been seen. After a multiday international search effort, debris from the vessel, including its tail cone, was found near the site of the Titanic’s wreckage on Thursday morning. The Titan likely experienced a “catastrophic implosion,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said Thursday, and it’s possible the implosion actually happened several days earlier. There were five people on board the Titan; no one is thought to have survived.

Cameron also said during his interview that the entire situation wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the tragic sinking of the original Titanic.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself,” Cameron said. “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. And with 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.”