“Titanic” director and submersible pioneer James Cameron has ripped the makers of the doomed Titan sub for not getting it certified — fearing the death of its CEO and four tourists could now halt further deep-sea exploration.
Cameron — who has made 33 trips of his own to the Titanic wreckage — accused OceanGate of destroying 63 years of similar pioneering by eschewing obvious safety protocols and warnings from experts.
“One of the saddest aspects of this is how preventable it really was,” Cameron, 68, told the BBC, saying he was “struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself.”
“And that to me was the greatest heartbreak of the whole thing,” said the director, who was friends for 25 years with one of those who died, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
He called submersible travel a “mature art” where there have been no serious incidents since 1960, making it the safety “gold standard.”
“Not only no fatalities but no major incidents,” he told ABC, saying that every single passenger-carrying submersible follows certification protocols — “except this one.”
“I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified,” he further told The New York Times.
“I’m worried that we’ll be tarred with the same brush” and forced under even more strict regulation that could halt further missions, he warned in his BBC chat.
He noted a letter sent by “the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community” that warned OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — the Titan pilot among the five who died — that his sub “was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified.”
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron told ABC.
“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.
“And for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site … I think is just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal,” he said.
OceanGate’s co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein, addressed the director’s criticism early Friday — defending the “very robust” testing by the company he was CEO of until 10 years ago.
“I think everyone keeps equating certification with safety, and is ignoring the 14 years of development of the Titan sub,” he told the BBC.
“Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr. Cameron, will also admit that they were not there for the design of the sub, for the engineering of the sub, for the building of the sub — and certainly not for the rigorous test program that he sub went through.
“This was a 14-year technology development program and it was very robust,” said Söhnlein, who remains a minority equity owner OceanGate after handing over control to Rush, 61.
“Anyone who operates in that depth of the ocean … knows the risk of operating under such pressure,” he said, noting how it was equivalent to the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
“And that at any given moment on any mission on any vessel you run the risk of this kind of implosion.”
Cameron, meanwhile, said that it was almost immediately obvious that the Titan had imploded, despite the headline-grabbing multi-million-dollar rescue operation.
He said this week “felt like a prolonged, nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff.
“I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. And that’s exactly where they found it,” he continued.
He hailed Nargeolet as a “legendary submersible dive pilot” who has been “a friend of mine” for 25 years.
“For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process,” he said of the expert who died alongside Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, and businessman Shanzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman Dawood.