“Titanic” director James Cameron has slammed the days-long search operation for the doomed Titan sub as a “nightmarish charade” — insisting he knew that the vessel had imploded just hours after it lost contact with the surface.
Cameron, a submersible pioneer who has made 33 trips of his own to the Titanic wreckage, told the BBC on Friday that he “felt in my bones” the Titan submersible had been lost soon after the news broke that the five people on board were missing.
The 68-year-old director said the subsequent hunt for the submersible — including the countdown of how much oxygen supply was left and that banging noises had been heard — “felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade.”
“That was just a cruel, slow turn of the screw for four days as far as I’m concerned,” Cameron said. “Because I knew the truth on Monday morning.”
“For me, there was no doubt. I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That’s exactly where they found it,” he added.
Following a multi-day search, the US Coast Guard revealed Thursday that an implosion had killed all five passengers instantly on their descent to explore the 111-year-old remains of the Titanic.
Search teams made the determination after debris from the sub was located on the ocean flood near the wreckage of the ocean liner.
But Cameron said he knew instantly that an “extreme catastrophic event” had happened when he heard the submersible had lost navigation and communications less than two hours after setting off on Sunday at 6a.m.
“I felt in my bones what had happened. For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – sub’s gone,” he said.
The famed director said he quickly reached out to his submersible contacts and was informed with an hour that the vessel was close to the bottom of the ocean floor when it lost contact.
“Their comms were lost and navigation was lost. I said instantly, you can’t lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event or high, highly energetic catastrophic event,” he said.
“The first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.”
Cameron said the one of the saddest aspects of the deadly ordeal was how “preventable it really was.”
“We now have another wreck that is based on, unfortunately, the same principles of not heeding warnings,” he said.
The passengers lost on the vessel were British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman.