- By Rebecca Morelle
- Science Editor, BBC News
Hollywood film director James Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic, told the BBC that the team that built the submersible that exploded with the loss of five lives had “cut corners”.
OceanGate, the parent company of the Titan sub, “didn’t get certification because they knew they couldn’t pass”.
“I was very suspicious of the technology they were using. I wouldn’t have been able to get into that sub,” he said.
Cameron completed 33 submersible dives on the Titanic wreck.
The Titan is built from carbon fiber and titanium.
In 2012 Cameron used a different technology for the Deepsea Challenger submersible expedition in the Pacific, which took him to 10,912m (35,800ft), the deepest known oceanic trench.
The Titanic wreck is 3,810m (12,500ft) down.
Cameron said that when he realized that the sub’s navigation and communications were lost at the same time he suspected a disaster.
“I felt in my bones what was happening. For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communications system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – the sub was lost.”
He said that on Monday, when he heard that the sub was missing, “I immediately called some of my contacts in the deep submersible community.
“Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on the way down. They were at 3,500 meters (11,483ft), heading down to 3,800 meters.
“They lost comms, and they lost navigation – and I said right away, you don’t lose communications and navigation together unless there’s a very catastrophic event or a long, very powerful catastrophic event.”
On Thursday, an official from the US Navy told BBC affiliate CBS News that the navy detected “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface.
The official said the information was sent to the US Coast Guard team, which used it to find the radius of the search area.
Cameron suggested there was a “terrible irony” in the loss of the Titan and its crew, likening it to the loss of the Titanic itself in 1912.
“We now have another destruction based unfortunately on the same principles of not following warnings,” he said. “OceanGate has been warned.”
Cameron said some within the deep submergence community, not including himself directly, wrote a letter to OceanGate saying they believed, in his words, “you’re going down a path of disaster”.
A letter sent by OceanGate to the Marine Technology Society (MTS) in March 2018 and obtained by the New York Times stated that “the current ‘experimental’ approach adopted by OceanGate … may result in negative consequences (from minor to catastrophic)”.
Separately, US court documents show a former OceanGate employee was warned of potential safety problems on the ship as far back as 2018.
The documents show that David Lochridge, the company’s director of marine operations, raised concerns in an inspection report.
But OceanGate’s co-founder insists though that the Titan has passed rigorous testing.
Guillermo Sohnlein, who left the company 10 years ago, told the BBC that the 14-year development program was “very good”.
“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, the construction of the sub and certainly not for the rigorous testing program that the sub went through. sub.”
The Titan sub is not certified, but it is not mandatory.
In a blog post about it in 2019, the company said that the way Titan was designed fell outside the accepted system – but “this does not mean that OceanGate does not meet the standards to which they apply”.
It added that classification agencies “slow down innovation… rushing an entity out of every innovation before putting it to the test in the real world is the bane of rapid change”.
Cameron told BBC News last week that it “felt like a long and terrible charade where people were running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and other things”.
“I knew that the sub that was sitting on the bottom was the last known depth and position of it. That’s exactly what they found,” he continued.
He said that anyone going to the Titanic wreck should be fully aware of the risks, because “it is a very dangerous place”.
“Accept the risks, but don’t go into a situation where you’re not told about the risks of the actual platform you’re on.
“In the 21st Century, there aren’t any risks. We’ve done it for 60 years, from 1960 to now, 63 years without a death… So, you know, one of the saddest aspect of it. how preventable it is.”