'Titanic' director James Cameron reacts to the ill-fated submersible voyage: 'I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself'
James Cameron, the director of the 1997 film Titanic, has commented on the deaths of the five people who were onboard the tourist submersible Titan.
After reports of debris being found, Cameron said that there were concerns about the Titan, especially since it hasn't been certified yet.
"Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub," he said during an interview with ABC News, "and 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, who is also an experienced diver and has completed 33 trips to the RMS Titanic wreckage site, also said that he was reminded of the Titanic disaster.
“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,” he expressed.
"And for 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," added the Canadian director.
The famed director noted that the wreckage site of the Titanic is a vicious and challenging environment—"a dangerous site to die." Cameron, a submersible designer himself, also noted that every time he'd go down to the site, they would "dive in a two-sub system."
"You'd have another sub there that could help you manage the problem. We always felt that we were pretty safe ground. This sub (Titan) had no backup. It didn't have a lot of backup systems from what I understand. And it was predicated on what I think of as a fundamentally flawed design principle which is carbon fiber hull," he said, adding that the sub should be made of a "contiguous material like steel or titanium."
He hopes that this would be a lesson and would be reminded of the significance of conducting thorough testing and implementing safety measures.
"It is absolutely critical for people to really get the take-home message from this, from our effort here, is [that] deep-submersible diving is a mature art," he said. "The safety record is the gold standard, absolutely — not only no fatalities, but no major incidents."
The Avatar director also added, "Of course [what happened with the Titan is] the nightmare that we've all lived with. Since all of us entered this field of deep exploration, we live with it in the back of our minds."
The U.S. Coast Guard announced earlier Friday that it had found a debris field near the Titanic wreck site. It later determined that the debris field was from OceanGate Expeditions' Titan submersible, which had been missing since Sunday.
The five people onboard were British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani investor Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.