Director of the movie Titanic James Cameron said he had suspected the submersible imploded. Cameron made the statement on Friday after the US Coast Guard confirmed that the Titan submersible was destroyed in an implosion. The submarine, which went missing on an expedition to view the Titanic shipwreck on June 18, had five passengers onboard.
Cameron is part owner of Triton Submarines, which makes submersibles for research and tourism. The 68-year-old Cameron has made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage site himself over the years. He said he came to the conclusion based on information he received from his sources.
The director compared the tragedy to that of the fated 1912 luxury cruise liner itself. “Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” he said, the Guardian reported. “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 that it needed to be certified and so on. 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 added.
Crediting his sources, Cameron told Reuters, “We got a confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,"
The Canadian filmmaker also said he felt sceptical of the OceanGate submersible being built with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull. "I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I'd spoken up, he said.
Apart from OceanGate's founder and chief executive officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan, the others present in the submersible include British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times. The expedition, which has been operational since 2021, costs $250,000 per person.
