Hollywood director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron on Thursday pointed out the similarity he sees between the tragic loss of the OceanGate vessel and the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.
In an interview with ABC News, Cameron argued both the Titan and the British passenger liner had people at the helm who were overconfident.
"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 up full speed into an ice field on a moonless night," Cameron said. "And many people died as a result and for us very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site...it's astonishing."
Chris Goldfinger, a deep-sea explorer and marine geologist at Oregon State University, made a similar argument.
"The same sort of classic thing that got the Titanic into trouble in the first place was overconfidence in yourself and overconfidence in an underprepared vehicle," Goldfinger said, according to ABC.
Cameron, who’s been to the Titanic wreckage 33 times, and even designed and piloted his own vessel to descend into the deepest part of the ocean, said the Titan’s carbon fiber construction was “fundamentally flawed.”
“I understand the engineering problems associated with this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols you have to go through,” he said. “The take-home message from this is…deep submergence diving is a mature art.”
Cameron pointed out that the safety record of such vessels is “the gold standard.” While there were some accidents in the ‘60s, there’s been no major incidents since then—certainly no fatalities, and the safety record has improved drastically.
“[M]any people in the community were very concerned about this sub," he said of the Titan. "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 that needed to be certified, and so on."
‘Titanic’ director James Cameron on the ‘catastrophic implosion’ of Titan submersible: “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." pic.twitter.com/vO8JkCXS5f
— ABC News (@ABC) June 22, 2023
Five people are dead after the Titan's implosion, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.