Movie director and submersible maker James Cameron said he wishes he had sounded the alarm earlier about the submersible Titan that imploded on an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, saying he had found the hull design risky.
All five people aboard the vessel were killed.
Avatar and Titanic film director James Cameron says he wishes he raised the alarm about the Titan.Credit: AP
Cameron became a deep-sea explorer in the 1990s while researching and making his Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic, and is part owner of Triton Submarines, which makes submersibles for research and tourism.
He is part of the small and close-knit submersible community, or Manned Underwater Vehicle (MUV) industry. When he heard, as many in the industry had shared, that OceanGate Inc was making a deep-sea submersible with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull, Cameron said he was sceptical.
“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron told Reuters in a Zoom interview.
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The cause of the Titan’s implosion has not been determined, but Cameron presumes the critics were correct in warning that a carbon fibre and titanium hull would enable delamination and microscopic water ingress, leading to progressive failure over time.
Other experts in the industry and a whistleblowing employee raised alarms in 2018, criticising OceanGate for opting against seeking certification and operating as an experimental vessel. OceanGate has not addressed queries about its decision to forgo certification from industry third parties such as the American Bureau of Shipping or the European company DNV.