Renowned Hollywood director and Titanic researcher James Cameron, has likened the catastrophic sinking of the submarine Titan to the identical overconfidence that may have contributed to the Titanic’s own fate.
Cameron, the renowned director of the Academy Award-winning epic “Titanic,” told ABC News on Thursday that he saw similarities between the sinking of the British passenger liner in 1912 and the failure of the submersible built especially to explore the sunken ship’s.
“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.”
Cameron, a submersible designer who has created machines that can descend to depths three times greater than those at which the Titanic is now submerged, criticised the Titan’s carbon fibre construction as being “fundamentally flawed.”
The CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, had previously defended the choice to build the Titan with the substance, stating that he thought a sub manufactured with carbon fibre would have a superior strength-to-buoyancy ratio than titanium. Rush was one of the five passengers killed aboard the submersible.
Given how much diving takes on throughout the world every day without incident, Cameron said he is particularly surprised by how the current tragedy played out.
Given that no one has ever died in a submersible before, the safety criterion for submersibles is considered to be the “gold standard,” according to Cameron. He continued that while there had been a few accidents in the 1960s, there had been no significant events afterwards, and standards had greatly improved.
PUNCH METRO reported that the submersible disappeared less than two hours after it submerged Sunday afternoon.
Along with Rush, who served as the vessel’s pilot, the missing include British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani tech and energy mogul Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman, and famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
