James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” claimed in an interview this week that he knew what happened to OceanGates’ Titan submersible on Monday and that he regrets not saying anything sooner.
Cameron, who is considered an expert at diving and submersibles after his 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage, said he realized what happened when he learned that the sub’s electronics, communication system, and tracking transponder had all failed simultaneously. Officials announced on Thursday that all five people on board the vessel died in the accident.
He said that he learned on Monday morning that the submersible had gone missing and that he “immediately got on the phone with some of my contacts in the deep submersible community.”
Cameron said that within an hour he had gathered numerous facts about the dive that the submersible called “Titan” was on when it lost contact with the surface.
“And the first thing that popped to mind was an implosion,” he said. “I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position, and that’s exactly where they found it. There was no search. When they finally got an ROV down there that could make the depth, they found it within hours. Probably within minutes.”
He slammed the media for sensationalizing the story for ratings and claimed that he “knew the truth on Monday morning.”
“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,” he added.
In interviews with ABC News and The New York Times, Cameron declared that he had “actually calculated that I spent more time on the [Titanic] than the captain did back in the day.”
“As a submersible designer myself, I designed and built a sub to go to the deepest place in the ocean – three times deeper than Titanic,” he said. “So, I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through.”
Cameron said that there have never been any fatalities in this type of underwater exploration in the past and that the Titan imploded because it was made out of carbon fiber, which is stronger and lighter than steel or aluminum but has “no strength in compression.”
Cameron said that the implosion, when an object collapses inward, would have been “an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”
