James Cameron says the passengers of the submerging Titan were likely warned before the implosion

James Cameron, director of the movie “Titanic,” said during the ceremony hv news In an interview with one of his old friends he was among the passengers of the tourist submarine Titan and that the sensors likely warned of the disaster just before it happened. All five on board were killed in the “Catastrophic implosionofficials said.

After Oceangate cruises A statement was issued Cameron said Thursday that all five passengers were “unfortunately missing” and the company confirmed that the wreckage found was indeed from the missing submarine, taking its weight in the tragedy.

“This OceanGate submarine has sensors inside the hull to warn them when it starts to crack,” he told ABC News. “And I think if that’s your idea of ​​safety, you’re doing it wrong. They probably had a warning that their hull was starting to crack, it was starting to crack. … [W]Understanding from within the community that they had dropped their weights and were coming in, trying to manage the emergency.”

boss The movie “Titanic” in 1997 A longtime member of the diving community, he has experience designing submarines capable of withstanding depths that Titan could not venture to and has even ventured to the wreck of the Titanic 33 times.

Describing implosion as a “violent event,” Cameron said that engineers usually focus first and foremost on a submersible design that maintains structural integrity against pressure that increases with depth.

Read more: 5 people died on board the Titanic tourist submarine after a catastrophic internal explosion

“People in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron told the network. “A number of senior players in the deep submersible 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 get certified. I was struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was warned over and over again of the ice in front of his ship and yet it vaporized at full speed in an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.

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“For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where the warnings weren’t heeded. For events in the exact same location with all the diving happening around the world, I think it’s amazing. It’s really surreal.”

The Times obtained the 2018 letter I wrote privately to Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, who was among those who died in the implosion. The Marine Technology Association’s Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee has written to Rush, emphasizing the need for a third-party safety review of OceanGate subs.

“Our concerns are that OceanGate’s current experimental approach could lead to negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have devastating consequences for everyone in the industry,” the letter read.

William Conin, the committee’s chair, told The Times that OceanGate “raised a number of eyebrows.”

Also in 2018, David Loughridge, a former OceanGate employee, He sued the company to terminate it Having raised safety red flags, “particularly OceanGate’s refusal to perform critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental hull design.” Lockridge specified that the ship’s hull monitoring system would detect failure “very often.” [only] milliseconds before the implosion. “

He said he did not agree with Rush’s decision to “expose passengers to potentially severe danger on an experimental submarine”.

Read more: ‘Catastrophic’ safety concerns were raised about the submarine long before Titanic’s ill-fated voyage

Cameron also told ABC News that he was mourning the death of French Titanic explorer Paul Henri “PH” Nargeolet, an old friend who was aboard the submarine Titan.

“It’s really surreal, it’s amazing,” he said. “PH, the legendary French dive pilot, was a friend of mine. It’s a very young community, I’ve known PH for 25 years.

“For me to die so tragically that way is almost impossible for me.”

This story originally appeared Los Angeles Times.