James Cameron, director of the blockbuster Titanic and a deep-sea submersible designer himself, likened the Titan tragedy in which five people died this week to the sinking of the ill-fated ocean liner because of the safety warnings both received prior to their disasters.
He told ABC News that the wider submersible engineering community had been specifically concerned about the OceanGate Expeditions vehicle, the Titan before it went missing on Sunday.
Follow the latest updates on the missing Titanic submarine here.
Confirmation of the deaths of those on board came on Thursday after debris from the Titan was found near the wreck of the ship they had gone to see in the depths of the North Atlantic.
It is believed that the Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion after beginning its dive on Sunday, killing OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Saying that deep submergence diving is a mature art that began in the 1960s and in which there have been few accidents with nobody killed until now, Cameron noted that there are strict certification protocols for all other deep submergence vehicles that carry passengers except this one.
“The safety record is the gold standard,” the director said.
Regarding OceanGate, he continued: “Many people in the community were very concerned about this up 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 it needed to be certified and so on.”
Cameron then compared the tragedy to the events of April 1912 when the Titanic sank with the loss of approximately 1,500 people after hitting an iceberg.
“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 on a moonless night,” said Cameron.
“And many people died as a result and for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world. I think it’s just astonishing.”
In addition to his work on Titanic and many other blockbuster movies, Cameron has filmed a number of documentaries about the ocean, helping pioneer underwater filming and remote vehicle technologies.
In 2012, he became the first person to do a solo descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — the deepest part of the world’s oceans.
