, the director of the 1997 movie about the tragedy of 1912, has shared his views on the .
The film director said that he was ‘struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself’, when the captain of the ship ‘was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship’, but still ‘steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night’, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
‘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. It’s really quite surreal,’ he told ABC News.
On Thursday June 22, a Coast Guard spokesperson said that for the missing submersible Titan, which went missing after a dive to the wreckage of Titanic, was ‘consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber’.
It was announced that on the submersible were believed to have died.
OceanGate said in a statement: ‘Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.’
Cameron explained that he knew the wreck site of the Titanic ‘very well’, having made 33 dives down to its depths, and calculated that he spent more time on the ship than the captain himself.
‘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. So I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through,’ he stated.
‘It’s absolutely critical for people to to really get the take-home message from this, from our effort here, is deep submergence diving is a mature art.
‘From the early 60s where there were a few accidents, nobody was Ki**ed in the deep submerges until now, is more time than between Kitty Hawk and the flight of the first 747.
‘So if we haven’t improved over that period of time, and we have improved drastically over that period of time, and the certification protocols that all other deep submergence vehicles, except this one, that carry passengers, especially paying passengers, all over the world and tropical waters, deep coral reefs other wreck sites and so on…
‘The safety record is the gold standard. Absolutely. Not only no fatalities but no major incidents requiring all of these assets to converge to a site. Of course, that’s the nightmare that we’ve all lived with, since all of us entered this field of deep exploration we live with it in the back of our minds.’
Cameron went into further detail on the way in which the members of the deep submergence diving community initially reacted to this particular submersible.
‘This is a mature art and many people in the community were very concerned about this sub 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,’ he stated.
So, 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 and many people died as a result. 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. It’s really quite surreal.’
