James Cameron weighs in on Titan submersible tragedy: "I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself"
James Cameron has weighed in on the tragic Titan submersible voyage.
Speaking on ABC News on Thursday (June 22) the Oscar-winning filmmaker and avid underwater explorer said, “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, 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.”
Cameron added, “It’s really quite surreal, and of course, PH [Paul-Henry Nargeolet], the French legendary submersible dive pilot, is a friend of mine. It’s a very small community. I’ve known PH for 25 years for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”
The Titan submersible, operated by the US-based company OceanGate Expeditions, went missing on Sunday morning in the Atlantic Ocean near the site of the Titanic shipwreck.
It lost contact with its surface support ship about an hour and 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the site.
It was carrying five people — OceanGate CEO Stockon Rush, 61; British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born British businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman; and French oceanographer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77. Rush was also the vessel’s pilot.
The Titan was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion”— caused by the ocean’s pressure — that killed everyone aboard, the US Coast Guard said in a press conference on Thursday afternoon.
Debris of the Titan was discovered on the seabed some 488m from the bow of the Titanic, 4km beneath the surface, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic.
Cameron is no stranger to the Titanic wreck site, having made 33 trips himself. In 2012, the Titanic expert, who is also National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence, piloted a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger to the ocean’s deepest point — about 10.9km— in the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep.
Watch Cameron’s full ABC News interview below:
