‘Titanic’ director James Cameron reacts to ‘catastrophic implosion’ of Titan submersible

‘Titanic’ director James Cameron has weighed in on the ‘catastrophic implosion’ of Titan submersible which killed five people and drew parallels to the 1912 ocean liner sinking in which around 1,500 people died.

The filmmaker, who is also a renowned deep-sea explorer, said many warnings were ignored about the safety of the tourist submersible that imploded.

‘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,’ Cameron told ABC News.

‘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. It's really quite surreal,’ he said.

In an interview with BBC, Cameron said when he learned that the sub had lost both its navigation and communication at the same time, he said he immediately suspected a disaster.

‘I felt in my bones what had happened. For the sub's electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously - sub's gone,’ he said.

‘I immediately got on the phone to some of my contacts in the deep submersible community. Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on descent. They were at 3500 metres, heading for the bottom at 3800 metres,’ he continued.

Cameron told BBC, ‘Their comms were lost, and navigation was lost - and I said instantly, you can't lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event or high, highly energetic catastrophic event. And the first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.’

James Cameron said ‘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.’

The Hollywood director said that he had personally known one of the lost submersible passengers, French ocean explorer Paul-Henri ‘PH’ Nargeolet.

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