James Cameron is expressing regret about not doing more to prevent the Titan submersible tragedy.
On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said a “catastrophic pressure implosion” likely killed all five people aboard the Titan — a Titanic shipwreck touring submersible that went missing Sunday.
The director of the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” — who is a longtime member of the diving and submersible community and has made 33 trips to the site of the 1912 shipwreck himself — told the BBC he believed the problem with the vessel was that OceanGate “cut corners” in the creation of its hull.
Because of faulty design, Cameron told ABC News on Thursday, he thinks that the hull couldn’t handle the pressure and that the pilot and passengers aboard the Titan likely knew they were doomed before the implosion occurred.
“This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of a hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack,” he told the BBC. “And I think if that’s your idea of safety, then you’re doing it wrong. They probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, starting to crack. ... [W]e understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.”
Cameron also told Reuters on Friday that he had long been skeptical about Titan’s hull, which was made of composite carbon fiber and titanium.
“I thought it was a horrible idea,” Cameron told the news agency. “I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face.”
Cameron told Reuters that the industry standard is to make pressure hulls out of contiguous materials such as steel, titanium, ceramic or acrylic.
“We celebrate innovation, right? But you shouldn’t be using an experimental vehicle for paying passengers that aren’t themselves deep ocean engineers,” the filmmaker said.
OceanGate had taken at least two dozen people down to see the Titanic and had completed over 50 test dives but had also reported canceled dives and scrubbed missions.
HuffPost previously reached out to OceanGate on Thursday for a response to Cameron’s remarks, but the company said it would not be commenting beyond a statement it had issued expressing its condolences for the lives lost.
It’s also understandable why Cameron feels remorse about not doing more to express his fears before the implosion occurred: One of his longtime friends died aboard the Titan.
“Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the legendary French pilot, is a friend of mine,” Cameron told ABC. “It’s a very small community; I’ve known him for 25 years. For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible to process.”