A number of leading experts in the deep-submergence engineering community wrote letters to the company, saying that the submersible “was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified
Admin I Friday, June 23, 2023
NEW YORK – James Cameron, who directed the 1997 blockbuster ‘Titanic,’ said he was amazed at similarities between the 1912 tragedy and the recent accident involving the Titan submersible en route the wreckage of the legendary ship.
According to Cameron, a number of leading experts in the deep-submergence engineering community wrote letters to the company, saying that the submersible “was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified.”
“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 steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result,” Cameron told ABC News.
“And with 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,” said the director, who made a dozen of dives aboard Russian Mir-1 and Mir-2 submersibles to the wreckage of the Titanic, lying on Atlantic seabed some 640km southeast of the Newfoundland coast, at the depth of 3,800 meters.
On June 19, the OceanGate Expeditions company announced that it had lost communication with the Titan sub, which was taking tourists to the site of the Titanic wreckage. According to the US Coast Guard, there were five people inside the vessel; communication was lost about 1 hour 45 minutes after diving on June 18.
The submersible’s passengers were OceanGate Expeditions President and Founder Stockton Rush, French aquanaut Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, owner of Action Aviation, Pakistani-born British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.
Late on Thursday the US Coast Guard confirmed that the wreckage, previously discovered during a search operation, was from the Titan. An examination revealed that fragments of the submersible had signs “consistent with a catastrophic implosion,” and all its passengers were declared dead./TASS
