23 June 2023

James Cameron feels “struck by the similarity” of the Titan submarine catastrophe and the Titanic disaster.

James Cameron has voiced his concern about the safety of the Titan

The 68-year-old filmmaker helmed the 1997 disaster movie ‘Titanic’ – which centred on the real-life sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912 – and Cameron believes there are strong similarities between that story and the Titan sub catastrophe, which claimed the lives of five men aged between 19 and 77.

He told ABC News: “Many people in the [deep-submergence engineering] community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of you know of the top players in the community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and needed to be certified and so on.

“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.

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“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.”

The victims of the Titan submarine catastrophe were all hoping to see the wreckage of the Titanic, which sunk after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from England to the US.

But Cameron always had concerns about the safety of the 21-foot Titan.

He explained: “As a submersible designer myself, I designed and built us up 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. And I think [it] is absolutely critical to really get the take-home message from our effort … [that] deep submergence diving is a mature art.

“From the early ’60s, where there were a few accidents, nobody was killed in the deep submergence until now. [That’s] more time than between Kitty Hawk and the flight of the first 747.”