James Cameron – who is a diving expert and a good friend of Titan passenger Paul Henri Nargeolet – likened the OceanGate Titan tragedy to the Titanic in an interview with ABC News Thursday (June 22nd).
The Titanic director 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.”
He added, “People in the community were very concerned about this sub. 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 US Coast Guard said in a news conference Thursday (June 22nd) that all five people aboard the submersible, known as the “Titan,” were killed during a “catastrophic implosion” during their attempt to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.