Titanic director says OceanGate were ‘warned’ about design shortcomings in submersible design

Hollywood director James Cameron, who completed 33 dives to the wreck of the Titanic, said OceanGate were warned over potential shortcomings in their submersible design.

"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,” Cameron told the BBC.

On Thursday evening, five people aboard the Titan were confirmed dead in what the US Coast Guard described as a “catastrophic implosion”. 

The tail cone and other debris were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, deep in the North Atlantic and about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The Titan submarine with five people on board was on an expedition to explore the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, told reporters.

On Thursday, a US Navy official said the navy had detected "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface.

The official said the information had been relayed to the US Coast Guard team which used it to narrow the radius of the search area.

Cameron told BBC News the past week had "felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff".

"I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That's exactly where they found it," he continued.

He added that once a remotely controlled underwater vehicle was deployed on Thursday, searchers had "found it within hours, probably within minutes".

A winch hoists James Cameron's submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, which he helped design

Cameron also suggested that there was a "terrible irony" in the loss of Titan and its crew, likening it to the loss of the Titanic itself back in 1912.

"We now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings," he said. "OceanGate were warned."

He said the company had had people working internally who quit but he did not specify why.

He went on to say that some within the deep submergence community, not including himself directly, had written a letter to OceanGate saying they believed, in his words, "you are going on a path to catastrophe".

A letter sent to OceanGate by the Marine Technology Society (MTS) in March 2018 and obtained by the New York Times stated "the current 'experimental' approach adopted by OceanGate... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic)".

Separately, US court documents show a former employee of OceanGate warned of potential safety problems with the vessel as far back as 2018.