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James Cameron blasts OceanGate's dangerous Titan sub, says listening for signs of life was like trying to hear 'a sparrow fart over a cacophony' and says he knew 96-hour search for survivors was pointless, a year after doomed trip to Titanic
Titanic director James Cameron has slammed OceanGate for its lax approach to building the ill-fated Titan submersible that imploded last year.
The world held its breath for 96 hours last June as the US Navy, the US Coast Guard and the Canadian Coast Guard launched a complex mission to find the doomed vessel before the five inhabitants ran out of oxygen.
The Titan sub was built by OceanGate, a startup founded by CEO Stockton Rush, who tragically perished along with the four other people onboard when it imploded hours after it set off on June 18 2023.
But Cameron, best known for directing the hit film Titanic, claims OceanGate knowingly cut too many corners, and unnecessarily risked the lives of the people who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to travel to the wreck of the Titanic.
He told 60 Minutes Australia: 'These guys broke the rules. It's that simple. They shouldn't have been legally allowed to carry passengers.
James Cameron (pictured), best known for directing the hit film Titanic, claims OceanGate knowingly cut too many corners
The Titan sub (pictured) was built by OceanGate, a startup founded by CEO Stockton Rush, who tragically perished along with the four other people onboard
The Titan was made of titanium and carbon fibre, which was against the 'rules' of making submersible
'This is a place where you've really got to know your stuff before you step outside the box.
'You don't move fast and break things, as they say in Silicon Valley, if the thing you're gonna break has got you inside it, along with other innocent people who believe your line of BS.'
Rush notoriously said in an interview before the Titan's final voyage that he 'broke some rules' to make the submersible.
'I've broke some rules to make this, I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me... the carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that - well I did.'
The risks he and his startup took caught the ire of submersible experts as early as 2018, when the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, a 60-year-old trade group that aims to promote ocean technology, warned Rush that OceanGate's 'experimental' approach could result in problems 'from minor to catastrophic.'
Five people were onboard, including British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding (left), Shahzada Dawood (far right) and his 19-year-old son Suleman (second from the left)
Mr Nargeolet (left) and Stockton Rush (right), CEO of the OceanGate Expedition
The 69-year-old film director also criticised the approach America and Canada took to searching for the Titan.
The navy and coast guards zeroed in on sounds that they interpreted as repeated banging on the submersible's hull.
'It's like somebody is making that sound and the fact that it is repeated, is really unusual,' former navy submarine captain Ryan Ramsey said in a Channel 5 documentary about the Titan that was released in March.
Referring to the sounds heard underwater by marine agencies during their probe, he said: 'Tapping sounds? Ridiculous.
'They [were] hearing a crescent wrench or something tapping against a hull over the sound of 11 ships operating in the immediate vicinity moving giant pieces of deck equipment around.
'That's like hearing a sparrow fart over the cacophony of an airport.'
The Avatar director, who has been to the wreck of the Titanic dozens of times himself, claimed he was told about the implosion heard by the US Navy hours after the submersible set off long before the 96-hour search concluded.
French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, was one of the five killed when a submersible imploded on a trip to the wreckage of the Titanic a year ago
Showing a note that he claimed to have written the day after the Titan set off on its fateful voyage that read '9.25am, confirmed implosion', he told 60 Minutes Australia:
'I literally wrote that on the pad the moment I heard from my naval source, a very reliable source, that they had heard an event and triangulated it to the site.
'I had a silent moment, as I knew [Paul-Henri Nargeolet] very well. It was a sombre moment, and then it just transformed into the crazy thing - everybody running around with their hair on fire when we knew right where the sub was.
'But nobody could admit they didn't have the means to go down and look, so they were running all over the surface.
'The entire world waited with baited breath, talking about 96 hours of oxygen - We all knew they were dead. We already hoisted a glass, a toast, to our fallen comrades on Monday night.'
Cameron's claims were backed by reporting at the time, with naval sources revealing that during the search, the US navy went back and analysed the anomalous sound that was recorded hours into the search.
Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck
That anomaly was ‘consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,’ according to a senior Navy official who spoke anonymously at the time.
The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search in spite of the analysis.
Last week, the US Coast Guard said that its investigation into the tragic incident will 'take longer than initially projected to complete.'
It said the 'need to contract two salvage missions to secure vital evidence and the extensive forensic testing required... led to necessary delays.'
But despite lingering questions about the disaster, the deadly implosion of the Titan has not dulled the desire for further ocean exploration.
The Georgia-based company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic plans to visit the sunken ocean liner in July using remotely operated vehicles.
And Larry Connor, a real estate billionaire from Ohio, has said he is personally planning a voyage to the shipwreck in a two-person submersible in 2026.
Numerous ocean explorers have declared they are confident undersea exploration can continue safely in a post-Titan world.
'It's been a desire of the scientific community to get down into the ocean,' said Greg Stone, a veteran ocean explorer and friend of Titan operator Stockton Rush, who died in the implosion.
'I have not noticed any difference in the desire to go into the ocean, exploring.'
Larry Connor, 74, was undeterred by the OceanGate disaster last June - so much so that he was on the phone to a rival firm days after it happened asking it to build a better submersible.
A NASA-certified private astronaut, Mr Connor has no fears about the Triton 4000 submarine he will share with its manufacturer's co-founder Patrick Lahey despite last year's tragedy, which counted three British citizens among the dead.
The businessman is no stranger to chasing adrenaline - he competed in the 2004 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, is a private pilot involved in aerobatic competitions and an experienced submariner, having already explored the Mariana Trench - one of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth.
He is set on taking the two-person submersible down to the depths to show people worldwide that 'while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,' he told the Wall Street Journal.
Ohio real-estate investor and businessman, Larry Connor (left) says he is signed up for an expedition to the Titanic. He is pictured with Triton Submarines boss Patrick Lahey after they travelled to more than 20,000ft beneath the ocean surface in another Triton sub
Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Submersible manufacturer Triton has developed a series of underwater craft (Pictured: the world's smallest, lightest three-person superyacht submersible - TRITON 1650/3 LP)
Thrillseeker Larry Connor is no stranger to risk - he is a private pilot, racing driver and an astronaut
Triton's newly designed underwater exploration vehicle, named the 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer - reportedly costs a cool £15million and will have presumably overcome the presumed flaws that saw the OceanGate Titan implode before it reached the Titanic wreckage.
The Triton 4000 - so named for the depth in metres (13,100ft) it will be capable of diving to - will only be deployed once its manufacturers are certain it can withstand the extreme pressure at such a depth.
'Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago,' Mr Connor said.
Triton's operators point out that their submersible is safer than Titan, which was criticised for having no official safety certification.
Sophie Bentham-Wood, Executive Director of Global Marketing and Sales Strategies for Triton, told MailOnline that the company was contacted by a slew of investors willing to front cash for their operations amid concerns the Titan sub disaster could undermine further deep-sea exploration.
'Some have already approached us to discuss the build of deep-diving submersibles purely to counteract any negative impact those events could have had and maintain momentum in the ocean space,' Bentham-Wood said.