Veteran deep-sea explorer and film-maker James Cameron said on Friday that the design of the Titan submersible was “critically flawed”, and it was “only a matter of time” before the tragedy occurred – as Canada’s transportation safety board said it was launching an investigation.
“People in the deep sea submergence engineering community warned the company that this could lead to catastrophic failure,” Cameron told ABC’s Good Morning America show on Friday morning, referring to the carbon fiber hull of the 22ft (6.7m) vessel.
“The weakest link, if I had to put money down on what the findings will be, the achilles heel of the sub, was the composite cylinder, the main hull that people were inside.
“There were two titanium end caps on each end. They’re relatively intact on the seafloor, but that carbon fiber composite cylinder is now just in very small pieces. You don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure.”
Titan was declared on Thursday to have been destroyed in the deep ocean, probably as a result of a “catastrophic implosion” around the time it lost communications with the surface less than two hours into its dive to the Titanic wreck last Sunday, with the loss of the five lives onboard.
On Friday, the White House confirmed that the US navy had passed on the information to the “incident commander” as soon as the vessel was declared missing that its underwater detection equipment had picked up a sound that was potentially an implosion, after listening back to its acoustic data.
Later on Friday, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board announced an examination of the loss of the Titan, saying it was launching “a safety investigation regarding the circumstances of this operation” because the Titan’s surface support vessel, the Polar Prince, was a Canadian-flagged ship.
Meanwhile, Cameron, an experienced Canadian submariner who has dived to the Titanic wreckage more than 30 times, and directed the 1997 multi-Oscar winning movie of the same name, said the material was used safely in aerospace and aviation, but not rated for the pressure of the 12,500ft depth of the ocean liner’s wreck.
He said OceanGate, the company that designed and operated the sub, “was trying to apply aviation thinking to a deep submergence engineering problem, and we all said that it was a flawed idea”, adding: “They didn’t go through certification. It wasn’t peer-reviewed by other engineering entities, by any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that. That was a critical failure,” he said.
“Apparently there’s an engineer that walked off the project because he didn’t believe in it. And a number of people in the greater deep submergence engineering community, including people that I’m very close with, warned the company this could lead to catastrophic failure. And that’s exactly what happened,” he said.
Asked for further context, Cameron said the doomed vessel, which had completed three previous trips to the Titanic, would have become weaker during each dive.
“It’s insidious,” he said. “The way composite, carbon fiber materials fail at pressure, they fail over time. Each dive adds more and more microscopic damage. So yes, they operated the sub safely to Titanic last year and the year before, but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with them.”
Bob Ballard, the explorer who discovered the Titanic’s wreck in 1985, 73 years after it struck an iceberg and sank to the North Atlantic’s seabed off Newfoundland, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives en route from the UK to the US, told GMA there would be no early answer to the precise cause of the tragedy.
He said there would be a thorough survey of what is left of the Titan using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and a painstaking analysis of every aspect of the tragedy.
“[Debris] is scattered all over the place. So the ROV is going to do a very, very precise systematic mapping that will collect the photography and high-definition imagery. And it will also be recovering the objects. So this investigation will go on for quite some time,” he said.
Cameron said the fact that five more people died at the wreck site had parallels in the original catastrophe more than a century previously.
“Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system back then, and 1,500 people paid the price for it,” he said.
“The warnings were not heeded. They were warned about the ice, they had radio, Marconigrams, the Titanic captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead [yet] he steamed full ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon.
“If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.”
Reuters contributed reporting.
