Titan Sub Tragedy: James Cameron ‘Struck’ by Titanic Parallels, How ‘Warnings Went Unheeded’

Titanic director James Cameron has weighed in on the tragedy that befell the Titan submersible, which was confirmed on Thursday to have imploded near the sunken steamliner’s wreckage, killing all five passengers on board.

Cameron, who has himself made 33 dives to the underwater site and claims to have spent “more time on the ship than [Captain Edward Smith],” noted the stunning parallels between the Titan and Titanic, while also touting the importance of safety regulations.

“Deep submergence diving is a mature art. We have improved [since the 1960s] and the certification protocols that all other deep submergence vehicles — except this one — that carry passengers… is the gold standard,” Cameron told ABC News. “Many people in the community were very concerned about the sub, and a number of the top players in the 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 needed to be certified.

“So I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself,” he continued, “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. And 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.”

Watch Cameron’s full comments in the video below.

Titan’s five-person crew consisted of British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son, Sulaiman Dawood, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

The sub set out Sunday to explore the Titanic wreckage site. Less than two hours later, Polar Prince, the support vessel that transported the Titan to the dive site, lost contact with the submersible. The U.S. Coast Guard was thusly alerted, and a massive search operation got underway. Noises detected from beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on Tuesday and Wednesday offered some hope that perhaps the five passengers would be found alive.

The U.S. Coast Guard announced at a press conference Thursday that the debris field that was detected earlier in the day belonged to the Titanic-bound vessel and was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the pressure chamber,” per Rear Admiral John Mauger.