The Creator of “Titanic” Cameron spoke about the dead bathyscaphe: “Same damn idea”

The US Navy said it had discovered an “anomaly” that was likely the Titan’s fatal explosion shortly after the submersible went missing, while filmmaker James Cameron claims his sources in the deep sea industry also recorded a “loud bang “.

According to The Guardian, the US Navy analyzed its acoustic data after the Titan was first reported missing on its voyage to the Titanic wreck. According to the statement, the sailors detected an anomaly “corresponding to an implosion or explosion in the immediate vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communication was lost.”

The Navy passed this information on to the Coast Guard, who continued the search because the Navy did not consider the data conclusive.

The data came from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track enemy submarines, according to The New York Times.

Cameron said he had been aware of the missing submersible since the start of the four-day search, after his sources said similar information, the director said on Thursday.

“Within an hour, we received confirmation that, simultaneously with the loss of communication with the submarine, there was a loud bang. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Transponder loss. Communication loss. I knew what happened. The submarine exploded,” Cameron told Reuters news agency.

As recalled by The Guardian, Cameron became a deep-sea explorer in the 1990s while researching and filming his Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic and is a co-owner of Triton Submarines, which makes submersibles for exploration and tourism.

The director said he told his colleagues via email on Monday: “We’ve lost a few friends” and “Everything is falling apart right now.”

On Thursday, after days of searching for the missing sub, the US Coast Guard announced that the crew members aboard the Titan likely died instantly in a “catastrophic explosion” as it sank to the Titanic’s wreck two miles below the surface. Atlantic Ocean.

A large debris field, containing several sections of the ship, was found about 488 meters (1,600 feet) from the Titanic’s bow earlier in the day by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) scouring the seabed.

The Titan has been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes after what was supposed to be a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

The Coast Guard said five large fragments of the 6.7-meter (22-foot) Titan were found in the debris field left by its destruction, including the ship’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull.

On board the submersible were 58-year-old British traveler Hamish Harding; 77-year-old French explorer of the Titanic, Paul-Henri Nargeole; 48-year-old British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman; and 61-year-old American Stockton Rush, co-founder of OceanGate. who piloted the lost submarine.

After their deaths were announced, Cameron said he regretted not sounding the alarm sooner, saying he was skeptical when he heard that OceanGate was building a deep submersible with a carbon fiber and titanium composite hull.

“I thought it was a terrible idea. I’m sorry I didn’t speak up, but I assumed someone smarter than me, you know, because I’ve never experimented with this technology, but at first glance it just sounded bad,” Cameron told Reuters.

The cause of the Titan’s explosion has yet to be determined, but Cameron said he thought the critics were right in warning that the carbon fiber and titanium hull would cause delamination and microscopic water ingress, leading to gradual failure over time.

Other industry experts and the whistleblower raised the alarm in 2018, criticizing OceanGate for refusing to obtain certification and operate as an experimental vessel.

In 2019, OceanGate said it was concerned that the certification process could slow development and act as a brake on innovation. “Having a third party familiar with every innovation before it has been tested in the real world is anathema to rapid innovation,” it says.

Earlier Thursday, Cameron went on air with ABC News and said that many people in the submarine community were concerned about the Titan.

“Some of the leading players in the diving engineering community have even written letters to the company saying that what they are doing is too experimental to carry passengers and needs to be certified and so on. We welcome innovation, right? But you shouldn’t use an experimental vehicle to pay passengers who aren’t themselves deep-sea engineers,” he added.

Cameron said that both the Titanic tragedy and the Titan tragedy were preceded by unheeded warnings. In the case of the Titanic, the captain crossed the Atlantic on a moonless night despite being told about icebergs.

“We are here again,” says Cameron. – And in the same place. Now some debris is lying next to others for the same damn reason.”

Cameron himself made 33 dives to the crash site, directing not only the 1997 Oscar-winning film, but also the documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss”.

Read also: “Bathyscaphes work for wear and tear”: tourist submarines sink on average once every 5 years