"Titanic" director James Cameron spoke out late Thursday about the loss of the Titan submarine that had dived to explore the historic shipwreck. “Many people in the [deep-submergence engineering] community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of you know of the top players in the community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and needed to be certified and so on,” he told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, 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.”
The multiple Oscar winner and longtime ocean-diving enthusiast has made nearly three dozen dives to the Titanic wreckage. He was commenting on today’s news from the Coast Guard that “a debris field was discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic” and that all five souls aboard are feared dead after a “catastrophic explosion.”
Cameron also addressed the concerns voiced by experts about the safety of the 21-foot Titan submersible vehicle. “As a submersible designer myself, I designed and built us up to go to the deepest place in the ocean, three times deeper than Titanic. So I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through.
On CNN tonight, Cameron spoke about the fundamental flaw in the design of the Titan submersible, and how unsuitable it was to use carbon-fiber composite material for such a vehicle, as opposed to steel or titanium. He told Anderson Cooper that using a composite material was ill-advised, since "with each pressure cycle, you can have progressive damage [to the hull]. You may have a number of successful dives, and then have it fail later."
No comments:
Post a Comment