James Cameron, who was in charge of making the 1997 movie Titanic, told the BBC that he felt the loss of the Titan submarine “in my bones.”
Cameron has gone on 33 dives to the Titanic’s wreck.
He said he was on a ship when the submarine went missing on Sunday and didn’t find out about it until Monday.
When he heard that the submarine had lost its tracking and communication systems simultaneously, he said he knew something terrible would happen.
“I knew what had happened in my bones. If the sub’s computer, communication system, and tracking device all fail at the same time, the sub is dead.”
The director continued, “I immediately called some of my friends in the deep submarine world. I knew the following things in about an hour. They were coming down. They were at 3500 meters and going down to 3800 meters, which is the bottom.
“Their communications were lost, and they couldn’t figure out where they were. I told them right away that you can’t lose communications and guidance at the same time without a major disaster or a disaster with a lot of energy. The first thing that came to mind was a collapse.”
On Thursday, a US Navy source told the BBC’s partner CBS News that the navy had found “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” soon after the Titan lost touch with the surface.
The source said the information had been given to the US Coast Guard team, which used it to narrow the search area.
Cameron told BBC News that the past week had “felt like a long, nightmare charade” where people were running around talking about loud noises, air, and other things.
“I knew that sub was right where it was last seen and at the same depth. “That’s where they found it,” he said next.
He also said that after a remote-controlled underwater car was sent into the water on Thursday, “it was found within hours, probably within minutes.”
Cameron also said that the loss of Titan and its crew was a “terrible irony” and compared it to the loss of the Titanic in 1912.
“We now have another wreck that’s caused by the same thing, which is that people didn’t listen to warnings,” he said. “OceanGate was told what to do.”
He said that people who worked for the company had left, but he didn’t tell why.
He then said that some people in the deep submergence group, who were not himself, had written a letter to OceanGate saying, in his words, “you are headed for disaster.”
Cameron isn’t the first to worry about how the tourist company works.
The Marine Technology Society (MTS) wrote to OceanGate in March 2018, and the New York Times got a copy of the letter. It said that OceanGate’s “experimental” method could have bad results ranging from small to catastrophic.
Documents from a US court show that a former employee of OceanGate warned of possible safety problems with the ship as early as 2018.
The papers show that in an inspection report, David Lochridge, who was in charge of the company’s marine operations, pointed out some problems.
A representative for OceanGate didn’t want to say anything about the safety concerns Mr. Lochridge and the MTS brought up.
