“We’ve never had an accident like this before,” said James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” on Thursday.
A submersible expert, Cameron has dived into aging hulls dozens of times and has dived to the bottom of the earth’s deepest depressions in a small craft of his own design.
Cameron said in an interview that the estimated loss of five lives aboard the Oceangate submersible Titan was unlike anything anyone involved in commercial ocean exploration had ever seen. rice field.
“There have never been fatalities at this depth, and certainly no implosion,” he said.
Implosion in the deep sea occurs when a hollow object violently collapses inward due to the crushing pressure of the abyss. In an interview, Mr Cameron said that if the object was large enough to hold five people, “it would be a very violent event, like 10 dynamite explosions”.
In 2012, Cameron designed an experimental submersible and piloted it to an area called the Challenger Deep in the Pacific. Mr Cameron did not seek certification of the vessel’s safety by a maritime industry body that provides such services to a large number of companies.
Cameron said the spacecraft had an experimental, scientific mission, so “we did it knowingly.” “We would not design a vehicle without certification to carry passengers.”
Cameron has sharply criticized Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush, who piloted the submersible during Sunday’s disappearance, for never having a tourist submersible safety certified. He pointed out that Rush called authentication an impediment to innovation.
“I basically agree,” Cameron said. “But you can’t behave like that when you’re paying to put guests on a submarine, which means you have innocent guests who trust you and what you say.”
Cameron cites carbon-fiber composite construction as a possible design weakness and passenger warning for the Titan submarine. This material is widely used in the aerospace industry because it is much lighter than steel and aluminum yet still strong and stiff per pound.
The problem, Cameron said, is that carbon fiber composites “have no compressive strength.” This occurs when the subsea vehicle plunges deeper into the abyss and faces a sudden increase in water pressure. “It’s not designed for that.”
He added that the company was using sensors on Titan’s hull. Assess the condition of carbon fiber composite hulls.among them promotional materials, Oceangate pointed to the sensor as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.”Earlier this year, an academic expert explained The system gives the pilot “sufficient time to stop the descent and ascend safely.”
In contrast to the company, Cameron called it an “alarm system” to let submarine pilots know if “the hull is ready to explode.”
Cameron said the sensor network on the submarine’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he thought was inherently flawed.
“It’s not like a light comes on when your car is low on oil,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”
