“Ocean Gate shouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. I think that’s clear enough. I wish I had been more explicit about it, but I was unaware that there were no certifications because I hadn’t researched the case, I wasn’t interested. Stockton Rush had asked me if I wanted to hang out with them and dive into this season. But I wasn’t interested. There was much concern for this crew and this submarine. A lot of concern, even though I wasn’t directly involved because I was making “Avatar 2” at the time. But many of them got together and wrote a letter to Ocean Gate in which they wrote: “You have to give certifications. You can’t bring people down. It’s irresponsible. And it could lead to catastrophe”».
So the director James Cameron, who in 1997 filmed “Titanic”, responded to an interview with Reuters about the tragedy of the Titan, in which 5 passengers died.
“When I first heard about the incident on Monday morning, I received a lot of calls and emails. It’s a small community. And in an hour and a half I had the following information: (the Titan, ed) was going downhill. It was at 3,500 feet. Lost communications and tracking, the last one was the most critical because the transponder used to track a submarine during its descent and on the bottom is a completely autonomous system. It sits in its own pressure housing and is battery powered. So to lose communications and tracking at the same time, the sub was gone. For me there was no doubt.
For days I tried to imagine other scenarios that could explain it. Nothing came out. So the next thing I did was contact some people they managed to track down… There are acoustic nets under water. Some are for research, some for intelligence. We confirmed within the hour that there had been a loud bang as communications were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophones, loss of transducer or transponder, loss of communications. I knew what had happened. The submarine had imploded. I have emailed everyone I know. I said: we have lost some friends. The submarine imploded. He’s at the bottom in pieces right now. I sent it on Monday morning. I never believed in that carbon fiber wrapped, filament wrapped, cylindrical hull technology. I thought it was a horrible idea. I wanted to talk, but I thought someone would be smarter than me because I’ve never experienced that technology.
But apparently it sounded bad because we make pressure holes in material contiguous to steel, titanium, ceramic, acrylic. So you can shape it. You can do a finite element analysis. And you understand the properties of yield. Understand the serial number it may require. But you can’t do that with a composite material because they are two different materials bonded together. And so we all knew the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water infiltration and fatigue, what they call mechanical fatigue. And we knew that if the sub passed the pressure test, it wouldn’t fail on the first dive. It might fail at dive seven, or I don’t know what they are, but it will fail over time, which is tricky. You don’t get that with steel or with titanium. Now there’s one wreck next to another for the same damned reason.’
June 23, 2023 – Updated June 23, 2023, 11:18 am
© breaking latest news