OceanGate Expeditions explore wreck of The Titanic in 2022
The co-founder of the company that built the doomed Titanic tourist submersible has hit out at James Cameron for alleging that OceanGate Expeditions was careless and hasty. Guillermo Söhnlein said the film director had nothing to do with designing Titan and was just speculating.
Mr Cameron, 68, who was behind the camera for the box office smash hit 1997 film Titanic, is a renowned deep sea explorer who has descended to the wreckage of the ship more than 30 times and had expressed concern in recent days about the sub’s design.
He said that the carbon fibre design was universally considered unsafe within the deep sea exploration community.
But Mr Söhnlein, 58, who started the company in 2009 with Stockton Rush, 61, who died onboard Titan snapped back at the director in an interview with Times Radio.
“One of the things Mr Cameron said which was correct is that the deep sea exploration community is very small,” he said. “We all know each other. I think in general we all respect each other.
READ MORE: Ross Kemp ‘pulled out of’ Titanic submarine trip after checks deemed it ‘unsafe’
The Titanic tourist submersible (Image: OceanGate)
“But as you would expect in this kind of community there are completely different opinions about how to do things – how to design submersibles, how to engineer them, how to operate in the dives.
“But one thing that’s true of me, and every other expert that has been talking, is that none of us were involved in the design, engineering or even testing of the subs.
“So it’s impossible for anyone to really speculate from the outside.”
Harsh criticism has been fired in the direction of OceanGate, and in particular Mr Rush, about the allaged design and testing shortcomings, and accusations that the engineering and scientific consensus was overlooked.
The disaster killed Mr Rush, as well as British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, 19.
Five years on from Mr Söhnlein’s departure of the company in 2013, OceanGate’s director of maritime safety was dismissed for questioning the structural composition.
The same year Mr Rush was informed by an industry group that there were extensive worries about the design of Titan.
Mr Rush confidently claimed that Boeing, NASA and the University of Washington had all been involved in its design, however all three have since denied any involvement, MailOnline reports.
However, according to Mr Söhnlein, Mr Cameron and other critics were incorrect in saying OceanGate was reckless.
He said: “I was involved in the early phases of the overall development program, during our predecessor subs to Titan.
Film director James Cameron questioned the building process of the Titan (Image: Getty)
“And I know, from first hand experience, that we were extremely committed to safety, and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture.”
But Mr Cameron stated there were numerous “potential failure points” in the vessel, claiming a warning system most likely alerted the five crew members.
Over the past few years numerous concerns have been raised about the submersible’s carbon fibre hull, which carried the craft’s pilot and four passengers, and its porthole, which was possibly not accredited to descend to the enormous depths Titan reached.
Mr Rush even confessed that the carbon fibre design broke a “rule”, triggering accusations of him ignoring concerns from OceanGate staff.
According to Mr Cameron Titan had “three potential failure points” and he suggested the vessel’s “Achilles heel” was its carbon fibre cylinder.
The director also said that the hull was split into “very small pieces” when its implosion was caused by the hull fracturing due to the pressure.
He added that a warning system likely caused an alert, with the crew responding by attempting to ascend in the moments prior to the implosion.
OceanGate’s former head of marine operations David Lochridge raised concerns about the hull and porthole in court documents in 2018.
According to the filings the viewport was “only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 metres”.
Mr Cameron has participated in a collection of interviews following the tragedy, in which he has blasted the vessel’s design for venturing away from verified techniques in exchange for investigational approaches.
Don’t miss… New search for debris at sub site where five died [LATEST]
How Deep is the ocean? (Image: Express)
He told Good Morning America: “There are three potential failure points and the investigation hopefully can localise it down to exactly what happened.
“The viewport in the front was an acrylic viewport. I’m told it was rated to less depth than they were diving to, which is one point. They also had two glass spheres on the sub, small glass spheres for floatation, which is a bad idea.”
The director did not explain his comment regarding the “glass spheres”, however elaborated that the carbon fibre hull was the “weakest link”.
“If I had to put money down on what the finding will be, the Achilles heel of the sub was the composite cylinder that was the main hull that the people were inside.
“There were two titanium end caps on each end. They are relatively intact on the sea floor.
“But that carbon fibre composite cylinder is now just in very small pieces. It’s all rammed into one of the hemispheres. It’s pretty clear that’s what failed.”
In a 2021 video Rush admitted he may have “broken some rules” to construct the vessel, saying: “The carbon fibre and titanium, there’s a rule you don’t do that – well I did.”
He added that in 2020 the hull had “showed signs of cyclical fatigue”.
Delamination – when material fractures into layers due to pressure – is a common issue for carbon fibre.
Mr Cameron said: “The way it fails is it delaminates. You have to have a hull, a pressure hull, made out of a contiguous material like steel, or like titanium, which is the proven standard.
“This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack. And I think if that’s your idea of safety, then you’re doing it wrong. And they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it started to crack…
“It’s our belief we understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.”
The comments about safety concerns have not been addressed by OceanGate since Titan imploded.
In promotional material the company has bragged about Titan’s “Real Time Hull Health Monitoring”, which regularly established the vessel’s integrity throughout the dive.
Acoustic sensors and strain gauges were used by the system to “analyse the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure”.
However, according to legal filing former director of marine operations Lochridge “expressed concern that this was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail – often milliseconds before an implosion – and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.”
In 2012 Mr Cameron used the Deepsea Challenge submersible to reach the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest known point on Earth.
Mr Cameron’s venture was just the fourth time the descent to the Pacific sea bed had been completed – and the first time a man had made the seven mile descent and made it back since 1960.
Seven years of planning and design for the building of the specialised sub to ensure it could endure the huge pressure at the ocean floor preceded the dive.
