"For us, it's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded."

Lessons Unlearned

James Cameron, the director of the megahit movie "Titanic," has weighed in on the submersible that imploded on its way down to the wreck of the eponymous ship, drawing eerie parallels between the fates of both vessels.

"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," Cameron told ABC, after OceanGate, the company behind the doomed submersible, announced that all five of the passengers had died following a fatal implosion.

"For us, it's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded," he added.

Like in the Titanic's case, the warning signs were clear. During the prolonged search for the submersible, more and more damning details — some truly baffling — came to light indicating that the vessel called Titan was not safe for deep-sea exploration.

"People in the community were very concerned about this sub," Cameron said.

"A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified."

Deep Sea Veteran

As a seasoned ocean explorer, Cameron would know a thing or two about the risks involved in such a dangerous undertaking.

The director helped design a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger, which he piloted himself to the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, reaching a record depth of 35,787 feet.

That's almost three times as deep as the wreck of the Titanic, which Cameron also happens to be an expert on, claiming that from his over thirty dives down to the wreck, he's "spent more time on the ship than the captain did."

But Cameron, like many of us, is still finding the events surrounding the Titan submersible's demise hard to believe.

Some of the details, like remains of the submersible being found only 1,600 feet from the Titanic's final resting place on the seafloor, sound stranger — and grimmer — than fiction.

"To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that's going on all around the world, I think it's just astonishing," Cameron said. "It's really quite surreal."

Farewell, Friend

Cameron also mourned the loss of his friend Paul-Henri "PH" Nargeolet, who died on board the Titan. Nargeolet's images of the Titanic wreck inspired Cameron to make the movie about the ship's disaster.

"PH, the French legendary submersible dive pilot was a friend of mine," he said.

"I've known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process."

More on the submersible: OceanGate Says Missing Submarine Passengers "Have Sadly Been Lost"


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