James Cameron Claims That The Doomed Titan Is Fated To Implode Sooner Or Later
The Titanic director shared his two cents about the doomed Titanic-bound submersible and pointed out that it has several Achilles’ heels. James Cameron revealed the Titan’s potential failure points and shared that the vessel had a warning system that could have alerted the five people that the submersible was about to implode.
According to James, concerns about Titan’s carbon fiber hull had already been raised. This cylinder carries the crew—for this last trip, the five passengers who perished. There’s also an issue with the vessel’s porthole, which was not certified to be capable of the depths that the Titan was to venture to.
James, an avid explorer who has also ventured to the ocean’s deepest points, openly criticized the Titan and its weaknesses. The Canadian film director delivered his assessment during recent interviews after news that the Titan imploded surfaced.
For one, James was not a fan of the Titan’s design. According to him, the vessel’s design steered away from proven techniques and instead leaned towards experimental methodologies.
James, who is considered the King of Hollywood thanks to all of his blockbuster films, claimed, “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.”
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who also perished during the Titan implosion, mentioned in 2021 that he had broken several rules while creating the vessel. He noted that using carbon fiber and titanium was not in the rule book, but he went ahead and did it anyway for his design.
A year earlier, before this admission, in 2020, Stockton also mentioned that the hull was showing signs of cyclical fatigue, which is attributed to delamination, which carbon fiber is prone to. Delamination is when a material fractures into layers when subjected to pressure.
James agrees because titanium, steel, or any contiguous material has been proven to be the standard material for a pressure hull. The Avatar franchise director also explained, “This OceanGate sub had sensors inside the hull to warn them 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 warned that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it started to crack.”
OceanGate has not released any statement yet to address the apparent safety concerns involving the doomed vessel. Before the incident, OceanGate was promoting the Real-Time Hull Health Monitoring feature of the Titan, which supposedly was to address the integrity of the vessel’s hull during the entire dive.
A series of acoustic sensors with strain gauges were used to evaluate the pressure changes as it went deeper into the dive and provide a real-time assessment of the hull’s integrity.
Unfortunately, one former director of marine operations negates this approach as problematic because acoustic analysis would just let you know if the component is seconds away from failing. This means that milliseconds before an implosion, the team monitoring the hull’s health will be alerted.
James is no newbie in ocean exploration because he has done 33 submersible dives to the Titanic’s wreck. Recall that in 2012, James reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point of the Pacific Ocean, through the Deepsea Challenger submersible. James’ trip was the fourth in the history of a man completing the seven-mile descent and reaching the Pacific sea bed.
James’ dive included seven years of planning and careful design and construction of the hub, with the main priority being the structure’s capability to withstand the colossal pressure of the ocean floor.
