UPDATE: OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein has responded to “Titanic” director James Cameron’s concerns about the company and his allegations that the dives were “too experimental.”
Söhnlein founded the deep-sea diving company with Titan passenger and CEO Stockton Rush in 2009. The now Barcelona-based executive served as CEO and then COO before stepping down in 2013.
Speaking to the U.K.’s Times Radio on Friday, Söhnlein said: “In this kind of community, there are completely different opinions and views about how to do things, how to design submersibles, how to engineer them, build them, how to operate in the dives. But one thing that’s true of me and the other experts, is none of us were involved in the design, engineering, building, testing or even diving of the subs. So it’s impossible for anyone to really speculate from the outside. I was involved in the early phases of the overall development program during our predecessor subs to Titan, and I know from firsthand experience that we were extremely committed to safety and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture.”
Asked whether there was extensive regulation for submersibles, Söhnlein said that due to the handful of companies attempting such deep dives, “the regulations are pretty sparse and many of them are antiquated or designed for specific instances, so it’s kind of tricky to navigate those regulatory schemes.”
He added that “the intent of all of these missions is not to conduct joyrides down to this wreck.”
“Titanic” director James Cameron spoke out during an ABC News interview about the tourist submersible Titan that lost contact on its way to reach the wreck of the famous passenger liner.
After submarine company OceanGate released a statement on Thursday saying that the five people who went down are believed dead, Cameron gave his thoughts on the tragedy as a longtime member of the diving community, who has made 33 trips to the Titanic himself.
“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. 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. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. 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. It’s really quite surreal.”
In 2018, the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society wrote to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush warning him of their “unanimous concern” about Titan’s development, according to a letter obtained by the New York Times.
On ABC News, Cameron spoke about how he had known Titanic explorer Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet for 25 years and was mourning the death of his friend, who was on Titan.
“PH, the French legendary submersible dive pilot was a friend of mine,” Cameron said. “You know, it’s a very small community. I’ve known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”
International search teams from the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K. joined efforts this week in an attempt to locate and rescue the craft. A breakthrough came on Tuesday when a Canadian aircraft picked up “banging” noises from the underwater search area. But on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said debris had been discovered by a remote-operated vehicle on the seabed around the shipwreck. Within hours, it was confirmed that those onboard are believed to have died in a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel.
It was later revealed by the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. Navy had heard the possible implosion of the sub near the site where it first lost communication on Sunday.
In February, Cameron posted footage of the first discovery of the Titanic shipwreck in 1986 by the research submersible HOV (Human Occupied Vehicle) Alvin.
In 2012, Cameron piloted a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger to the ocean’s deepest point in the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep, which is 35,876 feet deep. There, Cameron collected samples and filmed the experience for a Nat Geo documentary.
Parks Stephenson — a Titanic specialist who advised on Cameron and Bill Paxton’s 2003 documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” — made a public Facebook post on June 19 about the search for the Titan.
“No matter what you may read in the coming hours, all that is truly known at this time is that communications with the submersible have been lost and that is unusual enough to warrant the most serious consideration,” he wrote.
Those aboard included Nargeolet; British businessman Hamish Harding; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman; and OceanGate CEO Rush, who was piloting Titan.
Watch Cameron’s full interview below.
