- James Cameron said he warned OceanGate the Titan sub could lead to "catastrophic failure."
- "And that's exactly what happened," Cameron after it was revealed Thursday the sub imploded.
Filmmaker and Titanic explorer James Cameron said he and several engineers warned OceanGate Expeditions officials that the Titan submersible could lead to "catastrophic failure" before the mission the vessel took to the Titanic shipwreck that ended exactly that way earlier this week.
In a Friday appearance on Good Morning America, Cameron told George Stephanopoulos that the people who designed and operated the Titan were "warned" that a mission to the Titanic wreck, which sits in multiple pieces nearly 13,000 feet deep into the ocean, could "lead to catastrophic failure."
"And that's exactly what happened," Cameron said.
The sub first went missing on Sunday, nearly two hours into its dive to the shipwreck, when it lost communication with its mother ship. After four days of searching for the missing vessel, the US Coast Guard announced on Thursday afternoon that they had discovered a "debris field" consisting of pieces of the sub just north of the Titanic wreck, indicating that it had imploded and all passengers had died.
Later Thursday, the Wall Street Journal first reported that a top-secret US Navy listening system identified the sound of an implosion just hours after the vessel had left for its mission and that they had thought it was the Titan.
OceanGate has touted its successful trips to the Titanic wreck in the Titan in years past, but Cameron insisted on GMA that each trip the vessel had taken down to the ocean floor may have weakened it.
"Each dive adds more and more microscopic damage," Cameron said on GMA. "So yes, they operated this sub safely at Titanic this year and the year before, but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with them."
Cameron also identified "three potential failure points" that could have led to the sub's implosion.
Cameron said the viewport in the front of the sub was "rated to less depth than they were diving it." He added, "Two glass spheres on the sub ... for flotation, which is a bad idea."
The third point is where Cameron said he thinks it all went wrong: The composite cylinder, which was the "main hull that people were inside," Cameron said. He called the compartment the sub's "Achilles heel."
"So it's pretty clear that's what failed," Cameron said. "The question is: Was it the primary failure or a secondary failure from something else happening?"
He continued: "But I'm putting my money on the composite because you don't use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure."
Cameron said the engineers who created the Titan were "trying to apply aviation thinking to a deep submergence engineering problem" by using a carbon-fiber composites.
"We all said that it was a flawed idea, and they didn't go through certification, so it wasn't sort of peer-reviewed by other engineering entities, like any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that," Cameron said. "And I think that was a critical failure."