- James Cameron suggested OceanGate lacked "rigor and discipline" after the Titan disaster.
- The Hollywood filmmaker and ocean explorer called for more regulations on deep-sea vessels.
Hollywood filmmaker and underwater explorer James Cameron suggested OceanGate — the company behind the Titan submersible that imploded last month, killing all five people on board — lacked "rigor and discipline" as he called for more regulations on deep-sea vessels after the tragedy.
The "Titanic" movie director on Tuesday called the catastrophic implosion of OceanGate's Titan sub an "extreme outlier" when it comes to the safety record in the world of deep-sea exploration, according to CBC News.
"No fatalities, no incidents, no deaths, no implosions — until today," Cameron, who has voyaged to the Titanic wreck site in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean 33 times, said while speaking during an event at the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in Ontario.
The Titan disaster, Cameron said, "is an extreme outlier of a data point that in a sense proves the rule. And the rule is we've been safe for half a century," CBC News reported.
However, "We have to be reminded of the possibility of human failure," Cameron said.
French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet was among the five passengers killed on the Titan sub during an expedition to the wreckage site of the famed ship, and Cameron called him "a good friend."
"So it's an emotional shock. It's like a gut punch. You don't expect it because you don't expect an implosion to happen because that's what you spend all your time and all your finite element analysis and your computer simulations and everything else to prevent it," Cameron said.
"But they obviously didn't do that," said Cameron, referring to OceanGate. "They didn't approach it with that same rigor and discipline, unfortunately."
Cameron added that new regulation is now needed when it comes to deep-sea exploration to "treat any kind of passenger vehicle — which it [the Titan] was — the same way you treat a ship that takes passengers or a fishing boat," Cameron said, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
The filmmaker made the comments while speaking at the opening of an exhibit called "Pressure: James Cameron into the Abyss," which features the Deepsea Challenger submersible that Cameron piloted in 2012 to the ocean's deepest point in the Mariana Trench.
"I certainly wasn't worried about imploding because we had tested everything — that's how it should be," Cameron said.