OceanGate Co-Founder Defends Against James Cameron’s Criticism

After several days of searching, on Thursday it was reported that the U.S. Coast Guard believes the OceanGate Titan crew and passengers are dead. The submersible had set out on Thursday to explore the Titanic wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, but soon lost contact with its support boat. Now, the company’s co-founder is defending their work against critics, including Titanic film director James Cameron.

Speaking to the U.K.’s Times Radio on Friday, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo 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.” He added, “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.”

“One of the risks that the community takes every time it operates is that if there is some sort of catastrophic failure the general public will backlash against the entire community and basically say it shouldn’t occur,” Söhnlein later added. “But just like with space exploration the best way to preserve the memories and the legacies of these five explorers is to conduct an investigation, find out what went wrong, take lessons learned and then move forward.” 

Shortly after the news of the Titan crew’s fate was reported, Cameron spoke with ABC News and stated that many people in the “deep submergence engineering community” were “very concerned” about OceanGate’s Titan submersible. “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,” he said. Notably, Cameron has made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage site, and has even designed his own 24-foot submersible known as the DeepSea Challenger.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself,” Cameron continued, “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.”