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BBC NEWS
Hollywood film director James Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic, has told the BBC the team who built the submersible which imploded with the loss of five lives had “cut corners”.
OceanGate, the parent company of the Titan sub, “didn’t get certified because they knew they wouldn’t pass”.
“I was very suspect of the technology that they were using. I wouldn’t have gotten in that sub,” he said.
Cameron has completed 33 submersible dives to the Titanic wreck.
Titan was built from carbon fibre and titanium.
In 2012 Cameron used a different technology for the Deepsea Challenger submersible expedition in the Pacific, which took him down to 10,912m (35,800ft), the deepest known oceanic trench.
The Titanic wreck is 3,810m (12,500ft) down.
Cameron said that when he learned the sub had lost both its navigation and communication at the same time he immediately suspected a disaster.
“I felt in my bones what had happened. For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – sub’s gone.”
He said that on Monday, when he heard the sub had gone missing, “I immediately got on the phone to some of my contacts in the deep submersible community.
“Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on descent. They were at 3,500 metres (11,483ft), heading for the bottom at 3,800 metres.
“Their comms were lost, and navigation was lost – and I said instantly, you can’t lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event or high, highly energetic catastrophic event. And the first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.”
On Thursday, an official from the US Navy told…
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