Back now from Saint John's, Newfoundland,
where the submersible titan
first went out to sea
on its way to the Titanic.
We're talking tonight
about the five lives lost,
also about the vessel itself.
And the questions surrounding it,
namely the decision to build it
out of carbon
composites and non-certified safety
as other such vessels are.
Back now with Deep-Sea
Explorer and Titanic director
James Cameron
I mean, it's extraordinary to me
that this debris field
is just
600 feet away
from the bow of the Titanic.
Obviously,
people think
about the barrel of the Titanic
and they think of your film Titanic
with that iconic scene on the bow.
I heard you earlier to kind of talk
about these two captains
and a kind of a similarity that you see.
And I wonder if you could could
could talk about that.
I think there's a great almost surreal
irony here, which is Titanic sank
because the captain took it
full steam into an ice feel that night.
On a moonless night
with very poor visibility
after he had been repeatedly warned
by telegram, by Marconi, Graham by radio
during the day that that's
what was ahead of him.
And so I think we're also seeing
a parallel here
with unheeded warnings about a sub
that was not certified
where the entire deep submergence
community actually
or not the entire community,
but a large number of them
got together to write a letter to Ocean
Gate, the company,
and say we believe
that this could lead to catastrophe.
It was less a criticism
of the engineering
than of the process,
but it contemplate that
the fact
that the engineering
probably wouldn't pass muster
from a certification bureau.
And so they were trying
to head this whole thing off
it was our worst nightmare.
I mean, all of us in the deep
submergence community,
people like myself
that pilot subs and designed subs.
Implosion is obviously the
the Specter
that looms over us all the time.
But because of that,
that's the thing that you engineer
for the most years in advance.
So that should never be the problem.
I've never believed that if I was going
to have a serious problem
in a sub that it would be implosion,
maybe entanglement in a fishing net,
maybe a fire from the electronics
Hard to rule those things out. Implosion.
Absolutely not.
Especially with modern
finite element analysis and
computer aided design.
Do you.
I mean, what should be the
what should we learn from this?
Because obviously,
water expert deepwater exploration.
I mean, there are
there's a pretty great
I mean, I know if it's great,
but a very good safety
record with people who have done
the certification, people
who have really studied this.
Do you worry about this
having an impact
on the continued exploration?
I do.
Look, I'm
not worried about exploration
because explorers will go
and I'm not worried about innovation
because people will innovate.
I'm worried that it has a negative impact
on, let's say,
citizen explorers, tourists, you know.
But these are serious people
with serious curiosity,
willing to put serious money down
to go to these interesting places.
And I don't want to discourage that,
but I think that it's almost it.
Now, the lesson
the takeaway is make sure
if you're going to go into a vehicle,
whether it's an aircraft or a surface
craft or a submersible
that it's been through,
a certifying agencies,
you know, that it's been signed off
every day.
We trust our lives to to engineering.
We step into an elevator.
We make an assumption
that somebody somewhere has done
the math properly
and it's all been certified properly.
We should take the same precautions
when we get into a submersible,
even if it's at a resort.
And we're only going down 300 feet
or a thousand feet.
You know,
I'm a I'm a partner in a submersible
company called Triton.
I'll say that upfront.
Triton not Titan.
And Triton has a perfect operational
safety record across
20 vehicles and 10000 hours
of people
diving to depths up to a thousand meters.
It can be done, but it requires rigor.
And I think
all of us in the community now
now our worst fears have have happened.
And we know why it happened.
I think largely, you know,
it puts us now on even more alert to be
to be disciplined
and to really think
about the ethics of it.
You know, there's a lot of countries
where subs are diving all over the world.
You're not going to have
regulation everywhere that solves
this problem.
It's really more
that we have to just accept
a standard of practice
that we
that we don't encourage operators to
to work without without proper ads
or German, Lloyd's or whatever
it is, certification
that the you know,
the Coast
Guard rear admiral
today was talking
about the unforgiving environment
at those depths.
Can you just talk about that
feeling of being down there?
I mean,
I can't believe
how deep you have gone into the ocean
three times deeper than the Titanic,
I think you said. Yeah.
What is that feeling of being down there?
Well, I always say
you'd have to take a backhoe with you
to go deeper
than I went anywhere on this planet.
That is a feeling of of remoteness.
I knew when I made that dove
that there was no hope of rescue.
There literally
was no vehicle in the world,
no matter if you could fly it
in, no matter
if I could survive
long enough on my on my life
support system,
there was no rescue
I had to self rescue if I had a problem.
And we thought about that
for the seven years
that we spent building the sub.
And I designed a lot of the
safety systems myself
knowing I was going to be in that sub
terms of how to drop the weights.
If I was incapacitated,
the weights would drop themselves over
after a certain period of time.
Many, many
communications beacons
for when I got back to the surface.
If I had drifted off
someplace, I'd have been picked up
by satellite.
They would have reported my position.
I had radio, I had visual beacons.
It wouldn't have required
an aircraft search.
They'd have found me pretty quickly.
So you think all that stuff through,
but the feeling in the moment,
it's almost a sacred space.
It's a place where there's
nobody else there.
It's just you,
you and yourself and
and a sense of deep time.
You're looking at something
that no one's ever seen.
It's been that way for
hundreds of millions,
if not billions of years
at Titan like it's different.
You feel this the presence
of the tragedy,
you know, and I think that's the lure.
I think that's why people want to go
and experience it for themselves.
To feel, to remember history.
You know,
I think people go to battlefields,
to Gettysburg, to, you know,
Normandy Beach
and all those things
to remember history
and to take it in
and make it make it part of their lives.
I don't think that
you know,
I don't think
there's anything wrong with that.
I mean, some people
don't like they say it's a gravesite
and that sort of thing.
But I think it's important
for us to remember.
But here's a case starkly today
where the collective
we didn't remember the lesson of Titanic
these guys at Ocean Gate didn't
because the
the arrogance
and the hubris
that sent that ship to its doom
is exactly the same thing
that sent those people in that
that sub to their fate.
And I just think it's heartbreaking.
I think it's heartbreaking that it was
it was so preventable.
James Cameron, I'm sorry
we're talking in these circumstances,
but I appreciate the level of detail
and expertize
that you bring to the conversation.
So thank you very much.
Well, thank you, Anderson.
It's been a pleasure.
All right.
Wish you well.