Titanic director James Cameron called the day-long search operation for the doomed submarine Titan a “nightmare charade” – claiming he knew the ship imploded just hours after it lost contact with the surface.
Cameron, a submarine pioneer who made 33 of his own expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic, he told the BBC on Friday that he “felt in his bones” that the Titan submarine had gone missing shortly after news broke that five people on board were missing.
The 68-year-old director said that the submarine hunt that followed – including counting down how much oxygen was left and that pounding sounds were heard – “felt like a protracted and nightmarish farce.”
“So far as I’m concerned, it was just cruel, slowly turning the screw over 4 days,” Cameron said. “Because I came upon the reality on Monday morning.
“For me, there was little doubt. I knew the sub was exactly below its last known depth and position. That is where they found him,” he added.
After days of searching, the U.S. Coast Guard revealed Thursday that the implosion killed all five passengers immediately during their descent to check the 111-year-old stays of the Titanic.
Search teams made the determination after debris from the submarine was positioned in an ocean flood near the wreck of the ocean liner.
But Cameron said he knew immediately there had been an “extreme disaster” when he heard the submarine had lost navigation and communications lower than two hours after leaving at 6am on Sunday.
“I felt in my bones what had happened. Failure of the submarine’s electronics and its communication system, in addition to the tracking transponder concurrently – spells the top of the sub, he said.
The famous director said he quickly reached out to his underwater contacts and after an hour was informed that the ship was near the ocean floor when he lost contact.
“Their communications have been lost and their navigation has been lost. I immediately said that you would be able to’t lose communications and navigation together without an extreme catastrophe or high-energy catastrophe,” he said.
“The very first thing that got here to mind was implosion.”
Cameron said one in all the saddest features of this deadly ordeal was how “it really might have been prevented”.
“We now have one other wreck that’s unfortunately based on the identical principles of disregarding warnings,” he said.
Passengers lost on the ship include British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman.