OceanGate co-founder defends 'rigorous' sub testing after James Cameron's criticism
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Dave J Hogan/Getty Images; NEWSNATION/YOUTUBE James Cameron and OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein
One of the co-founders of OceanGate Expeditions is speaking out in defense of the Titan submersible program, after Titanic director James Cameron raised questions about the safety of the ill-fated craft.
Guillermo Söhnlein founded OceanGate in 2009 with Stockton Rush, one of the five people who died on board the Titan this week. Söhnlein left the company 10 years ago but retains a minority stake, and he defended the research and design process in interviews Friday, arguing that the Titan sub went through a "rigorous test program."
"I think one of the issues that keeps coming up is that everyone keeps equating certification with safety is ignoring the 14 years of development of the Titan sub," Söhnlein told BBC Radio 4's Today show. "Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr. Cameron, will also admit that they were not there for the design of the sub, for the engineering of the sub, for the building of the sub, and certainly not for the rigorous test program the sub went through."
He added, "This was a 14-year technology program, and it was very robust and certainly led successful science expeditions to the Titanic even over the last three years."
Söhnlein also told the U.K.'s Times Radio that during his time with OceanGate, "I know from firsthand experience that we were extremely committed to safety, and safety and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture."
A day earlier, Cameron had likened the loss of the Titan sub to the Titanic disaster itself, "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."
He added, "For 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 is just astonishing. It's really quite surreal."
In addition to directing Titanic, Cameron has a long history as an underwater explorer and has made more than 30 dives to the wreck of the Titanic. He also helped create the famed Deepsea Challenger and piloted it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
"Many people in the community were very concerned about [the Titan] sub," Cameron told ABC News, "and 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 it needed to be certified, and so on."
OceanGate announced Thursday that the five people aboard the Titan were believed to be dead, several days after the sub lost contact with its mother ship. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, the sub catastrophically imploded about halfway through its planned dive to the Titanic site.
Related content:
