Titanic submersible: ‘Catastrophic implosion’ doomed Titan — and the U.S. Navy likely heard it Sunday

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James Cameron is reacting to the presumed deaths of the five passengers on board the Titan.

The director of the Titanic movie told ABC News Thursday that the diving community was “deeply concerned” about the submersible’s safety even before Sunday's expedition. 

“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 claimed.

The Oceangate submersible Titan

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After reports discovered Titan debris was found, indicating the crew inside was dead, Cameron said he couldn’t help but connect the circumstances of the presumed catastrophe to that of the Titanic. 

“I’m struck by the similarity of 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 said.

“For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded,” the Canadian director surmised. “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.”

Cameron, 68, is not only a filmmaker but an experienced diver, reportedly completing 33 trips to the ship’s wreckage site in his life.

On Thursday afternoon, OceanGate announced that the 5 people onboard a missing submersible, which lost contact with their main ship less than two hours into the eight-hour expedition, have died.

The Oceangate submersible Titan

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"We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost," the company said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.

"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew," the statement continued.

In a press conference on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that an ROV discovered debris 1,600 feet from the bough of the tailbone of the Titanic wreckage on the sea floor.

Wreck of Titanic

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The Coast Guard said that the debris that they found was consistent with the catastrophic loss of pressure in the 'Titan' chamber.

"This is an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss," read the company statement. "The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful for the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who expedited wide-ranging resources and have worked so very hard on this mission."



The five-day search for a missing submarine and its five passengers came to a tragic end Thursday in the same icy, unforgiving depths of the Atlantic that claimed the Titanic 111 years ago.

Debris discovered on the ocean floor by a Canadian remotely operated vehicle was determined to have come from the Titan, the seven-meter-long submersible that dove on Sunday with five passengers on an excursion to view the iconic wreck.

The Titan lost contact with its surface vessel, the Polar Prince, 700 kilometers south-southeast of Newfoundland, an hour and 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour descent to the Titanic, 3,800 meters below on the ocean floor.

For the next five days, ships, airplanes, and remotely operated vehicles from four countries and a host of private companies crisscrossed a search area more than four times the size of Prince Edward Island, racing against the clock and the four-day air supply left to the Titan’s occupants — a supply that was projected to run out Thursday morning.

There was a seemingly hopeful but ultimately futile blip 24 hours earlier, when a “banging” sound was detected, prompting the redeployment of an ROV to investigate that area of the ocean bed.

But on Thursday afternoon, after analyzing the found debris, that search came to an end. It was not because of the dwindling air supply.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” said U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger on Thursday afternoon. “Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families. On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.”

OceanGate, the company which operated the Titan and ran the Titanic excursion — and whose CEO piloted the fated submersible — said shortly before that announcement that it feared the worst.

“We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,” the statement by OceanGate said.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” read the statement. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

This June 22 satellite image courtesy of Maxar Technologies shows the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic (2nd from top), Deep Energy (C) and Skandi Vinland (bottom) searching for the missing Titan submersible. A robot from the Canadian vessel found some of the Titan debris.

The death of the five men will surely bring scrutiny over the future of big-money adventure tourism, and certainly raise questions about where and when it should be allowed and how it should be regulated. Questions are also being raised about what rescue officials knew and when.

Paul Hankin, director of salvage operations and ocean engineering for the U.S. Navy, said that the Canadian ROV found “five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan.”

The debris was found 500 metres off the bow of the Titanic, in an area where the ocean bottom was smooth and clear of any Titanic wreckage.

Initially, said Hankin, the ROV found the nose cone of the Titan, then, within a large debris field, the front-end bell of the submersible’s pressure hull.

“That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event,” he said.

Shortly after, the ROV found another, smaller debris field, which contained the aft-end bell of the Titan’s pressure hull.

The location of the debris field and the timing of the event — based on the loss of communication with its surface vessel and the lack of evidence from sonar buoys in the water during the search — lead to the conclusion that the Titan suffered a “catastrophic implosion” in the water column.

Mercifully — if that is the word — death for the occupants of the Titan would have been quick, almost instantaneous; crushed by the enormous weight of the ocean at pressures some 330 times greater than we experience at the surface.

Several news outlets reported Thursday evening that a U.S. Navy official said the navy detected “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” shortly after the sub lost contact Sunday. CBS said the information was relayed to the coast guard, which used it to narrow the radius of the search area. The Wall Street Journal also reported on the detection, saying the official called it “not definitive.”



Meanwhile, tributes were pouring in for the passengers. Pakistan offered the nation’s condolences to the two members of the Dawood family, one of the country’s most prominent.

A statement on behalf of the family of Hamish Harding and his company, Action Aviation, described him as” a loving husband to his wife and a dedicated father to his two sons.”

“If we can take any small consolation from this tragedy, it’s that we lost him doing what he loved,” the statement said.

At the afternoon briefing, a somber Mauger was pessimistic about the chances of recovering bodies.

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. So, we’ll continue to work and continue to search the area down there but I don’t have an answer for prospects at this time,” he said.

Mauger said ROVs would continue to search the ocean floor, but that some of the search flotilla — there were nine vessels on site as of Thursday afternoon — would be demobilized in the next 24 hours.

“We’re going to continue to investigate the site of the debris field,” said Mauger.

“And then I know that there’s also a lot of questions about how, why and when did this happen? Those are questions that we will collect as much information as we can on now.”

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