The “Titanic” director and diving expert said he’d had concerns from the start about the vehicle’s hull composition and claims about its network of hull sensors.
“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.
Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.
In an interview, Mr. Cameron called the presumed loss of five lives aboard the Titan submersible from the company OceanGate like nothing anyone involved in private ocean exploration had ever seen.
“There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions,” he said.
An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”
In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep.
