OceanGate co-founder believes ‘Titanic’ director James Cameron ‘knows nothing’ about doomed sub
The co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions took a swipe at critic James Cameron, saying the “Titanic” director and deep-sea explorer “knows nothing” about the company and its imploded submersible.
Cameron “is a very experienced ocean explorer and a sub guy himself, but knows nothing about OceanGate and that stuff,” Guillermo Söhnlein told Insider.
The 68-year-old director made waves after the Titan disappeared June 18 with five people aboard, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, on its way to the Titanic’s remains.
Cameron, who described himself as an expert who made 33 trips to the shipwreck, criticized Rush and his company for allegedly skirting routine safety protocols and engineering standards for the sake of tourism.
“One of the saddest aspects of this is how preventable it really was,” Cameron told the BBC.
Söhnlein responded to the criticism, saying, “The media’s whole spin on how unsafe this was is based on David Lochridge, Will Kohnen from Marine Technology Society, Jim Cameron, who knows nothing about any of this stuff … and Karl Stanley. Four people.”
Lochridge was fired as OceanGate’s director of marine operations after raising concerns and saying he found “a lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan.
Kohnen, chairman of the Marine Technology Society’s manned submersibles committee, had sent Rush a letter warning him that he was misleading the public with false claims that the Titan met industry safety standards.
Stanley, a submersible expert who rode on the Titan during a test run in the Bahamas in 2019, has said that “Stockton was designing a mouse trap for billionaires,” and suggested that he was happy to risk the lives of his deep-pocketed passengers in order to go down in history.
Söhnlein noted that complaints about OceanGate came from a minority of people.
“Over the course of 15 years that company’s probably employed like 200 and has dived dozens of people. And you’re only hearing from four people,” he told Insider.
“Common sense seems to indicate these must be the vocal minority because there are a lot of other people that aren’t speaking up who disagree with those four,” he said.
“The world only had one foremost expert on using carbon fiber to go in the deep oceans and he’s gone now,” Söhnlein added about Rush.
In addition to Rush, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman, were killed in the Titan.
OceanGate’s website has gone dark after the company suspended all exploratory and commercial operations amid criticism of the vessel’s shoddy construction and what some perceive as lax attitudes about safety.
Cameron has denied that he is working on a disaster film about the tragedy,
