'Surreal': James Cameron struck by similarities between Titanic and Titan's fates

James Cameron talks about the parallels between the Titanic and the Titan sub, which he says both received 'unheeded warnings'

Titanic director and submersible expert James Cameron said he believes there is a "surreal irony" while comparing the similarities between the fate of the Titanic and doomed sub Titan.

All five people onboard the submersible died in the vessel’s catastrophic implosion, search authorities confirmed after days of searching.

Search teams were in a race against time after the sub lost contact on Sunday during its deep dive to the Titanic wreck.

With only days of oxygen aboard the tiny craft, rescue crews from around the world converged to attempt to locate and retrieve the sub before its air ran out.

'The deep submergence community needs to know exactly what happened,' says director James Cameron

But on Thursday, authorities said they had discovered a debris field near the Titanic, later confirming they believed the parts to be from the missing sub, wrecked in a 'catastrophic implosion.'

During the search, questions were raised about the deep sea-worthiness of the sub, including in a lawsuit between OceanGate and an ex-employee who alleged he was fired after repeatedly raising safety concerns.

Cameron's 1997 hit film Titanic intensified nearly a century of fascination with the doomed ocean liner.

The film director drew comparisons between the Titanic's sinking, and the Titan sub's fate.

He told CNN: “I think there was a great, almost surreal irony here which is Titanic sank because the captain took it full-steam into an ice field at night, on a moonless night, with very poor visibility, after he had been repeatedly warned by telegram, by radio... during the day that's what was ahead of him."

Cameron is himself a submersible designer, and has made 33 dives to the wreck of the Titanic, which lies on the Atlantic seabed at pitch dark depths of around 12,000-ft.

More than 1,500 lives were lost when the Titanic struck an iceberg then sank during its maiden voyage from Britain to the United States on April 15, 1912.

Cameron continued: "I think we're also seeing a parallel here with unheeded warnings about a sub that was not certified.

"A large number of (the deep submergence community) got together to write a letter to OceanGate and say: 'We believe this could lead to catastrophe.'

"It was less a criticism of the engineering, than of the process... So they were trying to head this whole thing off, it was our worst nightmare."

The Titanic disaster led to widespread maritime safety regulation reforms, and locating the lost wreck became a source of obsession for explorers in the decades that followed.

The Titanic's wreck was finally discovered in an expedition led by oceanographers Robert and Ballard and Jean Michel in 1985, and its story captured worldwide fascination anew.

British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman died on the Titan, a tourist sub en route to explore the Titanic's wreck, alongside French submersible pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions Stockton Rush, and British billionaire and pilot Hamish Harding.

Cameron reflected on questions about the vessel's safety.

"All of us in the deep submergence community, people like myself... implosion is obviously the spectre that looms over us all the time.

"But because of that, that's the thing that you engineer for the most, years in advance.

"That should never be the problem - I've never believed that if I was going to have a serious problem in a sub, it would be from implosion."

Cameron spoke candidly about him hearing, possibly from a military official through his deep-sea exploration contacts, that an "implosion" sound had been heard around the same time the sub lost contact on Sunday.

Because of this, from Monday, he encouraged others to "raise a glass" to the crew.

"I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades.

"Then I watched over the ensuing days everybody running around with their hair on fire search, knowing full well that it was futile - hoping against hope that I was wrong, but knowing in my bones that I wasn't.

"So it certainly wasn't a surprise today, and I just feel terrible for all the families that had to go through all these false hopes that kept getting dangled as it played out."

On the future of deep-sea exploration, Cameron said: "I'm not worried about exploration, because explorers will go.

"And I'm not worried about innovation because people will innovate.

"I'm worried that it has a negative impact on let's say, citizen explorers - tourists - but these are serious people with serious curiosity, willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places and I don't want to discourage that."

"But I think that the lesson to take away is, make sure that if you're going to go into a vehicle, whether it's an aircraft or a service craft or a submersible, that it's been through certifying agencies, that it's been signed off."

Speaking after search teams confirmed they believed all five people aboard the Titan had died in a catastrophic implosion, Cameron reflected on questions about the vessel's safety to ABC.

The film director has designed submersibles himself which have travelled to depths far greater than the Titanic's resting place, and he said he understood the "engineering problems" and safety protocols inherent in building vessels capable of the deepest sea missions.

Cameron explained deep submergence vessels the world over are subject to strict safety protocols before dives, crediting those standards of an extraordinary lack of tragedies in the industry, until now.

He told ABC: "This is a mature art, and many, many people in the community were concerned about this sub, and a number of 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."

Cameron called Titan victim, Mr Nargeolet, a friend and "legendary" submersible dive for pilot, whom he had known for 25 years.

"For him to have died tragically, in this way, is almost impossible for me to process."The US Coast Guard confirmed the tail cone of the deep-sea vessel was discovered around 1,600 ft from the bow of the Titanic wreckage during a press conference in Boston on Thursday.

Rear Admiral John Mauger said further debris was also found, in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, that was “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”.

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