“Titanic” director James Cameron on Friday blamed the carbon fiber composite construction hull of the doomed OceanGate submersible for its tragic implosion this week.
The material likely led to the “critical failure” that claimed the lives of five passengers aboard the minivan-sized craft, Cameron told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
“You don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure,” he said. “They’re great for internal pressure vessels like scuba tanks, for example, but they’re terrible for external pressure.”
Cameron said the submersible’s designers relied on aviation engineering rather than submergence technology — an approach he believes led to the implosion during a tour of Titanic wreckage.
“We all said that it was, you know, a flawed idea and they didn’t go through certification,” he said.
“I think that was a critical failure.”
Cameron argued that carbon fiber accumulates damage with each dive.
“They fail over time, each dive adds more and more microscopic damage,” he said. “So, yes, they operated the sub safely at Titanic last year and the year before, but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with them.”
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who died in the submersible, previously asserted that carbon fiber was preferable to alternatives like titanium.
Virginia Tech ocean engineering professor Stefano Brizzolara also zeroed in on the hull as the possible cause of the disaster in a Friday interview with The Post.
Brizzolara said the carbon fiber element is “very prone to possible defects” and “exhibits a more fragile behavior” than other materials that could have been used.
Meanwhile, a writer who was slated to travel on the Titan in May claimed Rush told him the hull was constructed with discounted carbon fiber from Boeing that had passed its airplane shelf-life.
Arnie Weissmann, editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, wrote this week that Rush dismissed concerns about the materials, arguing that airlines discarded them prematurely.
OceanGate said it “successfully validated” Titan’s carbon fiber and titanium hull to a depth of 4,000 meters, or 13,123 feet, according to a 2018 Facebook post.
