“I know from experience that we were extremely committed to safety.” In various interviews with the media, the OceanGate co-founder defends the US company against criticism from James Cameron after the implosion of the Titan submersible that left five dead last week.
The director of the film Titanic, and himself an avid explorer of the seabed, has repeatedly denounced the condition and design of the vehicle that submerged at the site of the famous ship’s wreck.
“different points of view”
“One of the things that James Cameron said was right was that the deep-sea exploration community is very small – we all know each other and I think we all generally respect each other,” Guillermo Söhnlein said into a Times Radio microphone.
“There are completely different opinions and viewpoints on how to do things, how to design submersibles, how to fabricate them, how to build them, how to operate during dives,” he continued.
In another interview with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, he again mentioned James Cameron’s name, saying the director was not present during the sub’s construction and his “construction schedule” as “rigorous testing”.
“Therefore, it is impossible for someone to speculate from outside,” he defended himself.
“Very robust”
“People continue to equate certification with safety and ignore the fourteen years of Titan development, which was very robust and certainly led to successful scientific observations of Titanic in recent years,” added Guillermo Söhnlein.
In an interview with ABC News, James Cameron told him that the carbon fiber design of the OceanGate submersible was “too experimental to carry passengers and needed to be certified.”
Since then, he has appeared on various news channels to reiterate his concerns about the lack of vehicle certification and called for more regulation.
“I think it is unacceptable that this group has not followed this rigorous process,” he said, adding that the incident could have been prevented and that the community had been concerned for years.
David Lochridge, a former security manager at OceanGate, says he was fired in January 2018 after “raising significant security concerns regarding Titan’s experimental and untested design.”
Similarities to the Titanic
Criticisms refuted by Guillermo Söhnlein. “I was involved in the early phases of the overall development program when Titan was created, and I know from experience that we were extremely committed to security and that risk mitigation was a key part of the business culture,” he told Times Radio. . .
Guillermo Söhnlein co-founded OceanGate Expeditions with Stockton Rush, who piloted the Titan and perished on board. He served as CEO before leaving the company in 2013, while remaining a minority shareholder, with Stockton Rush taking over management of the company. The company had been using the Titan submarine for expeditions with “citizen explorers” on the Titanic since 2021.
The former leader lamented a “tragic loss to the ocean exploration community” but added that anyone operating in the deep ocean “knows the risk and knows that at any moment … they are at risk of such an implosion.”
For his part, James Cameron said he was “struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster, where the captain was repeatedly warned of the presence of ice in front of his ship and yet drove at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died”.
“For us, this is a very similar tragedy, where warnings were not heeded. The fact that the accident happened at the same site, with all the diving activities taking place around the world, is just unbelievable. It’s really surreal.” He concluded.
Source: BFM TV
