they were ascending. so i believe now that they had some warning, that they heard some acoustic signature of the hull beginning to delaminate, and investigation will hopefully eventually show what did happen because we all need to know as we go forward. the deep submergence community needs to know exactly what happened. you ve made dozens of just extraordinary deep water expeditions including more than 30 to the titanic itself. you ve also gone far deeper than the 13,000 feet where the titanic is. i think you ve gone deeper than just about anybody into the ocean. i forgot the name of the place you went but the challenger deep but challenger deep, yeah. you went in your own design yeah, you went in your own designed craft that was a submersible that was experimental and didn t go through sort of the standard safety protocol. the difference is you were not
from st. john s newfoundland where the submersible titan first went out to sea on its way to the titanic. we re talking today about the five lives lost, also about the vessel itself and the questions surrounding it, namely the decision to build it out of carbon composite and not certify its safety as other such vessels are. back with deep sea explorer and titanic director james cameron. it s extraordinary to me that this debris field is just 1600 feet away from the bow of the titanic. obviously, people think of the bow of the titanic and they think of your film titanic with that iconic scene on the bow. i heard you earlier kind of talk about these two captains and kind of a similarity that you see. and i m wondering if you could talk about that. i think there s a great almost surreal irony here, which
submersible company called triton. i ll say that up front. trait triton, not titan. and triton has a perfect operational safety record across 20 vehicles and 10,000 hours of people diving to depths up to 1,000 meters. it can be done. but it requires rigor. and i think all of us in the community now, now our worst fears have happened and we know why it happened i think largely, you know, it puts us now on even more alert to be disciplined and to really think about the ethics of it. you know, there s a lot of countries where subs are diving all over the world. you re not going to have regulation everywhere that solves this problem. it s really more that we have to accept a standard of practice that we don t encourage operators to work without proper a.b.s. or german lloyds or whatever it is certification.
this. it s phenomenal do you worry about this having impact on the continued exploration? i do. look, 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, you know. 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 it s almost now a lesson, the takeaway is make sure if you re going to go into a vehicle, whether it s an aircraft or a surface craft or a submersible that it s been through certifying agencies. you know, that it s been signed off. every day we trust our lives to engineering. we step into an elevator. we make an assumption that somebody somewhere has done the math properly and it s all been certified properly. we should take the same precautions when we get into a submersible. even if i
this is where five explorers and would-be explorers first set off on friday, out into the open ocean, traveling some 460 miles from here toward the wreck of the rms titanic. then on sunday morning they were sealed inside the submersible tight sxn lowered into the ocean for their descent to the seabed some 13,000 feet below, about two miles. less than two hours later communication, as you know, was lost with the submersible and we just learned it was about that time a senior navy official tells cnn that a navy network of underwater sensors picked up sounds consistent, they said, with an implosion but that it was determined to be, quote, not definitive, unquote. well, this afternoon we learned the worst. this morning an r.o.v., or remote operated vehicle, from the vessel horizon arctic discovered the tail cone of the titan submersible approximately 1600 feet from the bow of the