OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein, who maintains a minority ownership stake in the company, has lashed out at critics in a new statement, singling out Titanic director James Cameron in a comment that claimed the development of the lost Titan submersible had been “rigorous” and that the craft itself was “robust.” Söhnlein, who is continuing to toe the company line that tech developers know better than government regulators when it comes to safety, told BBC Radio 4’s Today show that he thought people were misguided to associate safety certifications with…well…safety. He points to the long development process for the submisersible and claims criticisms are unfair.
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Söhnlein reportedly left OceanGate 10 years ago, but as co-founder maintains a stake in the company. Co-founder and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush died on board the Titan earlier this week.
“Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr. Cameron, will also admit that they were not there for the design of the sub, for the engineering of the sub, for the building of the sub and certainly not for the rigorous test program the sub went through,” Söhnlein said. “This was a 14-year technology development program and it was very robust and certainly led through successful science expeditions to the Titanic even over the last three years.”
Söhnlein and Rush had both previously been quoted as being skeptical of government safety regulations — comments that have been dug up and criticized since the Titan went missing on Sunday.
“The collective ‘we’ didn’t remember the lesson of Titanic,” Cameron told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “These guys at OceanGate didn’t. Because the arrogance and the hubris that sent that ship to its doom is exactly the same thing that sent those people in that sub to their fate. And I just think it’s heartbreaking. I think it’s heartbreaking that it was so preventable.”
As reported by People, Cameron had previously told the BBC that OceanGate “didn’t get certified because they knew they wouldn’t pass”. He added, “I was very suspect of the technology that they were using. I wouldn’t have gotten in that sub.”
If Cameron is to be believed — and given his many journeys to the Titanic over the course of the last three decades, it seems reasonable to think he has some credibility on this — other members of the deep submersible community had expressed these concerns to Rush repeatedly, including once in writing, telling OceanGate, “You are going on a path to catastrophe.”
