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UPDATE: OceanGate co-founder hits back at James Cameron over Titanic sub comments
The former business partner of Titanic submersible pilot Stockton Rush said Friday that they put safety first when they co-founded their deep-sea exploration company.
Titanic movie director James Cameron has accused OceanGate Expeditions of ignoring safety warnings, after Rush and four other people were lost in a "catastrophic implosion" while descending to the shipwreck.
Guillermo Söhnlein, who started OceanGate with Rush before leaving the company in 2013, said he was not involved in the design of the Titan submersible, but denied his old friend was reckless.
"He was extremely committed to safety," he told Britain's Times Radio.
"He was also extremely diligent about managing risks, and was very keenly aware of the dangers of operating in a deep ocean environment.
"So that's one of the main reasons I agreed to go into business with him in 2009."
Söhnlein noted that Cameron himself had conducted many submersible descents, including more than 30 to the Titanic site in the North Atlantic, and to the Earth's deepest point in the Pacific Mariana Trench.
"I think he was asked about a similar risk and he said, 'Look, if something happens at that depth, it will be catastrophic in a matter of microseconds.'
"To the point where the implosion happens at almost supersonic speeds and you'd basically be dead before your brain could even process that anything was wrong."
Söhnlein stressed, however, that it was too soon to say what happened to the Titan, and that it was "tricky to navigate" to formulate global regulations for submersibles designed to go ultra deep.
But deep-sea exploration should continue despite the tragedy, he said.
"Just like with space exploration, the best way to preserve the memories and the legacies of these five explorers is to conduct an investigation, find out what went wrong, take lessons learned and then move forward."
Titanic director and renowned deep-sea explorer James Cameron said many warnings were ignored about the safety of the tourist submersible that imploded near the famous shipwreck, killing five people.
Cameron said the sub had been the source of widespread concern in the close-knit ocean exploration community, and drew parallels to the 1912 ocean liner sinking in which around 1 500 people died.
"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result," Cameron told ABC News.
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The US Coast Guard confirmed Thursday that the small sub, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, had suffered a "catastrophic implosion" in the ocean depths, ending a multinational search-and-rescue operation that captivated the world.
Cameron - who in 2012 became the first person to make a solo dive to the very deepest part of the ocean, in a submersible he designed and built - said the risk of a sub imploding under pressure was always "first and foremost" in engineers' minds.
"That's the nightmare that we've all lived with" since entering the field of deep exploration, he said, pointing to the sector's very strong safety record over recent decades.
But "many people in the community were very concerned about this sub," he said.
"A number of the 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 that it needed to be certified."
The Hollywood director added that he had personally known one of the lost submersible passengers, French ocean explorer Paul-Henri "PH" Nargeolet.
"It's a very small community. I've known PH for 25 years. For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process."
Cameron has visited the Titanic shipwreck many times in the course of - and since - directing his 1997 epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, which won a joint-record 11 Oscars.
"I know the wreck site very well... I actually calculated that I spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day," he said.
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