‘Safer than getting an elevator’: James Cameron staunchly defends deep sea exploration in the wake of the Titan tragedy

In the immediate aftermath of the Titan submersible going missing, it was inevitable that James Cameron would end up offering his two cents on the tragic incident.

After all, not only is the the filmmaker behind the critical, commercial, and awards season juggernaut Titanic, but he’s also made upwards of 30 dives to the wreckage of the titular ship, on top of helping design and engineer a submersible that saw him journey to the deepest recesses of the Mariana Trench.

His criticism of OceanGate was scathing to say the least, but it wasn’t entirely inaccurate, with Cameron doubling down on his sentiment in an interview with The Guardian where he outlined just how safe submersibles and underwater exploration are in 99 percent of cases, describing it as “safer than getting an elevator and safer than getting on an airplane.”

“The things you can imagine being problems – and the obvious ones are implosion and pressure – you can engineer against or you can create processes and procedures to mitigate. When you’re 25 years into the process of building vehicles to go very deep and you’re working with people that are experienced, you’ve pretty much seen almost everything that can go wrong. It’s the risks, you can’t imagine – a piece of foam falling off the space shuttle and hitting the carbon leading edge of the wing.

Nobody ever imagined that, so you can’t engineer against something that you can’t imagine. There have been no fatalities in the deep submergence community; zero. Zero fatalities, zero incidents where people were injured or where a sub was lost and had to be recovered by the coastguard in some big rescue operation. Zero in half a century. But it takes one incident to wake everybody up.”

Like he said, the Titan made the dangers all too real and captured worldwide attention, but Cameron wants the end result to be an increase in safety and experience when undertaking such potentially perilous journeys, and not a growing sense of fear and panic that deep sea exploration is a dangerous game.