James Cameron, the director of Titanic, said the delaying of the submersible Titan must have led to the implosion. He added that the material of the submersible carbon fiber composite was just the wrong material.
Delamination occurs when water ingress forces the layers of fibers apart, and theoretically you can hear it. I actually believe they heard it with their ears, not through the sensor system, at the last moments of their lives. And that's quite a horrifying prospect, he said in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper. The Titan submersible had sensors that could analyze the effects of changing pressure as it scanned the vessel's integrity.
The Titanic director said that carbon fiber composite, made of the Titan, is used very successfully for internal pressure, for vessels like a scuba tank. But for something that sees external pressure, all of the advantages of carbon composites go away and all the disadvantages come into play, he said. It was the wrong material for submersible hulls. You can make several successful dives and fail later. It's quite insidious, he said.
He also has gone far deeper than the 13,000 ft where the Titanic ruins rest. James Cameron has been to the Challenger Deep, the deepest seabed in the world.
In the interview, Cameron said he was on a ship when the event happened and that the first he knew of it was on Monday. He soon found out that the Titan lost communication and tracking simultaneously, making him realize that it was probably an implosion a shockwave event, which was so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is.
He said that he took the reports of the loud noises as a factor that he multiplied with other factors. He said he couldn t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost, where it lost communication and navigation at the same time and stayed out of touch and did not surface.