LONDON: Titanic submersible pilot Stockton Rush was “extremely” serious about safety, his former business partner said on Friday (Jun 23) after mounting criticism following a deadly implosion.
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 North Atlantic shipwreck.
William Kohnen, chairman of the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee, a voluntary industry body, said OceanGate was “not willing” to undergo a standard certification process for the Titan submersible.
But Guillermo Soehnlein, who started OceanGate with Rush in 2009 before leaving the company in 2013, denied his late friend was reckless.
“He was extremely committed to safety,” Soehnlein told Britain’s Times Radio, while stressing he was not involved in Titan’s experimental design.
“He was also extremely diligent about managing risks, and was very keenly aware of the dangers of operating in a deep ocean environment,” he said.
Soehnlein noted that Cameron himself had conducted many submersible descents, including more than 30 to the Titanic site, 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.”
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