OceanGate Expeditions co-founder slams James Cameron, saying Titanic director “knows nothing” about the company and its imploded submersible

The OceanGate co-founder has hit back at Titanic director James Cameron, claiming he knows “nothing” about the company and its diving program.

Cameron “is a very experienced oceanographer and a submarine guy himself, but he doesn’t know anything about OceanGate and stuff like that,” says Guillermo Söhnlein, a 58-year-old Argentine-American entrepreneur. insiders said.

Cameron, 68, who has made more than 30 deep sea dives to the Titanic wreck, has criticized OceanGate and its lack of safeguards for the Titan submarine, which disappeared on June 18, imploding and killing all five crew members.

“The entire media narrative of how unsafe this is is based on David Lochridge, Marine Technology Society’s Will Kohnen, Jim Cameron, who doesn’t know about any of this … and Karl Stanley.” “Four people,” said Söhnlein, who co-founded the company with Stockton Rush in 2009.

After the high-profile tragedy, it emerged that Will Kohnen, chairman of the Marine Technology Society, had sent Rush a warning letter detailing how he believed the CEO was misleading the public because the Titan met industry safety standards.

Guillermo Söhnlein, a 58-year-old Argentine-American entrepreneur, founded OceanGate in 2009 with 61-year-old Stockton Rush

Cameron, 68, who has made more than 30 deep-sea dives to the Titanic wreck, has criticized OceanGate and its lack of safeguards for the Titanic submarine

The Titan submersible is pictured descending. It was the only five-person submarine capable of reaching the Titanic and the only tourist submarine not independently certified safe

Lochridge was fired as director of naval operations at OceanGate after raising concerns about “a lack of non-destructive testing on the Titan’s hull”.

Diving expert Stanley also spoke up after the disaster and explained that he had taken the Titan on a test drive in the Bahamas in 2019 and was concerned about its safety.

“Stockton designed a mousetrap for billionaires,” he said. But Söhnlein remained loyal and dismissed the criticism as a “loud minority”.

“Over the course of the last 15 years, this company probably employed about 200 people and laid off dozens of people.” And you’re only hearing from four people,” he told Insider.

“Common sense seems to indicate that this must be the vocal minority because there are many other people who are not speaking up and disagree with these four,” he added.

He also defended Stockton’s decision to use carbon fiber for the submarine’s hull, telling the publication, “The world only had one leading expert on the use of carbon fiber for deep ocean operations and that’s gone now.”

Rush died in the disaster, along with British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58; French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77; and British-Pakistani father and son Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19.

In 2012, James Cameron conducted a successful solo mission to the deepest known point on Earth, the Mariana Trench. He piloted the Deepsea Challenger (pictured), which was rated for depths in excess of 36,000 feet

Cameron in 2012 after his successful solo dive on the Deepsea Challenger to the deepest known point on earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean

A graphic shows Cameron’s mission in 2012 to the deepest known point in the ocean

Titan’s carbon fiber hull and acrylic viewport were the subject of several warnings, which James Cameron singled out as “potential sources of error” on the ship

Cameron gave a series of interviews following the news of Titan’s sinking, in which he criticized the “fundamentally flawed” carbon fiber hull

Cameron, a celebrated deep-sea explorer and famed film director, has previously said that Titan’s carbon-fiber design was widely considered unsafe in the deep-sea exploration community.

Söhnlein had previously dismissed Cameron’s opinion to Times Radio: “One of the things Mr. Cameron was right about saying is that the deep-sea research community is very small.”

“We all know each other. I think in general we all respect each other.

“But as you would expect in a community like this, there are wildly different opinions about how to do things — how to design submersibles, how to design them, how to go about diving.”

“But one thing that is true of me and all the other experts who have spoken is that none of us were involved in the design, construction or even testing of the submarines.”

“So it’s not possible for anyone to really speculate from the outside.”

Söhnlein said Cameron and others were wrong when they called OceanGate reckless.

“I was involved in the early stages of the entire development program during our previous versions of Titan.”

“And I know from personal experience that safety was very important to us and risk mitigation was an integral part of the company culture.”

Still, Cameron said there were several “potential failure points” in the doomed Titan submersible – and a warning system likely alerted the five crew members who died shortly before the ship imploded.

Cameron said the Titan had “three potential sources of failure” and pointed out that its “Achilles’ heel” was the carbon fiber cylinder.

He added that the hull shattered into “very small pieces” after Titan imploded as the hull ruptured due to pressure.

A warning system probably sounded an alarm and the crew tried to ascend the moment before the implosion, he added.