James Cameron, Bob Ballard discuss missing Titanic submersible tragedy l GMA

the tragic implosion of the Titan sub taking people to see the Titanic wreckage joining us now are James Cameron director of the Oscar winning Titanic and Bob Ballard the Ocean Explorer discovered that Titanic wreckage both our National Geographic explorers at large welcome to you both right now I know you both lost friends in this track thank you Bob you knew ocean Gates founder Stockton Rush quite well tell us about him well I met him quite honestly through his father over 20 years ago and I remember when he came up to me he was fascinated with the Titanic and had the dream his dream was to go down and explore the Titanic but unfortunately that dream turned into a nightmare and James you were long time friends with Paul Henry naggio lay who was a deep sea Explorer Titanic expert yeah we called him pH or in French payosh and he was one of the people that I looked up to when I first started in the sort of deep submergence world he had been out to Titanic before me and then we had a kind of friendly competition over the years he'd go out one year I'd go out the next year and we we explored the wreck site he was more focused on the debris field where they were recovering all kinds of artifacts which are in museums all around the world and I was more focused on the actual physical part of the wreck and the interior exploration of it but we made about the same number of Dives down to the wreck side so I know him very well and it's just this horrible horrible tragedy that's taken place here it sure has let's talk a little bit more about it Bob you said once you heard about The vessel's Disappearance you knew this was the outcome yes yes we are very familiar with exploring wrecks like this I explored the Scorpion just to to the east of the Titanic did a similar forensic analysis and we detected its implosion with our underwater listening system and that's what the Navy told the Coast Guard the moment it happened they picked up the implosion passed it on to the to the Coast Guard so we immediately knew that where to go and where to look but it just took time to get the rovs down there and they finally got there yesterday Bob what do you think went wrong well that's the big debate and there will be now a very systematic survey like I said I've done this before on the loss of the thresher in the Scorpion it's scattered all over the place so the rovs are going to do a very very precise systematic mapping that will collect the photography and high definition imagery and they'll also be recovering the objects so this investigation will go on for quite some time obviously Jim can talk about the the nature of the hull itself I'm still curious about whether the porthole was also part of it yeah and an awesome event that's exactly what I want to go to James on you you have been you've had have been critical of the design of the submersible what were the problems there there are actually three potential failure points and the investigation hopefully can localize it down to exactly what happened the uh the viewport in the front was an acrylic viewport I'm told it was rated to less depth than they were diving it to which is one point they also had a uh two glass spheres on the sub small glass spheres for flotation which is a bad idea those are prone to failure over time but I think the weakest link if I had to put money down on what the finding will be the Achilles heel of the sub was the composite cylinder that was the main Hull that the people were inside there were two titanium end caps on each end they are relatively intact on the sea floor but that carbon fiber composite cylinder is now just in very small pieces and it's all rammed into the one of the one of the hemispheres so it's pretty clear that that that's what failed the question is was it the primary failure or secondary failure from something else happening but I'm putting my money on the composite because you don't use Composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure they're great for internal pressure vessels like scuba tanks for example but they're terrible for external pressure so this was trying to apply Aviation thinking to a deep submergence engineering problem and I we all said that it was uh you know a flawed idea and they didn't go through certification so it wasn't sort of peer reviewed by other engineering entities you know like any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that and I think that was a critical failure Bob how do you explain these failures well you know this is the first time I think the important thing as Jim pointed out we've been diving in deep water since 1960 when they went down to Challenger Deep 35 800 feet seven miles down we've made thousands and thousands and thousands of Dives with other countries as well to these depths and have never had an incident so this is the first time and The Smoking Gun is this is the first time by a submarine that wasn't classed got it and and and and James of course what is so Eerie here the similarities to the sinking of the Titanic you know the the I think the great tragedy here is Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system uh back then and 1500 people uh paid the price for it uh the warnings were not heated they were warned about the ice they had radio then they you know the Marconi grams the the Titanic's captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead he steamed full Full Ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon if that isn't a recipe for disaster I don't know what is and they paid the price and here you have the people that were designing and operating this sub who were warned both internally apparently there's an engineer that walked off the project because he didn't believe in it and a number of people in the in the greater you know kind of deep submergence engineering community including people that I'm very close with uh warned the company that this could lead to literally the term was catastrophic failure and that's exactly what happened the thing that's Insidious here I think is that the way composite you know Carbon Fiber materials fail at pressure as they fail over time each each dive adds more and more microscopic damage so yes they operated the sub safely at Titanic last year and the year before but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with them and and Bob as you said there have been thousands and thousands of safe Dives how do we assure that in the future well I think we're following the engineering practice we do I've dove in numerous deep submersibles over the years and I never feared for the pressure vessel I was in I've always had great confidence It generally has a safety pact or 1.5 I've made hundreds of dies in in a submersible around the world but my favorite one naturally is where I was at Woods Hole with the Alvin and uh diving in the Alvin is safer than diving driving on I-95 thank you both for sharing your insights well hey there GMA fans Robin Roberts here thanks for checking out our YouTube channel lots of great stuff here so go on click the Subscribe button right over right over here to get more of Awesome videos and content from GMA every day anytime we thank you for watching and we'll see you in the morning on GMA

Channel: Good Morning America

Views: 265,154

Keywords: artifacts, cameron, debris, field, implosion, james, mission, oceangate, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-100330107, recovery, site, sub, submersible, titan, titanic, wreck, wreckage, james cameron, missing sub, sub implosion, titanic wreckage, titan sub, titanic submarine james cameron, titanic submersible, bob ballard, breaking news

Id: zd8TVSbl1_g

Length: 7min 34sec (454 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023