OceanGate Expeditions co-founder denounces James Cameron, says ‘Titanic’ executive ‘knows nothing’ about the company and its imploded submarine

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

Cameron “is a very experienced ocean explorer and a submariner himself, but knows nothing about OceanGate and things like that,” Guillermo Söhnlein, a 58-year-old Argentine-American entrepreneur, told Insider.

Cameron, 68, who has completed more than 30 scuba dives to the wreckage of the Titanic, has criticized OceanGate and the lack of safety procedures for the submarine Titan, which disappeared on June 18, imploded and killed all five crew members.

“The whole media spin on how unsafe this was is based on David Lochridge, Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society, Jim Cameron, who knows nothing about this sort of thing… and Karl Stanley. Söhnlein of four people, who founded the company in 2009 with Stockton Rush.

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

Cameron, 68, who has completed more than 30 scuba dives to the Titanic wreck, has criticized OceanGate and the lack of safety procedures for the Titan submarine.

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

Lochridge was fired as OceanGate’s Director of Maritime Operations after raising concerns about “a lack of non-destructive testing on the Titan’s hull.”

Diving expert Stanley also spoke out after the disaster, explaining that he had ridden the Titan during a test trip in the Bahamas in 2019 and was concerned about its safety.

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

Over the course of 15 years, that company probably employed about 200 people and laid off dozens of people. And you only hear 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 don’t speak up and disagree with those four,” he added.

He also defended Stockton’s decision to use carbon fiber for the submarine’s hull, telling the publication, “The world had only one leading expert in using carbon fiber to go into the deep oceans and he’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 designed to withstand depths of over 10,000 feet

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

An image shows Cameron’s 2012 mission to the deepest known point in the ocean

Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its acrylic viewing window were subject to several warnings, and James Cameron called them “potential points of failure” on the ship

Cameron gave a series of interviews following news of Titan’s demise, criticizing the ‘fundamentally flawed’ carbon fiber hull

Cameron, who is both a celebrated deep-sea explorer and a famous director, has previously said that the Titan’s carbon-fiber design was widely viewed as unsafe within the deep-sea research community.

Söhnlein previously rejected Cameron’s view to Times Radio, ‘one of the things Mr Cameron said that was correct is that the deep sea exploration community is very small.

‘We all know each other. I think we all generally respect each other.

‘But as you would expect in this kind of community there are completely different opinions about how to do things – how to design submersibles, how to build them, how to dive.

“But one thing that is true for me, and every other expert who has spoken, is that none of us were involved in the design, engineering, or even testing of the submarines.

“So it’s impossible for anyone to really speculate from the outside.”

Söhnlein said Cameron and others were wrong in calling OceanGate reckless.

“I was involved in the early stages of the overall development program, during our predecessors at Titan.

“And I know from first-hand experience that we were very committed to safety, and risk mitigation was an important part of the company culture.”

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

Cameron said the Titan had “three potential points of failure” and indicated its “Achilles’ heel” was the carbon fiber cylinder.

He added that the hull had broken into “very small pieces” after Titan imploded as the hull broke from the pressure.

A warning system likely issued a warning and the crew attempted to take off just before the implosion, he added.