Titanic sub debris – update: Five men confirmed dead as James Cameron says he knew about implosion

Five crew members are presumed to be dead after the Titan submarine suffered a ‘catastrophic explosion’ – this is how it all unfolded.

Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron says both the Titanic and the Titan incidents were preceded by unheeded warnings.

In the Titanic’s case, the captain sped across the Atlantic on a moonless night despite being told about icebergs.

“Here were are again,” Mr Cameron said. “And at the same place. Now there’s one wreck lying next to the other wreck for the same damn reason.”

Pakistan-born businessman Shahzada Dawood who was one of the five people on board the Titan submersible, reportedly survived a flight plunge so horrific that it had him fearing for his life, his wife revealed.

The 48-year-old British national and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, were on the submersible that imploded underwater, killing them.I

n a blog post, Dawood’s wife Christine, recalled surviving a flight alongside her husband that left her frozen with “absolute terror”.

“I should have known when they canceled our flight and put us on the next one. We should have taken the sign, gone back home and had a long and generous breakfast. But we didn’t,” she said in the post, dated 22 January 2019.

Describing her experience, Christine wrote that passengers let out “… one simultaneous cry, which turned to a whimper and then silence”.

That was the first of multiple violent plunges that left her feeling “like a grain in a big bag of sand, or a boxer being soundly defeated—punched from all directions”.

“I clutched my armrests, as if that would make a difference,” she said, adding: “I needed something to hold on to, something stable in a shaky metal tube thousands of feet above the ground.”

Coast Guard offers deepest condolences to families of those on board submersible that imploded, including three British citizens.

Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron said he received the information within 24 hours of the disappearance of the submersible Titan that it had imploded when it lost communication with its mothership.

“We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost,” Mr Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic, said.

“A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,” he said, adding that he told colleagues in an email on Monday, “We’ve lost some friends,” and, “It’s on the bottom in pieces right now”.

Alisha Rahaman Sarkar reports.

CEO and founder Stockton Rush presumed dead along with four others who paid $250,000 per seat.

US Coast Guard said debris of Titan sub found near wreck of liner after it suffered ‘Catastrophic implosion’.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and four paying passengers presumed dead after debris found near the wreck.

James Cameron, director of the blockbuster Titanic and a deep-sea submersible designer himself, likened the Titan tragedy in which five people died this week to the sinking of the ill-fated ocean liner because of the safety warnings both received prior to their disasters.

He told ABC News that the wider submersible engineering community had been specifically concerned about the OceanGate Expeditions vehicle, the Titan before it went missing on Sunday.

Oliver O’Connell reports:

Suleman Dawood, 19, died alongside his father, Shahzada Dawood on the Titan submersible during an expedition to the Titanic wreckage.

Suleman was a student at Strathclyde University in Glasgow who was “big fan of science fiction literature and learning new things”, with an interest in Rubik’s Cube and playing volleyball, according to his family.