James Cameron Shares Terrifying Story About His Failed Titanic Submersible Dive: “Things Started to Fail” at Around 26,000 Feet Deep
Celine Dion famously belts out the lyrics “My heart will go on” in the song of the same name in James Cameron‘s 1997 classic Titanic. However, Cameron revealed that during one fateful deep submarine dive, he was “really debating if (he) should go on.”
In an interview posted on TikTok (that you can watch directly above), he recaps the time he was embarking on his deepest solo dive to the New Britain Trench, which Cameron shared had a target depth of 27,000 feet. However, according to Cameron, “things started to fail” at around 26,000 feet.
He “began to suspect it was what they call the ‘PAC’,” which is “the control computer that all the systems ran through that controlled everything by serial protocols out through just a small number of penetrators.”
“It was a little spooky because I lost my altimeter, I lost my depth gauge, I lost control of the lighting systems, I lost control of the propulsion, and so on,” Cameron said.
These system issues prevented Cameron from ever reaching the bottom of that dive.
“I was really debating if I should go on and at a certain point I wound up releasing shot ballast because I didn’t know- now I didn’t know where the bottom was and I had no way of seeing it coming and I didn’t want to crash into it,” Cameron explained.
However, Cameron has no one to blame but himself and a single line of code for his loss of control of the propulsion system, and thus the unfortunate results of this trip.
“It turned out that it was one line of code that they had written the night before that I had asked them to do,” Cameron reflected. “So it was completely self-inflicted because I had asked them to record the data from the touchscreen as I saw it.”
Nonetheless, the experience reminded Cameron of a decision he made a year prior that ultimately saved his life.
“I had insisted to the electronics guys that we NOT control the ballast system that allows me to come back to the surface through the PAC computer, and they wanted me to do that because it would free up penetrators going through the hole by controlling it by serial data protocol,” Cameron recalled. “So I said, ‘No, I want that on its own dedicated circuit,’ and it’s a good thing I did, too, because otherwise I’d be still sitting down there.”
Amid the tragic developments of the missing Titanic submersible, this story provides further insight into the fascination behind the wreckage.
Source: Decider
