In a recent interview, James Cameron blames the OceanGate failure on the same “arrogance” and “hubris” that doomed the original Titanic. Everyone knows that the Titanic captain believed the ship to be “unsinkable”, and negligently dined with his guests while the ship steamed at full speed through an iceberg field.
But what everyone knows is (probably) wrong.
After the disaster, there were numerous investigations that exonerated the Captain (Edward James Smith). Other captains that plied the same route claim that they would’ve made the same decisions, that it was standard practice.
When the captain left the bridge, the night was clear and the seas were calm, justifying full speed. Lookouts in the crows nest would see icebergs before they became a danger. The captain left orders that if conditions became hazy, they should slow down. This appears not to have happened.
One of the marvels of the Titanic was a ship-to-shore telegraph, with guests sending and receiving telegrams while they were out at sea. The Titanic had the most powerful telegraph transmitter on the sea. Instead of employing naval telegraph operators, they instead employed staff from the Marconi telegraph corporation. They spent most of their time dealing with guests.
When nearby ships warning the Titanic of of icebergs, it appears that the Marconi radio operators failed to forward on the messages properly. It wasn’t the captain that ignored such warnings so much as the captain (an officers) never receiving them properly.
The reason James Cameron sees a coincidence here is simply because it’s a cliché/trope. When disaster happens, we blame moral weakness, such as pride, sloth, villainy, greed. It justifies the masses believing they know what really the caused the event even though they know none of the details.
They then cherrypick details that confirm this higher Truth. There’s nothing wrong with using construction pipes for ballast. You need disposable, heavy things to release when the sub rises quickly. Yet, numerous news stories pick on this to claim that the sub was jury-rigged and hence unsafe. This is just confirmation bias. It looks ugly, but making it look pretty doesn’t make it any safer.
I’ve read OceanGate’s patent promising to make carbon fiber composites safe, and I wouldn’t have ridden in their sub. But these are for technical reasons, not because I believe they were arrogant and neglected safety.
Maybe in the end, once the investigation is complete, it’ll indeed show OceanGate’s CEO was arrogant and prideful. But it’s still not like the Titanic, where after 100 years of investigation, we’ve found nothing justifying those conclusions. We found technical mistakes, but no reason to believe the Titanic's captain did anything abnormal.