Days after news broke about the Titan submersible and its fate in the North Atlantic, Titanic director James Cameron spoke to CNN about the incident, saying that he had figured out the fate of the sub days before the official statement came out informing the world that the submarine had imploded. How? He's got plenty of experience diving down to the Titanic wreckage, tallying 33 trips down to the ocean floor.  

“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion — a shock wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the (mother) ship uses to track where the sub is,” Cameron told Anderson Cooper. 

He went on to explain that after he “got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise that was consistent with an implosion event," he knew there was no way that the crew could have survived. 

“That seemed to me enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” he said.

At the time, the sound of the implosion was “not definitive,” an official said. The Wall Street Journal was the first outlet to report the acoustic signature picked up by the U.S. Navy.

“I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch, and did not surface,” Cameron said.

Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate in 2009 with CEO Stockton Rush, who passed away during the outing, told BBC Radio 4's Today show that some comments about safety measures and lax attitudes in the design of the submersible are grossly exaggerated. 

"I think one of the issues that keeps coming up is everyone keeps equating certification with safety and are ignoring the 14 years of development of the Titan sub," he said. 

"Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr. Cameron, will also admit that they were not there for the design of the sub, for the engineering of the sub, for the building of the sub, and certainly not for the rigorous test program the sub went through,” Söhnlein continued, per the BBC. “This was a 14-year technology development program and it was very robust and certainly led through successful science expeditions to the Titanic even over the last three years.” 

In a previous interview, Cameron told the BBC that the Titan "didn't get certified because they knew they wouldn't pass." In addition to visiting the Titanic, Cameron dove to the Mariana Trench (7 miles below the ocean's surface) using the Deepsea Challenger, a 24-foot submersible that he designed.