Manlius Pebble Hill graduate is part of James Cameron’s ‘Titanic Dream Team’: Neighbors East Today

Brian Thomas, a 1995 graduate of Manlius Pebble Hill School, is a Coast Guard marine salvage engineer. There are only a handful of experienced salvage engineers in the country. Thomas’ rare and highly specialized career led him to play a key role in a new investigation for National Geographic into the history of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

Last year, Oscar-winning director and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron assembled a “Titanic Dream Team” of eight experts, including Brian Thomas, to answer the question of what actually caused the supposedly unsinkable Titanic to sink.

The team reveals its conclusions in “Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron,” a two-hour National Geographic special that will air on the 100th anniversary of the ship’s demise, Easter Sunday, April 8, beginning at 8 p.m.

Brian became involved in the Titanic project through a colleague at the Naval Academy, Commander Jeffrey Stettler. Stettler is another member of Cameron’s team of experts and had been working with Cameron to identify very precise sinking timelines and structural analyses.

Stettler asked Thomas to take a look at some of his research because he wasn’t able to get the speed and accuracy in his flooding model that he wanted. Brian offered to address the research using a computer tool with which he was familiar called General HydroStatics or GHS.

The method was exactly what Cameron was looking for and landed Thomas in the middle of the documentary, according to the MPH News Digest.