Costa Concordia captain talks to Today Tonight

Today Tonight managed a good Exclusive last night with Captain Francesco Schettino, who captained the ill-fated Costa Concordia to its dire end in January.

32 people lost their lives that night, and Captain Schettino, 52, is now facing multiple manslaughter charges, and charges of negligence and abandoning his ship.

Last night Matt White interviewed him in Sorrento, Italy after he was released from house arrest on July 5.

“To me this is just a chance to present my face – of course to pay a tribute, to express my sympathy to all the persons that lost their life on that awful night, and that they lost their loved ones, and for me this is a chance to express them my sympathy,” Schettino said.

“And because the story was built up in a way let’s say, that the issues was a little bit affected, or if I may say biased by some misinformation from the way this story has been presented to the public, this is the main reason.”

He blames the disaster on “Misunderstanding in between men, interacting one together” but experts say a sail-by ‘salute’ to Giglio Island was too close to be considered safe.

“It was very well planned in advance, a very safe distance. The navigation was very well planned to execute a flyby, but not so close at 0.5 nautical miles from the coast,” he defends. “Let’s say there was a team working, interacting together, and let’s say we failed to follow exactly the course.”

White asked him why did he evacuated before all of the other passengers had left?

“I have to clarify this point. As long as the ship sinks even, parallel, without any angle of illing, and you have the time to count all the passengers, and to start all the procedures, then it is more easy to do it. But this situation was all of a sudden worsening fast. It was not feasible for none of us that were on the capsized side that by the moment it’s under the water,” he said.

Did he abandon his ship?

“No, I didn’t abandon the ship. This is completely wrong. The ship was flipping over on its side and you had no other option than to go on the boat or to die at sea,” he said.

“It is a grounded ship and the reason why that’s there is that they have the feeling that I left the ship and abandoned the people there because I have created the grounding condition of the ship. If I would not have done that the ship would have sunk completely and in that case I would have been the last one to leave.”

Schettino has also recently been telling his side of the story, to Italy’s Canale 5 television and NBC ahead of a court hearing later this month in Tuscany.