This past Sunday, a tourist submarine went missing while on an expedition to tour the Titanic wreckage. Five people are confirmed to be aboard, and search-and-rescue crews are pulling out all the stops to find them. But the sub, named the Titan, costs $250,000 per head to ride. With that kind of ticket price, who’s really on board?
Thanks to Reuters, we now know. A British billionaire, a conglomerate chairman and his son, an “explorer”, and the submersible company’s own CEO. Many of the group have experience with diving or Titanic exploration, but no one — save maybe the CEO — has experience with a submersible quite like this one.
The British maybe-billionaire (he’s often called one, but Forbes doesn’t seem to list him) is Hamish Harding, chairman of airplane marketplace Action Aviation. He claimed to be joining the crew as a “mission specialist,” without really describing what that means, but he does have a history of exploration in pressurized containers — travelling from the depths of Challenger Deep to the heights of space. He’s also been to the South Pole twice, once alongside Buzz Aldrin.
The conglomerate chairman is Shahzada Dawood, who works at Engro Corporation. Engro is one of those companies that sort of just does “business” as a business — it trades in agriculture, energy, petroleum-based chemicals, telecommunications, and plain old stock trading. Dawood brought his son, Suleman, along for the ride; the two of them seem to be the most standard tourists on the sub’s manifest.
Next is Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French explorer who’s been a longtime enthusiast of the Titanic wreckage. He’s made 35 trips to the site, and is broadly known as “Mr. Titanic” for his knowledge. If the submarine needs to navigate its way back based on landmarks alone, Nargeolet may just be able to pull the feat off.
Last on the list is Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of OceanGate. His history is split between business, serving in plenty of “chairman” roles, as well as exploration — he claims to have been the youngest jet transport pilot in the world when he was 19.
As of this writing, the submarine is still lost at sea, and connection has not yet been reestablished with the five men on board.