The United States, Canada and France are engaged in a frantic race to find alive the five passengers of the small Titan submarine which disappeared near the wreck of the Titanic.
The five men are:
– French Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77 years old, specialist in deep-sea diving and passionate about maritime archeology. Explorer of the seabed, he spent the first part of his career as a naval officer. Commander of the group of clearance divers in Cherbourg (north-west of France), he then became a submarine pilot in the French Navy. He then moved on to maritime archaeology, with the excavation of several wrecks. In 1986, he became responsible for the deep intervention submarines of the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer). A year earlier, a team led by American scientist Robert Ballard, in cooperation with Ifremer, found the wreckage of the Titanic. As early as 1987, Paul-Henri Nargeolet saw wreckage aboard the French submarine Nautile. Dozens of dives followed, notably enabling the recovery of several hundred objects. The latest date back to the summer of 2021.
– The British Businessman Hamish Harding, 58, is also familiar with extreme explorations. Apart from his adventures, which he recounts on social networks, few details are known about the career and fortune of the CEO of the private jet sales company Action Aviation, founded in 2004. A graduate of the University of Cambridge in natural sciences and chemical engineering, Hamish Harding headed into space a year ago, aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, for a ten-minute flight marking the fifth successful manned mission for the company of Jeff Bezos, his “mentor”. He holds several mentions in the Guinness World Records. Among his exploits, he dived in March 2021 with another explorer, Victor Vescovo, to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean known to date, aboard a two-seater submersible. . This mission was the longest spent at such a depth (4 hours and 15 minutes) with the longest distance traveled (4,600 meters).
With his wife Linda, he has two sons including Giles, who at the age of 12 in 2020 became the youngest person to travel to the South Pole, reports the Times.
– On board the submersible are also a prominent Pakistani businessman and his son, their family said in a statement. It is Shahzada Dawood48, vice-president of the conglomerate Engro based in Karachi, in the south of Pakistan, and of his son Suleiman, aged 19, both British citizens. Engro has investments in several business sectors: energy, agriculture, petrochemicals and telecommunications.
– The fifth person, whose presence on board has not been confirmed by official sourceswould be according to media Stockton Rush, the American boss of OceanGate Expeditions, which organizes the trip and which he founded in 2009. The company of the man whom Smithsonian Magazine describes as “the daredevil inventor” began in 2021 to take paying customers to see the wreckage of the Titanic aboard her specially constructed submersible. Stockton Rush said visiting the wreck was part of a marketing strategy as he tried to develop new innovations for submersible vessels. According to his company’s website, the American began his career in 1981 as the world’s youngest jet transport pilot, at the age of 19. In 1984, he became an F-15 fighter flight test engineer for McDonnell Douglas. But over the past 20 years, he’s dabbled in several ocean-related tech ventures, including BlueView Technologies, which makes small high-frequency sonar systems.
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