‘Sadly lost’: The five passengers on board doomed sub
The director of Titanic revealed safety warnings about the Titan sub “went unheeded”, adding he is struck by the similarities to the Titanic disaster. See tributes.
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Titanic filmmaker James Cameron says the deaths of five passengers on board the ill-fated Titan submarine is “impossible for me to process”.
The Academy Award-winning director spoke about the tragedy after Friday’s announcement the crew died in a “catastrophic implosion”.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron told ABC News America.
“A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on.”
Cameron – who in 2012 became the first person to make a solo dive to the very deepest part of the ocean, in a submersible he designed and built – compared the Titan tragedy to the Titanic disaster.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result,” Cameron said.
“For us, a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
He said the death of his friend and submersive pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who was on board Titan, was “impossible for me to process”.
Cameron has visited the Titanic shipwreck many times in the course of – and since – directing his 1997 epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, which won a joint-record 11 Oscars.
“I know the wreck site very well … I actually calculated that I spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day,” he said.
Cameron has also directed underwater disaster movie “The Abyss,” and multiple deep-sea documentaries.
It comes as tributes pour in from around the world for the dead.
The UK government expressed “deepest condolences” to the families of the dead.
“Tragic news that those on the Titan submersible, including three British citizens, have been lost following an international search operation,” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said on Twitter.
“The UK government is closely supporting the families affected and expresses our deepest condolences.
The Pakistan government on Friday offered its condolences to the family of British-Pakistani father and son duo Shahzada and Suelman Dawood, who were also on Titan.
“Our deepest condolences to the Dawood family and the family of other passengers on the sad news about the fate of Titanic submersible in the North Atlantic,” the ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
“We appreciate the multinational efforts over the last several days in search of the vessel.”
THE FIVE PASSENGERS ON BOARD TITAN
The five passengers from the doomed sub that disappeared during an exploration of the wreckage of the Titanic were the founder of the company that operates the vessel; a British businessman and explorer; a father and teenage son from a prominent Pakistani family; and a French maritime expert.
STOCKTON RUSH
The founder of OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush originally trained as a pilot. According to his profile on the OceanGate website, he became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world aged 19 in 1981.
Mr Rush graduated from Princeton University in the US with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, the profile says.
His wife, Wendy Rush, is listed as the director of communications for OceanGate and a “comms and tracking team member” for the Titanic expedition on her LinkedIn page.
Mr Rush was described as “highly professional” alongside pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet by a businessman who Mr Rush led on a previous visit to the Titanic wreck.
According to friends, the two men were “consummate professionals” who had made the journey to the Titanic “38, 40 times”.
Mike Reiss, a writer and producer of The Simpsons, described him as a “magnetic man” who is “the last of the great American dreamers”, the New York Times reported.
Mr Reiss, who went on a Titanic dive in a different OceanGate submersible with Mr Rush, also compared him to business magnates Henry Ford and the Wright brothers.
In 2017, he told the alumni magazine for Princeton University, where he studied mechanical aerospace engineering: “I was interested in exploration. I thought it was space exploration. I thought it was Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars … and then I realised, it’s all in the ocean.”
Having co-founded OceanGate in 2009, Mr Rush has led crewed expeditions to remote ocean locations including the Titanic.
SHAHZADA AND SULEMAN DAWOOD
The father and son belong to one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.
Shahzada Dawood, 48, is vice-chairman of Pakistani conglomerate Engro Corporation, and a long-time adviser to the King’s charity, Prince’s Trust International, with a focus on its work in Pakistan.
He lives in London, with his son, wife Christine and daughter Alina, according to the Telegraph.
A family statement reported by the BBC said Shahzada was interested in “exploring different natural habitats”, and had previously spoken at both the United Nations and Oxford Union.
They described Suleman as a “big fan of science fiction literature and learning new things”, with an interest in Rubik’s cubes and playing volleyball.
Mr Dawood’s father, Hussain Dawood, was a founding patron of Prince’s Trust International, according to the charity.
The family were reportedly spending a month in Canada before Mr Dawood and Suleman made the dive.
Neighbours of the family told the Telegraph they were “very good neighbours, nice interesting people” and said Suleman was 19.
It was also confirmed that Suleman is a student at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.
PAUL-HENRI NARGEOLET
A former commander who served in the French navy for 25 years, Mr Nargeolet, 77, was in the first human expedition to visit the ship in 1987, according to the Telegraph.
After his career in the French navy, where he was captain of the deep submergence group, he held several roles in deep diving and piloting submersibles. These included acting as director of DESM, noted on his LinkedIn profile as a French deep-diving equipment company.
Sky News reported that he joined the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea, after the navy, according to The Five Deeps Expedition – a company that assembles scientists, engineers and submersible operators for missions.
As director of the Underwater Research Programme with RMS Titanic Inc, which owns the rights to the Titanic wreck, he has led the retrieval of items from the ship across many expeditions.
He lives in Connecticut, US, while his adult children live in Cork, Ireland, the Telegraph has reported.
Last year, Mr Nargeolet published a book in France about his experiences with the Titanic titled Dans Les Profondeurs Du Titanic (In The Depths Of The Titanic).
He told the Irish Examiner in 2019: “If you are 11 metres or 11 kilometres down, if something bad happens, the result is the same.
“When you’re in very deep water, you’re dead before you realise that something is wrong, so it’s just not a problem.”
HAMISH HARDING
The billionaire pilot and chair of Action Aviation, a sales and operations company which manages private jet sales, said on his Instagram account that he had joined the OceanGate expedition as a “mission specialist”.
Mr Harding, 58, is based in the UAE where the Action Aviation HQ is located, and presents himself in personal social media biographies as a “world explorer”.
A statement from his family and his company Action Aviation said they were “united in grief with the other families who have also lost their loved ones on the Titan submersible”.
“He was one of a kind and we adored him,” they said in a statement on Friday.
“He was a passionate explorer - whatever the terrain - who lived his life for his family, his business and for the next adventure,” the statement said, describing Harding as a “loving husband and a dedicated father to his two sons”.
“What he achieved in his lifetime was truly remarkable and if we can take any small consolation from this tragedy, it’s that we lost him doing what he loved,” the statement added.
His friend, the marine scientist James Mearn, characterised him as “very charming” and “very adventurous” in an interview with the BBC’s World At One.
He was also described as the “quintessential British explorer” by his friend Colonel Terry Virts, a former commander of the International Space Station, on the Today program.
Colonel Virts said: “Some people watch Netflix and some people play golf, and Hamish goes to the bottom of the ocean or into space or, you know, he sets world records flying around the planet.
“As I’ve said several times now, Hamish is the quintessential British explorer. He loves adventure. He loves exploring and that’s just the kind of person he is.”
Mr Harding was “very methodical”, according to Colonel Virts, who said: “I don’t think Hamish is an adrenaline junkie at all.”
According to multiple reports, he has two sons, Rory and Gile; a stepdaughter called Lauren; a stepson, Brian Szasz; while his wife is called Linda.
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