The five people killed in underwater implosion of Titan submersible
Five people were aboard the Titan submersible when it imploded last week during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. According to the company that sponsored the voyage, OceanGate Expeditions, all five were dead and the US Coast Guard said that debris from the craft was found on the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the Titanic.
Here are those who were aboard the Titan.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a renowned French maritime expert and submersible pilot, became a leading authority on the RMS Titanic through 37 successful journeys to its wreckage. He was killed on his 38th attempt when the submersible Titan imploded, the US Coast Guard announced on Thursday. He was 77.
Perhaps no one was more intimate than Mr. Nargeolet with the wreck of the White Star liner that settled nearly 13,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean after sinking in 1912, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew members. Often called “Mr. Titanic” for his knowledge of the ship’s wreckage and environs, he was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic Inc., the company that owns the salvage rights to the storied shipwreck, and the author of the book “In the Depths of the Titanic,” recently published by HarperCollins France.
His dozens of dives to the site included previous expeditions on the Titan, the vessel that disappeared Sunday en route to the wreckage. On one such trip, in 2022, he helped with the discovery of an “extraordinarily biodiverse abyssal ecosystem on a previously unknown basalt formation near the Titanic,” according to the company that owned the Titan, OceanGate Expeditions.
James Cameron, director of the popular movie “Titanic” and a friend of Mr. Nargeolet’s, described him as a “legendary submersible pilot.”
“For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process,” Cameron, who himself has made 33 dives to the famous wreck, said in an interview with ABC News on Thursday.
Few knew the wonders, as well as the risks, of such a dive more than Mr. Nargeolet. “If you are 11 meters or 11 kilometers down, if something bad happens, the result is the same,” he said in a 2019 interview with The Irish Examiner. “When you’re in very deep water, you’re dead before you realize that something is wrong, so it’s just not a problem.”
Paul-Henri Nargeolet was born on March 2, 1946, in Chamonix, France, in the French Alps. He moved to Paris after living in Morocco for 13 years.
He heard the call of the sea at an early age as an amateur diver, and in 1964 joined the French navy. He served as submarine pilot, mine-clearing diver, and a deep-sea diver.
After 22 years of service, he went to work for the French maritime research institute Ifremer, where he oversaw its deep-sea exploration crafts during early expeditions to the site of the Titanic. He made his first journey to the site in 1987.
During that 100-minute plunge, the crew of three traveling in a submersible called the Nautile chatted incessantly until they finally caught a glimpse of the liner’s bow in the searchlights. “For the next 10 minutes there wasn’t a sound in the submarine,” he said in an interview last year with HarperCollins France.
His survivors include his wife, Anne Sarraz-Bournet; two daughters, Chloe and Sidonie; a son, Jules; a stepson, John Nathaniel Paschall; and a grandson. His wife Michele Marsh, an Emmy Award-winning newscaster in New York, died in 2017.
Hamish Harding
Hamish Harding, an aviation tycoon and ardent explorer, made it his quest to probe the heavens as well as the depths, landing him a place in Guinness World Records and ultimately leading him to a fateful plunge to the wreckage of the Titanic some 2½ miles below the surface of the North Atlantic.
Mr. Harding was 58.
At the outset of the tour, Mr. Harding saw the opportunity as an unlikely stroke of good fortune. “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years,” he wrote in a social media post Saturday, “this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.”
Mr. Harding seemed to presage his own fate in a 2021 interview after a record-setting plunge to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.
At nearly 36,000 feet below the western Pacific Ocean, deeper than Mount Everest is tall, that four-hour, 15-minute voyage took him nearly three times farther down than the Titanic site. That expedition, with American explorer Victor Vescovo, earned two citations by Guinness World Records, for the longest distance traversed at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel and the longest time spent there on a single dive.
Mr. Harding knew the risks. “If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he told The Week, an Indian newsmagazine. But in business, and in his life of adventure seeking, he seemed to embrace them.
A lifelong space buff, he traveled to Antarctica in 2016 with Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the moon. At 86, Aldrin became the oldest person to reach the South Pole. Four years later, Mr. Harding took a similar journey with his son Giles, who at 12 became the youngest person to accomplish that feat.
In 2019, Mr. Harding set off on another record-setting venture with a former astronaut when he and former International Space Station commander Colonel Terry Virts completed the fastest circumnavigation of the world over the North and South poles in a Qatar Executive Gulfstream G650ER longrange business jet.
In June 2022, Mr. Harding finally got to experience the wonder of being an astronaut himself, soaring some 60 miles aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space tourism company, to the edge of outer space.
He was always drawn to the skies, and beyond. “I was 5 years old when the Apollo landing took place,” he said in the Business Aviation interview. “I vividly remember watching the event on an old black-and-white TV set with my parents in Hong Kong, where I grew up.”
“This event set the tone of my life in a way,” he continued. “We sort of felt that anything was possible after that and we fully expected there to be package holidays to the moon by now.”
His survivors include his wife, Linda; his sons, Rory and Giles; a stepdaughter, Lauren Marisa Szasz; and a stepson, Brian Szasz.
Stockton Rush
Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate and the pilot of the Titan submersible, was declared dead on Thursday. He was 61.
Mr. Rush oversaw finances and engineering for OceanGate, a privately owned tourism and research company based in Everett, Wash., which he founded in 2009. In 2012, he was a founder of the OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encouraged technological development to further marine science, history, and archeology.
Mr. Rush first looked skyward for adventure. In 1981, when he was 19, he was believed to be the world’s youngest jet-transport-rated pilot.
If the sky was the limit, though, it was too confining for Mr. Rush.
“I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” he told Fast Company magazine in 2017.
By the time he was 44, he had abandoned his dream of becoming an astronaut. Interplanetary travel didn’t seem economically viable in the foreseeable future. But he saw potential in underwater travel, and he said he was willing to take on risk and bend the rules to achieve his goals.
“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed,” he said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning” last year. “Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
Richard Stockton Rush III was the scion of one of San Francisco’s most famous families. He was descended on his father’s side from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton.
He was born on March 31, 1962, in San Francisco. His father is chair of the Peregrine Oil and Gas Co. in Burlingame, Calif., and the Natoma Co., which manages apartment and other investment properties in and around Sacramento. His grandfather was the chair of the shipping company American President Lines. Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was named for his grandmother.
The Davies family’s inherited wealth was derived from Ralph K. Davies, who began at Standard Oil of California as a 15-year-old office boy and rose to become the youngest director in the company’s history.
Stockton, as Mr. Rush was known, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and earned a bachelor of science degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984.
During summer breaks, he served as a DC-8 first officer, flying out of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for Overseas National Airways. The year he graduated, he joined the McDonnell Douglas Corp. as a flight test engineer on the F-15 program and was assigned as the company’s representative at Edwards Air Force Base on the APG-63 radar test protocol.
Before founding OceanGate, he served on the board of BlueView Technologies, a sonar developer in Seattle, and as chair of Remote Control Technologies, which makes remotely operated devices. He was also a trustee of the Museum of Flight in Seattle from 2003 to 2007.
In 1986, he married Wendy Hollings Weil, a licensed pilot, substitute teacher, and account manager for magazine publishing consultants. She became the director of communications for OceanGate.
Information on Mr. Rush’s survivors was not immediately available.
Shahzada and Suleman Dawood
Shahzada Dawood, a British Pakistani businessman who was among the five people aboard a submersible journeying down to view the Titanic, was presumed to have died when the vessel experienced what authorities believe was a “catastrophic implosion” during its descent to the ocean floor. He was 48. His 19-year-old son, Suleman, who was with him on the Titan submersible, also is believed to have perished.
The elder Mr. Dawood was the vice chair of Engro Corp., a business conglomerate headquartered in Pakistan in the southern port city of Karachi that is involved in agriculture, energy, and telecommunications. His family is known as one of the wealthiest business families in the country. Mr. Dawood’s work focused on renewable energy and technology, according to a statement from his family.
Mr. Dawood studied law as an undergraduate student at Buckingham University in Britain and later received a master’s in global textile marketing from Philadelphia University, which is now part of Thomas Jefferson University. In 2012, he was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
His son, Suleman, was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and had just completed his first year, according to a spokesperson for the school. Like his father, he was a fan of science fiction books and also enjoyed solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing volleyball, according to a statement from Engro.
“The relationship between Shahzada and Suleman was a joy to behold; they were each other’s greatest supporters and cherished a shared passion for adventure and exploration of all the world had to offer them,” according to a statement from the Dawood family. “This unwavering curiosity built the foundation for a close friendship between the two.”
The pair’s yearslong passion for science and discovery led them to embark on the expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, according to friends and family.
“Traveling, science, are part of his DNA,” said Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of the elder Mr. Dawood who used to work with him at Engro. “He is an explorer.”
A lover of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” the elder Mr. Dawood was also fond of nature and often traveled to faraway places, sharing pictures of his adventures, Sayed said.
His Instagram profile is like a memory book of his love of travel and nature; it is blanketed with photos of birds, flowers, and landscapes, including a sunset in the Kalahari Desert, the ice sheet in Greenland, penguins in the Shetlands, and a tiny bird in London with the caption “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”
“Don’t adventures ever have an end?,” Mr. Dawood wrote in a Facebook post last year from a trip in Iceland, quoting Bilbo Baggins from “The Fellowship of the Ring.” “I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”
Khalid Mansoor, another former colleague of Mr. Dawood, said that when the two worked together, Mr. Dawood was a passionate champion for the environment. He was also a trustee at the SETI Institute, an organization devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In his role at Engro, Mr. Dawood advocated “a culture of learning, sustainability and diversity,” according to the company statement. He was also involved in his family’s charitable ventures, including the Engro Foundation, which supports small-scale farmers, and the Dawood Foundation, an education-focused nonprofit.
“Shahzada’s and Suleman’s absence will be felt deeply by all those who had the privilege of knowing this pair,” his family’s statement read.
Mr. Dawood leaves behind one daughter, Alina, and his wife, Christine.