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The OceanGate CEO who is trapped on a 22-foot submersible on an ill-fated voyage to see the Titanic wreck once explained how he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t “inspirational.”
Stockton Rush, 61, added that such expertise was unnecessary because “anybody can drive the sub” with a $30 video game controller.
“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they — you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told Teledyne Marine in a newly resurfaced undated Zoom interview.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” he continued.
“So we’ve really tried to get, um, very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”
Rush’s Everett, Wash.-based company has made two previous trips to the 1912 wreckage of the “unsinkable” ship, which is 12,500 feet underwater at the bottom of the Atlantic some 370 miles off the coast of Canada.
The founder and CEO — who navigates the missing Titan submersible with a cheap Amazon video game joystick — has been trapped on the tiny vessel since Sunday with four wealthy adventurers who paid $250,000 apiece for the tour.
A frantic Coast Guard rescue operation was underway to locate the tiny vessel and save the marooned team — who had less than one day’s worth of oxygen as of Wednesday morning, officials said.
One of OceanGate’s previous Titanic expeditions had also gotten lost for several hours, because there is no GPS underwater, according to CBS News correspondent David Pogue, who was along for the harrowing ride.
Tourist submersible exploring Titanic wreckage disappears in Atlantic Ocean
What we know
A submersible on a pricey tourist expedition to the Titanic shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean has vanished with likely only four days’ worth of oxygen. The US Coast Guard said the small submarine began its journey underwater with five passengers Sunday morning, and the Canadian research vessel that it was working with lost contact with the crew about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive.
It was later found that a top-secret team with the US Navy detected the implosion of the Titan submersible on Sunday, but did not stop search efforts due because the evidence was “not definitive” and a decision was made to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”
Who was on board?
The family of world explorer Hamish Harding confirmed on Facebook that he was among the five traveling in the missing submarine. Harding, a British businessman who previously paid for a space ride aboard the Blue Origin rocket last year, shared a photo of himself on Sunday signing a banner for OceanGate’s latest voyage to the shipwreck.
Also onboard were Pakistani energy and tech mogul Shanzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman, 19; famed French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush.
What’s next?
“We’re doing everything we can do to locate the submersible and rescue those on board,” Rear Adm. John Mauger told reporters. “In terms of the hours, we understood that was 96 hours of emergency capability from the operator.
Coast Guard officials said they are currently focusing all their efforts on locating the sub first before deploying any vessel capable of reaching as far below as 12,500 feet where the Titanic wreck is located.
Mauger, first district commander and leader of the search-and-rescue mission, said the US was coordinating with Canada on the operation.
The debris recovered from the US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible search site early Thursday included “a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible.”
After search efforts to recover the stranded passengers proved futile, and bits of debris from the submersible were found, it was decided that the sub imploded, which correlated with an anomaly picked up by the US Navy in the same area.
The Coast Guard later reported that all 5 passengers were confirmed dead, and rescue efforts were halted.
Company officials were criticized for waiting eight hours after they lost communication with the Titan to alert authorities about the missing vessel on Sunday.
The entire journey to the shipwreck was only supposed to take 10 hours.
“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the preponderance of checklists, uh, things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation-related than, uh, ocean-related and we can train people to do that,” Rush had reportedly said.
“We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller, um, so anybody can drive the sub.”
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