WASHINGTON. You don’t need diving experience to slip into the Titan and descend to the edge of the abyss, you just need a ticket whose costs have risen up to 250 thousand dollars in 2023 (last year they ranged between 100 thousand and 150 thousand) and sign three documents with which one assumes the risk of «being able to die during the journey». The qualities required are “strength, balance and flexibility”, reads the OceanGate website – the company that organizes explorations around the Titanic and in the past also the Andrea Doria – to be able to live on the expedition ship for a week. On Saturday, Hamish Harding, British explorer and businessman, director of Action Aviation, founded in 2004, shared some images alongside the bathyscaphe on Instagram, explaining that operations would finally begin because “a window of good weather had opened” .
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Harding is 58 years old and is a collector of Guinness World Records: solo ocean crossings up to the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth by air from the two poles. In 2016 he was in the expedition that accompanied Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who arrived on the Moon with Armstrong and Collins, to the South Pole making him the oldest man to reach the extreme south of the world. Four years later he had instead accompanied Giles, his twelve-year-old son, to the same place to make him the opposite of Aldrin the youngest explorer of the South Pole. Member of The Explorers Club, based in New York, a sort of elite of researchers and explorers capable of setting records and making discoveries, Harding is also a professional racing driver, based in Dubai. In June 2022 he had been aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin’s New Shepard.
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He was thrilled, they say, when he learned that the voyage to discover the Titanic would take place and that he had been chosen among the four passengers. Jannicke Mikkelson, explorer and friend, said of him: «He can’t sit still, if he doesn’t work hard, then it’s because he’s doing a very tough exploration». Others who know him describe his ability to stay in control and solve problems. Even if with less than 40 hours of air available in the bathyscaphe, even some friends begin to whisper: «I’m afraid that the vessel has run aground». The last picture of him was taken on Sunday, he is on the bathyscaphe, watching the sea and wearing a suit with the “Titanic expedition crew” logo.
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With Hamish were two Pakistanis naturalized British: the billionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, a fan – they describe him – of scientific fiction and a student in a British college. It was the family who confirmed that they were on board and said that “now we are all praying to Allah so that they are alive and go home”. Shahzada is the vice president of one of the country’s largest companies, the Engro Corporation, which invests in fertilizers, agricultural vehicles, energy and digital technologies. He is on the Board of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. He too had entrusted his reflections and comments to Facebook before leaving, showing himself excited and reassured also by the team of divers who would accompany him and his son – both inexperienced – on the seabed.
“The team – he wrote – is made up of legendary explorers, some of these have over 30 dives to the Titanic since 1980”. PH included. Nargeolet, the 77-year-old explorer, director and co-founder of a company that owns the rights to the wreckage of the Titanic, and a former commander in the French Navy. “I’m not afraid of dying, I think it will happen in the day,” he said in an interview with France Bleu Radio in 2020 when answering a question about the risks of diving.