In video being shared on social media, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is aboard the missing vessel, explains why the company didn’t want to hire experienced sub operators.
"When I started the business, one of the things you'll find, there are other sub-operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you'll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys," Rush told Teledyne Marine in a 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, you know, who's a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational," continued Rush, who’s onboard with British billionaire Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and Paul Henry Nargeolet. "So we've really tried to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we're doing things that are completely new."
He continued: "We're taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub."
The CEO of OceanGate, which is operating the missing Titanic tourist submarine, explains that the company didn’t want to hire any experienced “50 year old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational.”
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 21, 2023
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While rescue efforts have been unsuccessful thus far, banging sounds were detected on sonar, helping crews focus their search. In the meantime, however, oxygen supplies are quickly running out.
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