Hamish Harding, an explorer who knew no boundaries until he found one, dies at age 58

Hamish Harding, an aviation magnate and ardent explorer whose insatiable quest to explore both the skies and the depths earned him a place in the Guinness World Records and ended up on an ill-fated dive to the wreck of the Titanic on the ocean floor some two and half a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

The underwater craft in which he was traveling with four others lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday. After a five-day search by multiple companies, the company sponsoring the trip, OceanGate Expeditions, said Thursday that all five were dead. The U.S. Coast Guard said debris from the vessel had been found Thursday morning on the ocean floor about 500 meters from the bow of the Titanic.

Mr Harding was 58.

About an hour and 45 minutes after descending Sunday morning, the Titan, a 22-foot long cylindrical submarine made of titanium and carbon fiber, operated by the private ocean exploration company OceanGate, disappeared, sparking a frenzied search for an area the size of Massachusetts and days of increasingly aggravating headlines around the world.

It was arguably the most publicized ocean search mission since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. No significant pieces of the Boeing 777 aircraft have ever been found.

Along with Mr. Harding, the British-born founder and chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and aviation company based in Dubai, were Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood; the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a noted Titanic authority; and Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of OceanGate.

The passengers had paid up to $250,000 each for the privilege of diving nearly 4,000 feet below the surface to glimpse the remnants of history’s most storied oceanic tragedy. The RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank about 400 miles off Newfoundland in 1912, four days after its maiden voyage. More than 1,500 people died.

At the start of the tour, Mr. Harding saw the opportunity as an unlikely stroke of luck. “Due to Newfoundland’s worst winter in 40 years,” he wrote in a social media post Saturday, “this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to Titanic in 2023.”

Mr Harding also described himself as a “mission specialist” on the expedition.

He appeared to predict his own fate in a 2021 interview after a record-breaking dive to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.

At nearly 11,000 feet below the western Pacific Ocean, deeper than Mount Everest is high, that four-hour, 15-minute journey put it nearly three times farther down than the Titanic’s location. That expedition, with American explorer Victor Vescovo, received two Guinness World Records entries, for the longest distance traversed at full ocean depth by a manned vessel and the longest time spent there on a single dive.

As Esquire Middle East magazine pointed out at the time, alone 18 people had ever traveled to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, unlike the 24 astronauts who orbited or landed on the moon, and the thousands who had successfully summited Mount Everest.

He knew the risks. “If something goes wrong, you don’t come back,” he told The Week, an Indian news magazine. But in business, and in his life of adventure-seeking, he seemed to embrace them.

Mr Harding, a pilot licensed to operate both business jets and airliners, started the first regular business jet service to Antarctica in 2017, naming the service Action Aviation by landing a Gulfstream G550 on a new ice rink known as Wolf’s Fang.

A lifelong space buff, he traveled to Antarctica in 2016 with Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut and second man to walk on the moon. At age 86, Mr. Aldrin became the oldest person to reach the South Pole. Four years later, Mr. Harding undertook a similar journey with his son Giles, who at age 12 became the youngest person to accomplish this feat.

In 2019, Mr. Harding embarked on another record-breaking venture with a former astronaut when he and former International Space Station Commander Colonel Terry Virts completed the world’s fastest circumnavigation of both the North and South Poles in a Qatar Executive Gulfstream. G650ER long-haul business jet.

In June 2022, he finally experienced the miracle of being an astronaut himself, flying some 60 miles aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, owned by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism company, to the edge of space.

“Once the liquid hydrogen/oxygen booster rocket takes the capsule to the edge of space, 100,000 feet above Earth,” he said in last year an interview with Business Aviation Magazine“the sky above you is all, all black, even right next to the sun.”

Despite a life of dramatic quests that seemed to come from boys’ books, Mr. Harding was by nature “an explorer, not a thrill-seeker,” Colonel Virts said in an interview with the BBC.

Mr. Harding apparently agreed. In discussing the Challenger Deep mission, he emphasized the science, not the nonsense.

“As an explorer and adventurer, I want this expedition to contribute to our shared knowledge and understanding of planet Earth,” he said in the Esquire interview. He spoke of collecting samples from the ocean floor “that could contain new life forms and even provide more insight into how life on our planet began.”

“And by looking for signs of human pollution in this remote environment,” he continued, “we hope to support scientific efforts to protect our oceans and ensure they thrive for millennia to come.”

George Hamish Livingston Harding was born on June 24, 1964 in Hammersmith, London.

He was always drawn to the sky, and beyond. “I was 5 years old when the Apollo landing happened,” he said in the Business Aviation interview. “I vividly remember watching the event on an old black and white TV with my parents in Hong Kong, where I grew up.”

“This event, in a way, set the tone of my life,” he continued. “We felt like anything was possible after that and we fully expected there would be package tours to the moon now.”

At the age of 13 he became a cadet in the Royal Air Force Chipmunk trainer airplanes. He obtained his pilot’s license in 1985 while a student at the University of Cambridge, where he studied chemical engineering and natural sciences.

In the 1990s, he built a career in information technology and rose to become the managing director of Logica India, a company based in Bangalore. He used the money he earned in that industry to set up Action Group in 1999, a private investment company. In 2002 he started Action Aviation.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In the Business Aviation interview, he said the Titanic dive, originally planned for last June, had been postponed because “unfortunately the submarine was damaged on its previous dive”. Instead, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania that summer with 20 relatives and friends.

When asked about the risks of his pioneering ventures, Mr. Harding, who was the president of the Middle East chapter of the Explorers Club: “My view is that these are all calculated risks and well understood before we begin.”

“I should add that I am not going to look for these opportunities,” he continued. “People tend to bring them to me, and I keep saying ‘Yes!’ say”