Titanic search enters finals hours as vital vessel joins mission

Stockton Rush is a former test flight engineer for McDonnell Douglas’ F-15 fighter jet program.

He already had much experience in aerospace and aviation as well as technology startups by the time he founded OceanGate in 2009, according to the company’s website.

Before graduating from Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984 and obtaining a master’s degree in business administration from the University of California in 1989, Mr Rush obtained his captain’s rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute.

He went on to oversee business ventures which included serving on the board of Seattle’s BlueView Technologies and as chairman of Remote Control Technology.

Mr Rush saw a way to use advances in materials sciences to craft a new type of sub — one that would be oblong, rather than spherical, and made with carbon fiber, which he said had a better strength-to-buoyancy ratio than titanium.

The design would carry five people and give scientists and deep-sea adventurers alike more room — the few privately owned subs in the world could only carry two or three people at most.

Most research subs also required huge support ships and were not meant to be cost-effective, according to Mr Rush.

Part of the idea behind OceanGate was to offset the cost of deep-sea research through high-end adventure tourism, exploration or mapping for the oil and gas industry, or inspection of bridges or ship hulls.

He and other investors poured tens of millions of dollars into OceanGate, he told The Daily Herald newspaper in Everett, Washington, in 2017.

The company is based at an industrial marine park in Everett, close to Boeing’s factory and aerospace firms with expertise in using titanium and carbon fiber.

OceanGate acquired its first submersible in 2009 and a second in 2012, which it rebuilt into the Cyclops 1 — a working prototype for the Titan that can descend 500 meters (1,640 feet).