The CEO and founder of the Titan company, Stockton Rush, pilot of the submarine that went missing last Sunday, has a strange coincidence with the Titanic. His wife, Wendy, is a descendant of two first-class passengers who died when the liner sank in 1912, according to archival records of the tragedy.

Stockton Rush, 61, founded OceanGate in 2009. He is a Seattle-born, Princeton-educated aeronautical engineer who worked on fighter jets and initially hoped to go to Mars before turning his attention to the sea.

International media have reported that Rush tried to buy explorer Steve Fossett’s submarine after his death in 2007, but was unsuccessful and began building his own submarine. Rush admitted that parts of his submarine were cobbled together: It’s controlled by a video game controller and the interior lighting was purchased from an online camping website, but said it was built with help from Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington.

At the age of 19, he became the world’s youngest qualified jet transport pilot and qualified at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute. For the next three years, he flew for Saudi Arabian Airlines during his summer vacation from his aerospace engineering degree at Princeton. Since 1984, he has worked with the United States Air Force on anti-satellite missile and F-15 programs, with the goal of eventually joining the space program.

Rush received an MBA from Berkeley and went on to work for several companies specializing in sonar, underwater technology and radar. Daily mail.

This undated image courtesy of OceanGate Expeditions shows CEO and founder Stockton Rush. Photo: AFP

Wendy Hollings Weil married Stockton Rush in 1986, according to a New York Times wedding announcement. She is also actively involved in her husband’s business; his LinkedIn page says he participated three OceanGate expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic over the past two years.

International media claims that Wendy Rush is the great-great-granddaughter of shopping magnate Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, two of the richest people aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage. Straus was part owner of the department store Macy’s, reports the New York Times.

She is the company’s communications director and serves on the board of directors of a company’s charitable foundation.

Wendy Rush descends from one of Strauss’s daughters, Minnie, who married Dr. Richard Weil married. Their son, Richard Weil Jr., later served as president of Macy’s New York, and their son, Dr. Richard Weil III, is Wendy’s father, according to Joan Adler, executive director of the Straus Historical Society.

The couple from the Titanic

An idealized version of the Straus couple was aired in the film by filmmaker James Cameron: In the middle of the sad farewell scene of the members who didn’t flee in the boats, you can see them both, now older, cuddling in bed as the water begins to enter his room to flood.

Still, reports from disaster survivors remind us that Isidor Straus refused a seat on a lifeboat when women and children were still waiting to flee the Titanic.

Ida Straus didn’t want to leave her husband to whom she had been married for 40 years, so the two were seen arm in arm on the deck of the Titanic as the ship sank.

Two weeks after the shipwreck, Isidor’s remains were found, but to date the body of Ida Straus has not been found.

Missing and out of oxygen

The 6.5-meter submarine, which was carrying five people, including tourists and crew members, stopped on Sunday, June 18, less than two hours after beginning its descent with its mother ship.

On board the submarine, named Titan, locate British billionaire Hamish Harding and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and her son Suleman, who are also British nationals and who paid $250,000 for each position on the trip. It is estimated that the pilot responsible is Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, the company operating the submarine, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, nicknamed “Mr. Titanic.” for his various trips to the wreck.

Hope is preserved

The situation is becoming increasingly difficult for the passengers of the small deep-sea submarine Titan operated by the private company OceanGate Expeditions. With emergency oxygen for 96 hours, that deadline would have been met on Thursday, June 22 at 11:08 GMT.

Communication with the 6.5-meter submarine was lost on Sunday during its descent to the wreckage of the Titanic, which lies nearly 4,000 meters deep in the middle of the North Atlantic.