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Payne: Inside Titan with my friend, OceanGate pioneer Tock Rush
Posted by Talbot Payne on June 23, 2023
OceanGate brought its Titan submersible to Oakland County Airport on Nov. 6, 2021, looking to sell $250,000 tickets for a seat to the Titanic shipwreck 13,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface off Newfoundland.
I was invited, though I didn’t have the financial means — or the claustrophobic tolerance — to join the expedition in the cramped, single-porthole vessel. But I did have a keen interest in the pilot, my friend and former classmate Stockton “Tock” Rush.
From test pilot Chuck Yeager to Mount Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, risk-takers are a special breed. OceanGate CEO Tock was one of them. Unlike the astronauts and explorers who lived to reach the summit of mountains and outer space, however, Tock was fascinated by going to the bottom of the ocean. Since he founded OceanGate in 2009, I followed his progress — occasionally visiting his headquarters in Everett, Washington, north of his Seattle home.
Tragically, Tock died this week — along with four other adventure seekers — aboard the Titan when the craft imploded, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, at the bottom of the Atlantic, just 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow. It was the Titan’s fourth trip to the 111-year-old shipwreck since 2021.
Ask anyone in my Princeton University Class of 1984 which one of us would be brave enough to dare such a mission, and Tock would be at the top of the list. Coming from a family of car racers, I have a need for speed that has taken me to some of America’s greatest race tracks, and Tock took great interest in my motorsports adventures.
But he had much bigger boundaries to explore.
When we were 19 years old, he became the world’s youngest commercial airline pilot, commanding Saudi Airlines planes during our college summers. After graduating with an engineering degree in 1984, he went to work as an aerospace engineer for McDonnell Douglas in California, but he chafed at working in the bureaucratic corporate world funded by government tax dollars.
In the summer of 1985 — during one of McDonnell Douglas’s frequent military project shutdowns while they waited for Congress to pass defense appropriation monies — my wife, Talbot, and I met up with him outside St. Louis (my wife’s hometown) in order to help him get an Ultralight airplane off the ground. A plane that Tock had built himself.
With a parachute strapped to his back and the Ultralight’s single propeller whirring away, he skimmed west St. Louis county cornfields while we chased him in our car. He eventually landed his maiden flight — on target — in a farm field he had designated miles away.
Like many pioneers, Tock came from a family of means. He was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune by virtue of his grandfather, director Ralph Davies. His namesakes — Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton — were signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their portraits hang in the foyer of his Seattle home.
Like those American pioneers, he was determined to explore new frontiers, and the ocean floor became his obsession. On a visit to Everett last decade, we boarded the first prototype sub that Tock and his engineering team had developed to test the lightweight construction that could transport a crew to the Titanic. Determined to explore the secrets of the world’s vast oceans, Tock saw the Titanic fascination — and the adventure-tourist revenue it could produce — as key to financing multiple adventures.
The project was laborious in financing, building and transporting the vessel to the Bahamas and other deep-sea locations to test. On a trip to Newfoundland in 2018 to test a new GMC Sierra truck, I learned that Tock was nearby as construction on the Titan was completed, and he had turned his focus to the big prize: taking passengers to the Titanic.
The vessel would make some 50 deep Atlantic simulation dives before completing its first Titanic trip in 2021. Shortly thereafter, the OceanGate team towed the Titan to a hangar in Oakland County Airport before a small audience of thrill seekers to sell the experience. The team included Tock’s wife (and Talbot’s college roommate), Wendy, a mission specialist whose great-grandparents had, coincidentally, perished aboard the Titanic.
My wife and I ascended the steps onto the Titan’s platform and ducked our heads into the low-lit passenger compartment behind the single, bow-mounted porthole. Inside, Tock gave us a tour of the controls and safety procedures. I can only remember thinking how my claustrophobia — not to mention my 6-foot-5 size — would be a problem for the 2.5-hour dive down to the Titanic.
Never mind bobbing on the surface for days in the Titan’s mothership — the Canadian research icebreaker Polar Prince — patiently waiting for the weather to clear for the dive.
The presentation included thrilling pictures from previous expeditions, but Tock and his team were blunt about the risks. Like the Apollo 1 crew fatalities or the multiple fatalities of explorers who have tried climbing Everest — the risk of death would always shadow you when pushing the envelope of the exploration.
Tock lived to conquer those risks. He — and his fellow passengers — died doing what they loved.
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.