Arduous work and ambition have introduced him each sort of materials success. And together with an enviable way of life and well-known buddies, there’s a household he adores.
However for all these qualities, Hamish Harding possesses one other extra puzzling attribute: a must push himself to the outer limits of human endeavour.
For his is not any atypical spirit of journey, slightly a want to hunt out probably the most excessive challenges.
It’s why he holds 16 air velocity information, together with the Guinness World File for the quickest plane navigation of Earth through the North and South Pole, why he was the primary British area ‘vacationer’ and why he visited the huge inky depths of the Mariana Trench 36,000ft beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
This curiosity, or as he put it, the urge ‘to enterprise into uncharted territories’, was additionally why he needed to be one of many first to discover the Atlantic seabed holding the remarkably well-preserved stays of the Titanic.
Billionaire businessman Hamish Harding (pictured) holds the Guinness World File for the quickest plane navigation of the globe through the North and South poles
Clambering aboard the mini-sub Titan 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, would have held no concern of claustrophobia for the person who strapped himself into Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket for a flight 62 miles to the frontier of area at thrice the velocity of sound.
Ever since he was a boy rising up in Gloucester, captivated by the tales of pig-headed striving that he learn within the pages of the Guinness E book of Data, Harding has needed to be of their quantity.
‘I at all times questioned how I may get into it. I didn’t assume I may do it. And I didn’t need to do one thing silly like setting a file for the variety of ping-pong balls bounced in a day, or one thing like that,’ he stated.
He now holds three extraordinary information of his personal.
His first was set in 2019 for that round-the-world flight in an ultra-long-range Gulfstream enterprise jet – alongside a former commander of Worldwide House Station. (He additionally counts Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to stroll on the moon, as a buddy.)
The others had been the 4 hours and quarter-hour he spent in a submersible traversing Challenger Deep, the southern finish of the Mariana Trench, and for travelling three miles within the Trench – the longest recorded distance.
It was not till Harding was in his center years that this quest for daring deeds was fired.
For all his accomplishments on the slicing fringe of technical genius, he’s no reckless daredevil.
Of his earlier deep sea dive, he stated: ‘It’s a really hostile setting, the stress is phenomenal down there.
‘This submersible, which is basically solely the scale of a giant automotive, had 100,000 tons of pressure on it. That’s equal to 300 jumbo jets sitting on this small stress vessel.’
Hamish Harding (pictured) holds a file for touring the longest distance on file within the Mariana Trench, the deepest sea trench on the planet
That journey additionally launched him to the opportunity of hazard when the craft sustained a broken thruster on its journey to the underside of the Mariana Trench. Such expertise would possibly show invaluable within the coming hours.
Certainly, however for that childhood dream, Harding may need been content material with the nice fortune that got here his approach by way of his enterprise acumen.
Certainly, overseeing a massively spectacular worldwide personal jet brokerage firm, which he runs from Dubai, would possibly fulfill even probably the most pushed of entrepreneurs. That enterprise is claimed to have made him extraordinarily wealthy, although whether or not it has propelled him into the ranks of the world’s billionaires shouldn’t be clear.
He has by no means appeared on the Sunday Instances Wealthy Checklist, which ranks the 1,000 wealthiest individuals within the UK, nor has he appeared on Forbes journal’s rating of the world’s billionaires.
It could possibly be that as a result of each his Motion Aviation firm and the 58-year outdated himself are primarily based offshore, he wouldn’t essentially seem within the Sunday Instances checklist.
However, in response to a household supply, Harding, a father of two, has a house in a small village within the Aylesbury Vale district of Buckinghamshire.
An solely little one, Harding was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1964 and, on the age of six, moved along with his dad and mom to Hong Kong, the place his father Donald was a amount surveyor.
The billionaire is now misplaced at sea within the Titan mini-submarine (pictured) after clambering on board the vessel off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada
Six-year-old Hamish was enrolled on the fee-paying Peak Faculty. At 11, he moved to The King’s Faculty, Gloucester, the place outdated boys embody actor Simon Pegg and BBC Breakfast presenter Charlie Stayt.
From there he gained a spot at Pembroke School, Cambridge, to learn pure sciences and chemical engineering.
After graduating, he held numerous technical and managerial roles in IT earlier than transferring to India, the place he turned managing director of infotech firm Logica.
By 2003, he had established the Motion Group within the United Arab Emirates earlier than beginning his plane acquisition enterprise working the nationwide helicopter air ambulance service within the Gulf state of Qatar.
He lives in Dubai with youngest son Giles. His eldest son Rory, 18, is that this week finishing his A-levels at a school in West Sussex.
Harding is separated from his sons’ mom Michelle and he shares his life with a brand new associate Linda, an American who’s considered in her 70s.
To the general public, buccaneers equivalent to Hamish Harding are a brand new breed of hero, ready to check themselves in probably the most demanding environments in air and sea.
However whereas he’s undoubtedly admired, he isn’t envied – and because the hours tick away, many can be praying that this won’t be his final journey.
