Remembering Hamish Harding

It is with deep sadness that Aerlex Law Group acknowledges the death of its friend, Hamish Harding, chairman of Action Aviation, an international aircraft brokerage firm headquartered in Dubai, and a 2022 inductee into the Living Legends of Aviation, who died June 18, 2023 as a passenger lost in the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible while visiting the wreckage of the HMS Titanic on the seabed of the North Atlantic Ocean.

George Hamish Livingston Harding was truly the definition of the quintessential 21st Century explorer and adventurer, having flown into space, set a world record for the fastest air circumnavigation of the Earth, visited the South Pole several times, and descended into the world’s deepest undersea channel, the Mariana Trench.

On July 9-11, 2019, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Harding, as chief pilot and mission director, led a team of aviators that set a Guinness World Record for the fastest aerial circumnavigation of the Earth via North and South Poles in a Gulfstream G650ER aircraft — 46 hours 40 minutes. The One More Orbit mission launched and landed from the Space Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Harding flew into space on June 4, 2022 as a crew member of the suborbital Blue Origin NS-21 mission, the fifth manned spaceflight of the New Shepard rocket.

On March 5, 2021, Harding dove to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in a two-person submarine, setting the records for greatest length covered and greatest time spent at full ocean depth.

Beginning in 2017, Harding worked with an Antarctic VIP tourism company to introduce the first regular business jet tourism service to the Antarctic using a Gulfstream G550 aircraft as the right tool for the job.  Harding visited the South Pole several times, accompanying Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 2016 as Aldrin became the oldest person, at age 86, to reach the South Pole.

British-born Hamish Harding and Aerlex Law Group President Stephen Hofer shared a Cambridge University connection, Hamish having attended Pembroke College and Stephen having studied at Queens College in Cambridge, England.

We salute a gentleman without peer who died doing what he loved most — exploring the Earth from one exotic locale to the next and always pushing the boundaries of human endeavor and accomplishment.

Requiescat in Pace, Hamish.