It was less than an hour off the coast of Greenland that Jules Mountain began to question his sanity. The British entrepreneur was completing the second leg of his eight-day attempt to become the first person to fly a Bell 505 light helicopter across the Atlantic. “I had to go over freezing fog at 14,500 feet or ice would build up on the vehicle’s blades,” he says. “It was -14 degrees Celsius and the high altitude meant I was gasping for air. And then I worked out I had 30 minutes’ worth of fuel remaining.”
Mountain was flying the helicopter from Montreal to Guernsey: a nearly 4,000-mile journey that included fuel stops in the frozen wastelands of Northern Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. He says he took on the challenge when he realized the helicopter’s range was 350 miles and that it could fly only three hours at a time. It meant his longest leg required pumping fuel mid-flight.
“My previous goal was to trek to the North Pole, but it felt too easy,” says Mountain. “It didn’t feel dangerous enough: You could get rescued at any moment. Whereas with this challenge, flying over icebergs and forests far from civilization, an engine failure might mean death. And that’s when the adrenaline rush hits—it’s when you feel most alive.”
Mountain, who has also summited Everest, is one of many businesspeople taking on extreme adventures around the world. British billionaire Hamish Harding and Pakistani British executive Shahzada Dawood were among the passengers aboard the Titan submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic Ocean on June 18. Operated by OceanGate, a US company that builds and launches manned submersibles, Titan was part of a tourist expedition to observe the wreckage of the Titanic at a depth of about 12,500 feet.
On June 22, remains from Titan were located by a remote-controlled underwater search vehicle about 500 meters from the wreckage of the Titanic, roughly 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The US Coast Guard believes all five passengers died following a catastrophic implosion.
The extreme tourism industry is niche, but growing. A swelling number of companies have emerged to facilitate dangerous adventures for the super-rich. OceanGate began offering trips aboard Titan to the site of the Titanic wreckage in 2021; seats on the latest, ill-fated trip cost $250,000 per person. However, safety concerns were raised as early as 2018, during Titan’s quality-control stage, including questions about the 6.7-meter vessel’s experimental carbon-fiber hull structure (typically, deep-diving subs have hulls made from metal) and lack of industry certification. Past passengers have also shared details of problems with communication, navigation, and buoyancy during their 12-hour round trip to the Titanic.
With such extreme adventures, the work of operators is naturally risky. Seattle-based mountaineer Garret Madison offers bespoke expeditions to unnamed, unclimbed Himalayan peaks through his company, Madison Mountaineering. He explains that the average Everest death rate is 1 percent—a higher figure than for US service members in recent conflicts. “It’s the exhilaration of being on the mountain and coming face-to-face with danger that’s so attractive.”
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