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Mo Elshenawy, Cruise’s executive vice president of engineering, looks to hire engineers who love to experiment.

Cruise , the San-Francisco–based designer and operator of all-electric self-driving cars, employs nearly 2,000 engineers, including somewhere between 300 and 900 engineers with Ph.D. degrees. They work in hardware and software. They specialize in AI, security, and safety. And though, indeed, some have robotics , automation, or automotive backgrounds, many don’t. Instead, they come from an incredibly long list of different technical fields—e-commerce, finance, game development, animation, cameras, semiconductors , and app development.

Here’s what Mohamed Elshenawy , Cruise’s executive vice president of engineering, told IEEE Spectrum about the company’s workforce. (Elshenawy himself came to Cruise from stints as chief technology officer at a financial services startup and leader of a technology team at Amazon .)

I EEE Spectrum: Let’s start with the big picture of your engineering team.

Mohamed Elshenawy: In AI, we have machine-learning (ML) engineers that build the on-the-road decision-making modules. We also have the engineers that help build the tools for our continuous-learning machine. We have data engineers and data scientists, and even UI folks that help with the tools that the main core ML engineers use.

In robotics, we have AV foundations engineers, who build and maintain our robotics operating systems, and embedded systems developers.

In our security and safety operations, we have engineers working on threat modeling, app security engineering, IT enterprise security, and the security of the vehicle itself, along with all the systems engineers responsible for test validation, generating test-case scenarios, and tracking it all.

Our hardware engineers build our own EVs from the ground up, in partnership with GM and Honda . They handle the definition, design, development, and production of sensors, compute modules, and related hardware and include about 50 engineering disciplines, including acoustic engineers, power engineers, system-on-chips people, and so on.

Finally, we have the product engineering team—that covers both user-facing and internal apps—and the infrastructure team which builds the technical foundations (cloud infrastructure, internal tools, etc.) that the rest of our engineers rely on every day to get work done.

Where do these engineers generally come from?

Elshenawy: Many of our AI engineers come from academia, consumer tech, and finance. Our simulation group is part of this team. They include several engineers that helped build The Sims and others that worked for gaming and animation studios like Pixar , LucasArts , and Ubisoft . Our hardware engineers include people who came from Kodak , JPL , and chipmakers, as well as academia. For robotics, we generally look to robotics, other automotive, and aerospace companies for hiring. On the security side, we hire a mix of researchers and practitioners—and even literal hackers, including the team that infamously hacked a Jeep . Our product and infrastructure engineers come from a variety of traditional engineering companies as well as startups; they’ve previously built videoconferencing software, cloud computing platforms, and even a meditation app.

How has the mix shifted over the years?

Elshenawy: We’re solving for a problem that is mainly rooted in general AI, so we’ve always been heavy on the AI side of things. Because we are cloud native, we are able to leverage a lot of the existing technology that is provided by cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Platform and Azure ; we don’t need to reinvent that. So we’re leaning more heavily towards AI, robotics, and hardware over time.

Also, we’re ramping up product engineering now that we have started charging members of the public to ride in fully driverless cars. We expect that to continue to grow there as we solve for the technology and expand to multiple cities in the United States and internationally.

You mean people working on the customer-facing app?

Elshenawy: That and a lot more. This includes the customer-facing app that lets you order a ride, the in-car experience, and all the fleet operation on the back end, where we control our fleet, placing our fleet ahead of demand and determining pricing, and all the services that keep these lights on.

What do your engineers have in common?

Elshenawy: The self-driving cars problem is a great AI problem, and some people think about it as essentially a research problem, because you’re pushing the state of the art. But when you think about how you are actually going to pragmatically ship something continuously, it’s all rooted in experimentation.

So one common factor that we find in the engineers who are successful here, regardless of where in our organization that they land, is having the experimentation mind-set, the humble, resilient mind-set of someone who’s continuously curious and very agile in nature. There are certain types of engineers that don’t deal well with uncertainty and experimentation, and there are other engineers who thrive under an environment of continuous learning.

So the common trait among all these engineers is that learning, curiosity, and experimentation mind-set, and having the agility to deal with an unknown problem like this one.

What are the hardest roles to fill right now?

Elshenawy: Software, in general, has a shortage and will always have less supply than demand in the coming years, particularly in AI, applied machine learning, and deep learning, and we will continue to need these engineers in many different areas as we grow. Robotics specializations, and in general, control theory, will be very important as we go forward and those areas will continually face high demand.

• A Q&A with Cruise's head of AI, Hussein Mehanna - IEEE Spectrum ›
• In 2019, We'll Have Taxis Without Drivers—or Steering Wheels ... ›
• GM's Cruise wins first California permit to carry paying riders in ... ›
• GM expects to spend $2B on Cruise in 2022 | TechCrunch ›

Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum . Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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I'm a CEO who ran my company from a cruise ship for a month. It requires a lot of discipline, but I'd do it again.

• Tony Fernandes, CEO of UEGroup, managed his company from a cruise ship for 21 days.
• Fernandes experienced challenges with slow internet and communication but found workable solutions.
• Despite the hurdles, he finds value in being offline at times and plans to continue cruising.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tony Fernandes, a 60-year-old founder and CEO of UEGroup based in San Francisco, about his experience working remotely on a cruise ship. It's been edited for length and clarity.

My wife and I are in the post-kid, post-pet phase of our lives. Our kids have gone off to college and we had a beloved dog and house rabbits that have passed away. After they passed, that really opened up a window for us to travel — and we did — but extended travel is new for us.

In November, I embarked on a trip where I spent several weeks leading my company from a cruise ship with my wife. We ultimately circumnavigated the globe on two different cruises and with air travel. Leaving California, we went through Europe, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan.

It's been a cool experience. But I found that while working on the ship , you do need some discipline — especially on a 21-day cruise.

You have to create a time for work and a time for play

We didn't realize it, but when we upgraded our internet, it upgraded our drinks package. So, it turned out we could get bottles of Moët & Chandon Champagne for free.

We had a couple of lunches and dinners where we enjoyed Champagne , but we also developed a rhythm where we had work time and playtime. It wasn't rigid — but there were times when my wife, who does finance at UEGroup, and I knew we had to get things done.

Related stories

Working can set you apart from people who are on vacation. That doesn't mean you can't work in your bathing suit or have a beer before you start your work, but it puts you on a slightly different footing than some of the other people on the cruise.

Expect very slow internet service

One thing I didn't realize prior to the trip was that the cruise ship had only one satellite connection shared by thousands of people. The internet was oppressively slow at times.

For our next long trip, I'm looking into getting a data satellite phone so I can put an antenna on my patio facing the right direction for the satellite. I've still got to figure it out, but there were times when it was really important for us to communicate, and we couldn't.

We're now very mistrustful of statements the cruise lines make about the quality of their internet. For example, we upgraded our Internet, but it turned out the cruise line's definition of upgrading was that we could have more than one device, not that there was any better speed or reliability. You've got to read the fine print about how they define an upgrade.

I would also recommend asking what kind of download and upload speeds to expect.

Create a backup plan for meetings and other communication challenges

Internet access can be unpredictable even with research and planning ahead, so we had backup people for important meetings back at the office. If we weren't able to show up, there was someone prepared with the slide deck. I can't say it didn't create awkward moments at times — and it is one of the downsides — but you can plan for it the best you can.

When my wife was dealing with a bank and needed to get a two-factor authentication code without working SMS, there wasn't much she could do. So, that was a challenge as well.

At some points, I was forced to go ashore and buy SIM cards to leverage local cell service, but this requires research. Depending on the country there might only be one cellphone service that works there, or you might be able to get SIM card brands that work for a larger area.

Being offline can end up being a good thing

I find it hard to be offline, but because the connectivity was so bad sometimes, it just forced it to happen. We were in the middle of nowhere, and it wasn't going to change. In a way, being offline was good because I could just tune out.

My wife and I plan to cruise more in the future and even recently bought a home in Portugal near a cruise port that we're going to commute to using cruises as much as possible.

When we did the math, taking a cruise from California to Portugal was less than two business-class air travel tickets. Plus, you get meals, entertainment, and no jet lag — it seems like the way to go.

If you live or work on a cruise ship and would like to share your story, please email [email protected] .

Watch: Microsoft's chief brand officer, Kathleen Hall, says the company's employees are its best product testers

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• Dude, where’s my self-driving car?

The many, many missed deadlines for a fully autonomous vehicular future.

By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

Share this story

In 2015, the then-lead of Google’s self-driving car project Chris Urmson said one of his goals in developing a fully driverless vehicle was to make sure that his 11-year-old son would never need a driver’s license. 

The subtext was that in five years, when Urmson’s son turned 16, self-driving cars would be so ubiquitous, and the technology would be so superior to human driving, that his teenage son would have no need nor desire to learn to drive himself. 

Well, it’s 2024, and Urmson’s son is now 20 years old. Any bets on whether he got that driver’s license? 

One of the hallmarks of the race to develop autonomous vehicles has been wildly optimistic predictions about when they’ll be ready for daily use. The landscape is positively littered with missed deadlines. 

In 2015, Baidu senior VP Wang Jing said the tech company would be selling self-driving cars to Chinese customers by 2020. In 2016, then-Lyft president John Zimmer claimed that “a majority” of the trips taking place on its ride-sharing network would be in fully driverless cars “within five years.” That same year, Business Insider said that 10 million autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. 

GM said it would mass produce driverless cars without steering wheels or pedals by 2019. Ford, slightly more conservative, predicted it would do the same in 2021. And in a perfect encapsulation of mid-2010s autonomy hype, Intel in 2017 predicted a $7 trillion industry — more than double what the global auto industry does now — around autonomy by 2050. 

Of course, no one has been more bullish than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has turned making wrong predictions about the readiness of autonomous vehicles into an art form.

Of course, no one has been more bullish than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has turned making wrong predictions about the readiness of autonomous vehicles into an art form. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk said in 2019. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature would be so reliable the driver could “go to sleep.” Teslas with the company’s FSD software are not autonomous, and drivers would be well advised to not sleep in their cars. 

Sure, there are some self-driving cars on the roads today. They’re in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Hamburg, and Beijing, among other cities. They’re operated by some of the biggest, most well-capitalized companies in the world. You can even ride in some of them.

But they’re stuck. Not stuck in the sense that a Tesla Cybertruck gets stuck in less than an inch of snow. But confined within geofenced service areas, held back by their own technological shortcomings, opposed by labor unions and supporters of more reliable modes of transportation, and restricted from driving on certain roads or in certain weather conditions. 

“The autonomous vehicle industry — particularly the companies developing and testing robotaxis — has gotten away for too long with selling a vision of the future that they should know perfectly well is never going to come to pass,” Sam Anthony, co-founder and CTO of Perceptive Automata, a now-defunct AV company, wrote in his newsletter in 2022.

We assumed the robots would be able to drive as freely as we do. After all, we built a world in which we humans can — and do — drive anywhere, all the time. So why did we get it so wrong?

Before we examine why the industry collectively whiffed the rollout of driverless cars, it’s instructive to look at why these predictions were made in the first place. Why set these goal posts if they never really mattered? 

Of course the answer is money. By promising that driverless cars were “just around the corner,” and on the cusp of taking over our roads, companies were able to rack in hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their experiments. 

The amount of money flowing into the autonomous vehicle space also had the knock-on effect of convincing regulators to take a lax approach when it comes to self-driving cars. AV boosters warned that too many rules would “stifle innovation” and jeopardize future gains, whether that was safety or job creation. 

And it turns out that regulators were very receptive to those arguments. The federal government — whether under Obama, Trump, or Biden — has done very little to stand in the way of companies testing their tech on public roads. A bill in Congress that would accelerate the rollout of cars with steering wheels and pedals has stalled over disagreements about liability, but you wouldn’t know it looking at these fundraising hauls. 

Some states, like California, have done their best to spin up some sort of regulatory playbook. But most were eager to attract companies under the belief that driverless cars were the future. And who wants to stand in the way of the future? 

For nearly a decade, AV operators were able to raise money almost without restriction.

For nearly a decade, AV operators were able to raise money almost without restriction. They did it through normal fundraising channels, or by tying themselves to big tech and car companies. Cruise Automation was acquired by General Motors. Ford invested $1 billion in Argo AI. Google, always slightly ahead of the rest, spun out its self-driving car project as Waymo. Amazon bought Zoox. Hyundai allied itself with Motional. Some have estimated over $160 billion has flowed into the industry over the past dozen or so years. 

And after the pandemic, the companies that weren’t able to cozy up to big automakers or tech giants found a new way to quickly raise cash: SPACs. Traditional IPOs were slow, and special acquisition companies were quick, so dozens of mobility-focused startups went public by merging with these so-called “blank check” companies in order to access more money faster. 

And despite a number of setbacks, like crashes and lawsuits and investigations, the cash kept coming in. It wasn’t until 2021, when the industry pulled in $12.5 billion led by GM’s Cruise raising a massive $2.75 billion, that funding for AV companies peaked. 

The predictions about the imminent arrival of safe, reliable self-driving technology helped speed the flow of money. And once those predictions failed to materialize, the money started to dry up. 

Why did the predictions fail? The technology, while incredibly effective at getting us most of the way there, stumbled as it got closer to the finish line. 

In the AV world, this is called the “long tail of 9s.” It’s the idea that you can get a vehicle that is 99.9 percent as good as a human driver, but you never actually get to 100 percent. And that’s because of edge cases, these unpredictable events that flummox even human drivers. 

When training an AI program on driving, you can predict a lot of what to expect, but you can’t predict everything. And when those edge cases eventually emerge, the car can make mistakes — sometimes with tragic consequences. 

When training an AI program on driving, you can predict a lot of what to expect, but you can’t predict everything.

Take the example of Cruise. In October of last year, a woman was hit by a human driver while crossing the street in San Francisco. The impact sent her flying into the path of a driverless Cruise vehicle, which immediately braked after also striking her. The Cruise vehicle then attempted to pull over to the side of the road, not realizing the woman was still trapped beneath the vehicle, injuring her further in the process. 

One of the first things Cruise did in the wake of the incident was to recall all 950 vehicles it had on the road in the US. This took the form of an over-the-air software update to the collision detection subsystem so the vehicle remains stationary during certain crash incidents, rather than pulling over to the side of the road. Cruise encountered an edge case, and it quickly issued a correction for it. 

But how many more edge cases are lurking in the shadows? And how many more people will be injured — or even killed — before these cars are seen as more reliable?

Waymo has been on the forefront of trying to convince the public and regulators that its vehicles are as safe, if not safer, than humans. It’s released a number of studies and statistical analyses in recent years that it says proves its vehicles get in fewer crashes, cause less damage, and improve overall safety on the roads. 

But for every Waymo, there’s an Elon Musk, whose misleading predictions about the imminent readiness of self-driving cars muddy the waters for everyone else who knows that the reality is much further away than previously thought. Waymo also assumes legal liability for crashes involving its vehicles — something Tesla has so far refused to do.

But Waymo isn’t driving the public’s perception of self-driving cars; Tesla is. Broken promises and failed predictions are what’s fueling the growing skepticism about self-driving cars in the public which, as the years plod by, gets more and more turned off by the idea of relinquishing control of their vehicles to a robot. 

Without passengers, there’s no business. But without safe, reliable technology, there’s no future for autonomous vehicles. 

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In the News

Royal Caribbean is hiring 10,000 workers in 2024 to keep up with high cruise demands

• Updated: May. 08, 2024, 1:25 p.m. |
• Published: May. 08, 2024, 1:05 p.m.

Royal Caribbean is hiring 10,000 workers in 2024 to keep up with a surging demand in cruise travel, according to a report from Reuters. TNS

• Katherine Rodriguez | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Royal Caribbean is hiring 10,000 workers in 2024 to keep up with surging demand in cruise travel, according to a report from Reuters.

Tourists taking cruises hit a record in 2023, and there is no signs that tourism is slowing.

Therefore, Royal Caribbean is trying to bolster its labor force this year as it brings on three new ships.

The cruise liner is asking several partner universities in the Caribbean to shore up short-term courses and certifications so more people can be qualified to work at sea.

Royal Caribbean is also in talks with port authorities in St. Maarten, the British Virgin Islands and the Gambia Tourism Board to drum up support for additional staff.

Royal Caribbean’s hiring spree comes as the cruise liner has hit some snafus with some of its itineraries and ships so far this year.

Royal Caribbean canceled a cruise to Alaska after passengers had already boarded due to a malfunction with the ship.

The cruise liner also stopped ships from docking at a private island port in Haiti due to ongoing violence in the region.

This decision by Royal Caribbean to change the itinerary on that cruise came after the U.S. issued a warning to tourists to avoid traveling to Haiti at this time due to an increase in gang-related violence.

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Moscow is a terrifying city for drivers. So what if a car doesn't have one?

Chaotic roads, bad weather and reckless habits make the Russian capital one of the worst to drive, and its quest to build an autonomous car uniquely challenging

I n certain sunny climes, self-driving cars are multiplying. Dressed in signature spinning sensors, the vehicles putter along roads in California, Arizona and Nevada, hoovering up data that will one day make them smart enough to run without humans.

Besides perennial sunshine, those places share other common traits: wide, well-manicured roads, functional traffic enforcement, and agreeable local governments. That’s how Chandler, Arizona – a Phoenix suburb on nobody’s radar as of a few weeks ago – became the first US town to host autonomous cars on public streets without human safety drivers. Courtesy of Waymo, they’re expected to start carrying passengers within the next few months.

If you ask many Silicon Valley companies, the future of driverless cars is just a couple of years away. But halfway across the world, the outlook is a lot more skeptical.

“We don’t have the luxury of California roads,” says Olga Uskova of Cognitive Technologies, a Russian software maker that specializes in autonomous vehicles. “The environment is ever-changing: the snow has covered traffic signs; it’s raining on your windshield, the sun is blocking you. Our people train using these kinds of data.”

Uskova asserts that technology tested in sun-drenched utopias can’t possibly translate to a city like Moscow. Gnarly road planning, terrible weather and reckless habits make the Russian capital one of the worst cities in the world for drivers.

With roads that spread like a cobweb away from the Kremlin, disturbances like car wrecks, construction and government motorcades can wreak havoc for miles. Seat belts are scorned, and traffic laws widely ignored; speeding violations are enforced with $4 fines, paid by phone. It’s no surprise that Russia’s rate of road fatalities is nearly double that of the US, with an average of 20 serious accidents a day just in Moscow. Or, for that matter, that dashcam videos of Russian road fights and collisions make up such a popular subgenre on YouTube.

But most of the world’s roads look more like Russia than Mountain View, and according to Uskova, that gives Russian developers an edge in building the brains of autonomous cars.

That theory was tested at a recent event in Moscow, advertised as the world’s first hackathon for driverless cars. In an austere, Soviet-era dormitory bedecked with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk posters, top engineering students from far-flung schools like MIT, Cambridge and Peking University sank into beanbag chairs for a three-day coding binge.

“We’re here because it’s a chance to change the world over the next 10 to 15 years,” said Mitch Mueller, a student who traveled from the University of Wisconsin to compete. They were also competing for a cash prize, bragging rights and – most importantly – the attention of participating companies, including Uber and Nvidia, eager to recruit the next generation of AI talent.

The event had another purpose: to advance a credo that when it comes to autonomous cars, tougher conditions produce smarter technology. Lidar – the expensive, light-pulsing sensors relied upon by current autonomous car models – is worthless in snow and thus “a fake”, says Uskova. Instead, cars should be trained to operate using high-definition cameras, low-cost radars and powerful AI that mimics the human brain.

As the 150 engineers pored over Moscow road data, it was obvious that this vision is a long ways off. Most cars struggled to identify signs, for instance, which were hard to detect in snow or rain; and for non-Russian speakers, the task was practically impossible.

“The problem is that the signs are small, and in Russia they look very similar,” explained Sami Mian, a computer scientist at Arizona State University. “The main difference is numbers and arrows, and a city entry sign can look almost the same as a stop sign. The top team had 40% accuracy.”

That team, three local guys from Moscow, had tapped into a secret weapon: a trove of the popular dashcam footage, which had been harvested and stored at nearby Moscow State University. Derived from 100,000 dashcam videos, that data served as the building blocks of a basic neural network hammered out by the cigarette-puffing coders, who mentioned that they had slept a total of five hours over three days.

Russian-built autonomous systems are already in use by Kamaz, Russia’s largest truck maker, and an agricultural equipment company. Both are working with Cognitive Technologies to build autonomous machines. But adapting the technology for city use, and bringing it to the international stage, is a steep battle.

No government agency has developed regulations for autonomous cars, so road testing is constrained to designated testing zones. The only car testing zone in Moscow is a 400m track embellished with pedestrian crossings, road signs, markings and a section with circular traffic. It’s a lousy facsimile of Moscow roads, or any road. But even worse is its location far outside the city center: a planned ride-along was scrapped because of bad traffic.

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Learn the basics of how a Cruise car navigates city streets safely and efficiently.

Sensors can see 360 degrees, hundreds of feet ahead, and around that double-parked car. Cruise cars make sense of this data in a split second, tracking every important object in view.

Is there room to change lanes? Is it safe to turn left here? Cruise cars consider multiple paths per second, constantly choosing the best ones for unexpected events and changes in road conditions.

Cruise cars tell their wheels and other controls how to move along the selected path and react to changes in it. The result is a ride that’s safe, efficient, and natural-looking to other drivers.

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Cruise ship sails into New York City port with 44-foot dead whale across its bow

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A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot dead whale across its bow, marine authorities said.

The whale, identified as an endangered sei whale, was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brooklyn on Saturday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries spokesperson Andrea Gomez said.

A spokesperson for MSC Cruises said the whale was on the MSC Meraviglia, which docked at Brooklyn before sailing to ports in New England and Canada.

“We immediately notified the relevant authorities, who are now conducting an examination of the whale,” officials with the cruise line said in a statement.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of any marine life,” the officials said, adding that the Geneva-based MSC Cruises follows all regulations designed to protect whales, such as altering itineraries in certain regions to avoid hitting the animals.

The dead whale was towed to shore in Sandy Hook, N.J., to allow for better access to equipment and to conduct a necropsy, Gomez said.

The necropsy, an autopsy on an animal, was conducted Tuesday, Gomez said. Samples collected from the whale will help biologists determine whether it was already dead when it was struck by the ship, she said.

Sei whales are typically observed in deeper waters far from the coastline, Gomez said. They are one of the largest whale species and are internationally protected.

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Mom shares terrifying ordeal that saw son, 12, airlifted from Carnival cruise ship with perforated bowel

Helicopters and planes were dispatched to the carnival venezia ‘within hours’, article bookmarked.

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A mother has shared details of the terrifying ordeal that saw her dangerously ill 12-year-old son airlifted from a cruise ship by the US Air Force .

Angela Bridges’ son Aiden fell ill on the Carnival Venezia cruise ship around 400 miles off the North Carolina coast with a perforated bowel.

Medics on board did what they could but the crew declared a critical medical incident and the US Air Force was called in, with the helicopter arriving “within hours” to take him to a hospital.

“I was just screaming and crying over the helicopter blades,” Ms Bridges told Good Morning America (GMA) on Thursday. “It was very scary.”

She added: “I feel so much gratitude, gratefulness, toward all the people that have been integral to my son’s recovery. It’s not just the Coast Guard, or the Air Force or the doctors or the nurses, it’s all of those people.”

The family were on their way back to New York from the Caribbean, when Aiden fell seriously ill on 4 May.

His mother told GMA that medics carried out an x-ray to work out what was wrong with him.

“They did that and she said ‘it looks as though he has a perforation in his bowel,’” Ms Bridges explained. “She said ‘basically the next thing that we need to do, immediately, is get him off the ship.’”

Two HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters and two HC-130J Combat King 11 planes took off from Patrick Space Force Base in Florida.

The mission required three intricate helicopter air-to-air refuellings since the ship was so far out at sea.Aiden received life-saving treatment on board the helicopter, his mother said, before being taken to a hospital in North Carolina.

His condition is currently unknown.

“Everyone in the wing mobilised with exceptional speed. By uniting our efforts, we saved crucial time, delivering life-saving assistance six hours ahead of other response teams,” rescue pilot Captain Dylan Gann said.

The helicopters flew a total of 1,200 miles throughout the operation, while the ship adjusted its course in order to meet the aircraft.

“The amazing thing about this rescue is actually how smooth it went. We went from zero notification, to having aircraft ready, to having aircraft in the air,” Lieutenant Colonel Dave Underwood told ABC News.“And the young man is in the hospital in just a matter of hours.”

The cruise liner arrived in New York City as scheduled on Monday.

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