Vanessa Barford
BBCNews
Fifty years ago, two British sailors sank more than 1,500 feet in a deep-sea submersible 150 miles off Ireland.
Trapped in a 1.8 meter diameter steel ball for three days, the men had only 12 minutes of oxygen left when they were finally rescued.
The BBC originally published this article in 2013. What happened to the Titan submersible has sparked interest again.
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Although the story of pisces III it was big news 50 years ago, today it is largely forgotten.
but on wednesday August 29, 1973the former Royal Navy submariner, Roger Chapmannthen 28 years old, and engineer Roger Mallinsonthen 35, sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in an accident, sparking a 76-hour international rescue operation.
Here’s how the incident and the rescue effort played out:
1:15 a.m. – Dive begins
Pilots Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson began a routine dive on Pisces III.
The Canadian commercial submersible, working for the Post Office, was laying a transatlantic telephone cable on the seabed 240 kilometers to the sea. south west corkan Irish town.
“It took about 40 minutes to sink to not far than 500 meters and a little faster to come back up,” recalls Chapman.
“We took turns 8 hours, scouring the surface of the seabed at half a mile per hour (0.8 kilometers), setting up pumps and jets that liquefied the mud, laying cables and making sure everything was covered. It was very slow and cloudy to work”.
Mallinson claims that the Poor visibility it made the job exhausting.
“It was like driving down a highway in thick fog and trying to follow a white line: you had to concentrate beyond belief.”
For Mallinson, that grueling shift was followed by a 26-hour stretch of no sleep.
“A previous dive had damaged the manipulator, so I worked all day repairing it. I knew Pisces III inside out, since I rebuilt it when it arrived from Canada as a shipwreck,” he says.
By a stroke of luck, the engineer also decided to change the oxygen tank.
“It was quite wide to run the dive, but for some reason I decided to change it to a full one, which was no small physical feat as it was so heavy.”
“I could have gotten in trouble for changing a half-used bottle, but it just so happens that if I hadn’t, we would not have lived ensures.
In addition to laying the cable, the pilots had to take care of life support.
Each 40 minutes they turned on a fan lithium hydroxide to absorb the carbon dioxide they exhaled and then injected a small amount of oxygen.
They also recorded each dive via video.
9:18 am – The accident
Pisces III was finishing the operation. When suddenly, the unexpected happened.
“We were waiting for the towline to be attached to lift us up and take us back to the base ship,” says Chapman.
“There were many blows from ropes and shackles, as is normal during the last phase of the operation, when suddenly we were thrown back and we sank, quickly. We hang upside down and then we go up,” says Chapman.
The aft sphere – a smaller hermetic sphere where the machinery was – had been flooded when the hatch was opened. Suddenly the submarine weighed more than a ton.
“As we were sinking, my biggest concern was if we were close to the continental plate because if we hit it we would be crushed.”
Mallinson remembers the sub shaking and everything coming loose as they fell.
“It was very scary, like a dive bomber with engines screaming and the gauges spinning.”
The pilots shut down the electrical systems and turned everything off for complete darkness, dropping a 400-pound lead weight to make it lighter as they descended.
“It took about 30 seconds until we crashed. We turned off the depth indicator at 500 feet (152 meters), as it could have blown. We managed to find a white cloth to put in our mouths so we wouldn’t bite our tongues too,” says Mallinson.
The submarine hit bottom -at 480 meters- at 09:30 hours.
Mallinson says the first thing he felt was relief that they were alive. He later found out that it crashed at a speed of 65 kilometers per hour.
“We weren’t hurt, but there were tools everywhere and we were holding on to the pipes. We sat there with a flashlight. We had unknowingly hit a ravine, so we kind of disappeared under the seabed,” says Chapman.
09:45 am – Making contact
Pisces III was able to make phone contact, sending a message saying that both were fine, morale was good, and they were getting organized.
Early indications suggested oxygen supplies would last until early Saturday morning.
The submarine carried 72 hours of oxygen in case of an accident, but they had already spent eight hours on the dive. They had 66 hours left.
10:00-16:30 hours – Harsh conditions
The pilots spent the first few hours “getting organized,” according to Chapman.
“The submersible was almost upside downwe had to rearrange it, repair the toolbox and make sure there were no leaks,” he says.
If they wanted the oxygen to last, they had to move little.
“If you calm down, you use a quarter of the oxygen. you don’t talk or move”, says.
The two men stayed as high up in the sub as possible above the heavy air that was settling to the bottom, according to Mallinson.
The internal diameter of the crew sphere was only 1.8 meters, so the pilots had little space.
“We hardly spoke, we just held hands and gave each other a squeeze to show that we were okay”Mallinson recounts.
“It was very cold, we were wet. I wasn’t in the best condition anyway, having just suffered from horrible meat and potato pie poisoning for 3-4 days. But our job was to stay alive,” she says.
On the surface, the rescue was underway.
the support ship vickers venturerthen in the North Sea, was contacted shortly after 10:30 a.m. and ordered to take the submersible Pisces II (sister to Pisces III) to the nearest port.
He HMS Hecate of the Royal Navy was sent to the scene by special ropes at 12:09 and RAF Nimrod aircraft flew over the area.
A United States Navy submersible, CURV IIIdesigned to collect bombs from the sea, was shipped from California and the Canadian Coast Guard ship John Cabot left Swansea on the Welsh coast.
Thursday August 30: conserving oxygen
The Vickers Voyager ship arrived in Cork (in Ireland) at 08:00 to load the submersibles Pisces II and Pisces Vwho had arrived overnight by plane.
The ship left Cork at 10:30 a.m.
Meanwhile, Chapman and Mallinson watched as supplies were running low.
The pilots only had a cheese and chutney sandwich and a can of lemonadebut they did not want to eat or drink them, according to Chapman.
“We allowed the CO2 to build up a bit to conserve oxygen; we had timers to track every 40 minutes, but we wanted to wait a little longer. That left us a bit lethargic and sleepy.”
“We also started thinking about our families. I had just gotten married, so I could focus on my wife, June. But Roger Mallinson had four young children and a wife, and he started to get a little anxious about how they were doing,” he says.
Friday August 31: failed attempts
“Friday was a disaster from a surface point of view,” says Chapman.
He pisces II it was launched with a special polypropylene rope attached to a collapsible snaphook at 2:00 hours, but the hoisting rope tore from the handler, so it had to be returned to the base ship for repairs.
Then, Pisces V it was also thrown with a polypropylene rope attached to a crowbar and, although it managed to reach the bottom of the sea, he was unable to find the affected Pisces III before it ran out of power.
He returned to the surface and then tried again.
“It was almost 1:00 p.m. when Pisces V found us. It was incredibly encouraging to know that someone knew where we were. But when Pisces V tried to connect a snaphook, the attempt failed due to the buoyancy of the rope”says Chapman.
Pisces V was ordered to stay with Pisces III, even though he was unable to lift it. Pisces II descended again, but had to return to the surface after water entered its own sphere.
Then he CURV IIIwhich had arrived around 5:30 p.m., had a power failure and was unable to set sail.
“By midnight on Friday, we only had Pisces V and two broken submersibles,” says Chapman.
“Then Pisces V was ordered to surface just after midnight, which was a bit harsh. It was like we were back to square one with no one around.”
“Our 72 hours of oxygen had run out, we were running low on lithium hydroxide to clean up the CO2, it was very dirty and cold, and we were almost resigned,” recalls Chapman.
Mallinson agrees that hope was fading at the time.
However, he affirms that there was one thing that helped him: the presence of dolphins. “We had seen them on the 28th, and although we couldn’t see them now, I was able to hear them on the underwater phone for the entire three days. That gave me a lot of pleasure, ”she says.
Saturday, September 1, 4:02 a.m.:
The Pisces II was re-released with a specially designed lever and another polypropylene string.
“Just after 5 in the morning they saw us in the aft sphere; they knew we were still alivesays Chapman.
“Then, at 9:40 a.m., CURV III went down and fixed another rope, with the lever inserted into the opening in the aft sphere. We wondered what was going on, why we weren’t being uplifted.”
Chapman says it was at this point that the pilots knew the line was attached.
But Mallinson says he wasn’t sure the elevator would work.
“It bothered me a lot that they didn’t pick us up. I thought it had been a wrong decision, ”she indicates.
“I think that in that oment if they had asked either of us if we wanted to be put down or picked up, we would both have said ‘leave us alone’: the recovery was so scary and the chances of getting back up were next to zero”add.
10:50 a.m. – The uprising
Until the Pisces III uprising began.
“As soon as we got off the bottom of the sea, it was very hard, very disorienting,” says Chapman.
The lift stopped twice during the ascent.
once a 100 metersto untangle the CURV, and a second time to 30 meters, so divers could attach heavier lift lines.
“We were rolling and swinging, so they needed more ropes so we could all be pulled up together,” Mallinson says.
1:17 p.m. – The rescue
Pisces III was dragged up out of the water.
“Apparently they thought we were dead when they looked at us, it had all been so violent,” Chapman says.
“When they opened the hatch and the fresh air and sunlight streamed in, we got blinding headaches, but we were elated.”
“It was quite difficult to get out of the submarine, we had been so packed together that we could barely move.”
In fact, Mallinson says it took a good 30 minutes to open the hatch.
“I was stuck. When she opened up, she went off like a gun, we could smell the salty sea air,” she says.
The pilots had been on Pisces III for 84 hours and 30 minutes when they were finally rescued.
“We had 72 hours of life support when we started the dive, so we managed to last another 12.5 hours. When we looked in the cylinder, we had 12 minutes of oxygen left.” Chapman says.
The consequences
The rescue captured the attention of the media and the public.
Shortly after the salvage, Roger Chapman formed the Rumic company, which provides submarine operations and services to the offshore and defense industries.
He became a leading authority on submersible salvage, being contacted for the sinking of the kursk on behalf of the Royal Navy, in 2000, and playing a central role in the successful rescue of the 7-man crew of the Russian submarine AS-28 Price, in 2005.
Rumic was acquired by the British company James Fisher and Sons the following year and is now known as James Fisher Defense.
Meanwhile, Mallinson, who lives in the Lake District, UK, continued to work for the same company on submersibles until 1978.
He became heavily involved in the restoration of steam engines and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Prince Michael of Kent for his involvement with The Shamrock Trust, Windermere, in 2013.
The two men kept in touch and met every year.
Chapmann died of cancer in 2020at 74 years old.
While Chapman’s dramatic underwater rescue had clearly influenced his career, in 2013 he said there had been no other aftermath.
“I’m a bit more reluctant to get on an elevator, I think it’s the going up and down, but that’s the only thing that worries me physically,” he said.
Mallinson claimed that if the submersible were to sink again, he “wouldn’t do anything differently.”
“Roger Chapman (was) a great man. Someone else might have panicked. If I could have picked someone to go with, it would have been him.”said.
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