What conditions need to be met in order for a submarine crew to be successfully rescued?
I remember the failure of the rescue attempts on the Russian submarine Kursk last year, which sank in the Barents Sea to a depth of 350 ft. I’ve read that the crew were most likely dead before any rescuers could have reached them.
I’ve also read that the Soviet Union lost several submarines during the Cold War, but I never heard of any successful rescues. The US lost at least two submarines during the Cold War (the USS Scorpion in 1968, located far too late to rescue any survivors had there been any, and USS Thresher in 1963, way too deep for any rescue attempts with the technology of the time). I found that the French also lost a submarine in the Mediterranean in 1968 (a bad year for submariners I guess ).
My guess would be the primary limitations on any rescue attempt would be:
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• locating the submarine
• the depth of the submarine
• location of survivors and escape hatches
• nature of the accident (e.g. reactor leak preventing rescuers from approaching?)
• weather conditions
• time (air, water, etc.)
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I can’t remember the case, but I think somewhere I’ve read that there has been one successful rescue of submariners from a sunken US submarine in 1939. Does anyone know the details, and was that the only successful rescue?
So does anyone know the limits of rescue capabilities?
Here’s some info on the rescue of survivors of the USS Squaalus in 1939. They used a “newly developed McCann rescue chamber–a revised version of a diving bell invented by Commander Charles B. Momsen…”
The aforementioned Momsen was also the designer of the Momsen lung, an early escape device for submariners.
For a detailed and yet very readable account of the rescue of the crew of the Squalus, and about the life of the undersung “Swede” Momsen in general, I heartily recommend Peter Maas’ The Terrible Hours. Not only did Momsen develop, demonstrate, and introduce the diving bell and the Momsen lung into Navy use against the usual bureaucratic opposition, he also was the key player in developing the depth-vs.-time charts still used by Navy divers, he was an accomplished commander on both subs and battleships in the war, and afterward led the program to design the new-generation hull design for nuclear subs as commanding officer of the Albacore. Oh, and he also straightened out the Navy’s mail system.
However in this particular case, later interviews with the survivors indicated that contrary to the official communiqués, the rescue of those trapped at the bottom did not involve what we’d call a proper diving bell/submersible rescue with a controlled, deliberate ascent, but rather because conditions were deteriorating too fast for that (the “air line” that was supposedly attached by the rescue team did not work properly), they used some sort of arrangement that just bobbed them up to the surface 2 at a time in a “free ascent” along a line to a ship above them. Most of the group suffered career-ending decompression trauma (surprise…) and at least two died from it.
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