Sub survivor recalls record-breaking Atlantic rescue mission 50 years later

There is, perhaps, no one alive who knows more about what the occupants of the Titan submersible could be going through than Roger Mallinson.

“Let’s hope, let’s hope, let’s hope they are safe,” he told Global News at his home in Cumbria, England.

Despite his hope, Mallinson worries that the signs are not good for a successful rescue.

Almost exactly 50 years after his small submersible plummeted to the Atlantic Ocean floor, the 85-year-old English man is now being confronted with those memories again, as people around the world are consumed by the fate of the Titan and its five occupants.

In August 1973, Mallinson and his colleague Roger Chapman had been laying telephone cable on the seabed, when a freak accident at the end of their shift stranded the pair inside their Canadian-made Pisces III sub, 480 metres below the surface.

Theirs remains the deepest successful sub rescue ever, but from a depth almost eight times shallower than the Titanic wreck.

“When we went down, it took us 26 seconds and we hit bottom at 40 miles-an-hour (64 km/h), and we hit like a major road crash,” Mallinson said.

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“First of all, we had to find out what life support we had. So how much oxygen did we have left?

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The reason Mallinson is alive to tell the tale is that he happened to grab an extra oxygen bottle for his sub in advance of that fateful mission off the coast of Ireland.

The two Rogers were able to ration that tank until the rescue effort was able to bring them to safety.

Mallinson says he and Chapman talked as little as possible to save oxygen over the four-day ordeal.

“Keep on praying and just don’t waste (oxygen), don’t exercise, don’t use muscles, because that all burns oxygen,” he said. “I think we both mentioned that the chances of recovery were almost non-existent.”

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But as they lay still, help was arriving from Canada and the United States in the form of other Pisces subs and a U.S. Navy undersea recovery vehicle.

Unlike the Titan occupants, the two men were also able to communicate with their mother ship via underwater telephone.

After a number of failed attempts, the rescuers attached cables to the sub and it was hoisted to the surface, with help near the surface from a brave team of scuba divers.

It was an experience Mallinson described as “extremely uncomfortable,” as the cables and waves tossed the men around like rag dolls.

Once on the surface, they opened the hatch with just 12 minutes of oxygen left.

Mallinson says a large pod of dolphins that had been circling his sub all along suddenly and eerily disappeared.

“One of the men said, ‘The dolphins have gone! Oh, the dolphins have gone!’ And that was brilliant. That was absolutely brilliant,” Mallinson said.

“The thing that puzzles me is, Did they know there was going to be an incident? I think they’ve got to have known.”

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Such a joyous and almost spiritual ending was not the end of Mallinson’s career under the waves.

He was so confident in the safety of the North Vancouver-made Pisces III, he went back to work and completed another 1,500 hours of cable laying.

“It was honest and straight and it was very, very well made,” Mallinson said. “You could work all over the world on it.”

Mallinson’s maritime achievements didn’t stop with subs.

Earlier this year, King Charles made him an MBE for his services to steam-boating heritage.

Roger Chapman passed away in 2020.