Survivor of deepest sub rescue in history recalls 84-hour wait at the bottom of seabed off Cork
The Titan has five people on board and is believed to have enough oxygen to last until about 10am on Thursday morning, Irish time.
As rescue teams race against the clock to find the submersible that has gone missing near the wreck site of the Titanic, one man is recalling his own rescue off the coast of Cork 50 years ago.
The rescue of Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman in 1973 is currently the deepest sub-rescue in history.
It took 84 hours to rescue the men and if it wasn't for some quick thinking by Mr Mallinson, he believes they would not have survived.
Mr Mallinson, who was 28 at the time, had been laying transatlantic telephone cable on the seabed about 240km from Cork.
The two men were onboard the Pisces III which they had been working on all summer long and had done over 220 dives with no major issues.
Pisces III was taken to do some work in the North Sea for a few weeks around August and Mr Mallinson said the dives undertaken during that time had caused some damage to the vessel.
According to Mr Mallinson, there was an issue with the hatch-locking bar and it had been taken off.
On Wednesday, August 29, when the two men returned to dive off the coast of Cork, the locking bar still had not been replaced.
"You couldn't hold a hatch on without it," he explained in an interview with Sky News.
The eight-hour shift passed by with no problems but when they surfaced shortly after 9am on August 29, a diver came to attach the sub to the mother ship with a tow line.
"Instead of attaching the tow line to the bottom of the aft sphere, he connected it to the hatch and pulled the hatch off," he explained.
"Suddenly, the back of the sub dipped down and then we got water alarms screaming. We were totally flooded."
The sub dropped to the maximum length of the towline and hung there until the rope snapped.
"We crashed to the seabed in 26 seconds. It had taken 40 minutes to come up."
At 1,670 feet below sea level, in total darkness aside from torches, the men would stay there for 84 hours before they were rescued.
"Eighty-four hours is a long time. We didn't have enough food, we didn't have enough oxygen, we didn't have enough battery power," he said.
"We just had to be rationing everything and look after each other. I think that we looked after each other and that was a major, major lifesaver."
A number of rescue attempts were made over the course of the 84 hours but were unsuccessful.
At 4.02am on Saturday, September 1, rescue submersible Pisces II was deployed and within an hour, had successfully attached a tow line.
Pisces III began to be lifted out of the water at 10.50am, it finally broke the surface at 1.17pm but it took another hour to open the hatch to allow fresh air in.
Luckily, the day before the dive, Mr Mallinson was carrying out repairs on the sub and took a full oxygen tank.
"I stole a bottle of oxygen and because I stole it, I'm still here. Otherwise, we certainly wouldn't be here. We would have run out just after we crashed to the bottom."
The full tank of oxygen would last 72 hours, but with eight hours used during the shift, they had just 64 hours left at the time they hit the seabed.
The men preserved the oxygen by doing as little physical exertion as possible, not speaking, and allowing the carbon dioxide to build up in the air beyond the normal 40 minutes.
Having gone through the ordeal in 1973, Mr Mallinson, now 85 years old, described the current situation involving the Titan tourist submersible as "horrendous".
"I can't think why they haven't transmitted some signal of some sort. I have a horrible feeling that something might be seriously wrong that they aren't able to transmit a signal," he said.
"I would have thought a hammer on a bit of the hull somewhere would be a good transmitter. It would carry."
The Titan has five people on board and is believed to have enough oxygen to last until about 10am on Thursday morning, Irish time.
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