Submarine Rescue and Salvage Procedures 1970 US Navy Training Film MN-10541B

more at http://quickfound.net/

Procedures for locating a sunken submarine, rescuing its crew, and salvaging the sub.

Originally a public domain film from the US Navy, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_Rescue_Chamber

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber is a device for rescuing submariners from a submarine that is unable to surface...

During the first two decades of the United States Navy Submarine Force, there were several accidents in which Navy submarines sank with the loss of life. The impetus for the invention for the chamber was the loss of S-51 on 25 September 1925, and the loss of S-4 on 17 December 1927. In the case of S-4, all of her officers and men were able to reach non-flooded compartments as the submarine bottomed in 110 ft (34 m) of water. However, the majority soon succumbed. In her forward torpedo room, six men remained alive. Heroic efforts were made to rescue these six, who had exchanged a series of signals with divers by tapping on the hull. In extremely cold water and tangled wreckage, Navy divers worked to rescue them, but a storm forced a stop to this effort on 24 December. Forty men lost their lives.

These experiences led submariner Charles B. "Swede" Momsen to think of technical alternatives for rescuing survivors from sunken submarines, which at that time was still a virtual impossibility. Momsen soon conceived a submarine rescue chamber that could be lowered from the surface to mate with a submarine's escape hatch and proposed the concept through official channels... Momsen... designed and built a prototype submarine rescue chamber...

The first diving bells for rescuing men from submarines were designed by the BuC&R in 1928. The diving bell went through a series of tests off the shores of Key West, Florida. Based on these tests, Momsen had several changes in mind for the bell, and after nearly two years of experimentation full of highly interesting results, the final bell was evolved and christened a "rescue chamber." This success was catalyst for gaining approval for development of the submarine rescue chamber in 1930. Before he could make these changes, Momsen went to the Bureau of Construction and Repair to work on an underwater breathing apparatus for individual escapes. Momsen turned to devising the "Momsen Lung", demonstrating it successfully in a series of unauthorized experiments in the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, and finally attracted enough favorable attention to see the lung adopted by the Navy in 1929.[3]

Lieutenant Commander Allan Rockwell McCann was put in charge of the revisions on the diving bell. From July 1929 to July 1931, McCann was assigned to the Maintenance Division, Bureau of Construction and Repair, where he developed the submarine rescue chamber. When the bell was completed in late 1930, it was produced as the McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber (SRC)...

The revised Submarine Rescue Chamber had improvements including a soft seal gasket for sealing the submarine/bell interface skirting...

The Squalus rescue

In 1939, the McCann Rescue Chamber made its debut when it was used to successfully rescue thirty-three survivors from Squalus, At the time of Squalus' accident, Lieutenant Commander Momsen was serving as head of the Experimental Diving Unit at the Washington Navy Yard. The submarine rescue ship USS Falcon (ASR-2), commanded by Lieutenant George A. Sharp, was on site within twenty-four hours. It lowered the Rescue Chamber — a revised version of a diving bell invented by Momsen — and, in four dives over the next 13 hours, recovered all 33 survivors in the first deep submarine rescue ever. McCann was in charge of Chamber operations, Momsen commanding the divers...