NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA: The last living survivor of the deepest successful sea rescue apparently has a "horrible feeling" about the five passengers on board the OceanGate submersible that went missing on a dive to see the famous Titanic wreck on June 19, 2023. Roger Mallinson, a former British Royal Navy pilot who was rescued after spending 3 days underwater, reflected on the case of the missing Titan, saying the lack of any contact from the sub is an ominous sign.
"That is horrendous,” the 85-year-old told Sky News when questioned about the search for the missing Titan that lost communication with its mothership MV Polar Prince, an hour and 45 minutes into the two-hour descent on June 18. "I can't understand why they haven't transmitted some signal of some sort," he further said, adding "I have a horrible feeling that something might be seriously wrong that they aren't able to transmit a signal." The former British engineer continued, "I would have thought a hammer on a bit of the hull somewhere would be a good transmitter and it would carry."
Who is Roger Mallinson?
Mallinson is the last living survivor of a 1973 rescue mission, which is still considered the deepest successful underwater rescue in history. The former Royal Navy submariner and his colleague Roger Chapman, then 35 and 28 years old, were in a tiny submersible dubbed Pisces III installing a trans-Atlantic telephone line 150 miles off the coast of Cork in Ireland when the machine room hatch was unintentionally forced open by the surface ship they were attached to. The accident sent water flooding into the side of Pisces III, prompting it to flip over and snap the towline.
The sub then crashed into the seabed at 40mph, leaving them trapped with no sign of escape. Mallinson and Chapman were finally rescued after an incredible 80-hour rescue operation that saw them lifted to safety with just 12 minutes of oxygen left in the tiny vessel. Talking about his own rescue mission, Mallinson told Sky News, "We certainly did [think we wouldn't make it]. 84 hours is a very long time and we didn't have enough food, we didn't have enough oxygen, we didn't have enough battery power to run a scrubber."
How Roger Mallinson survived the three-day-long ordeal?
'We just had to really ration everything and look after each other. We looked after each other and that was the major lifesaver,’ he further noted. Mallison then asserted that the decision to steal a bottle of oxygen at the last minute was the reason he survived. "Luckily before we started the dive I stole a bottle of oxygen. Because we stole it, I'm still here otherwise we certainly wouldn't be here. We'd have run out just after we crashed on the bottom, we would have run out," he added.
The former submariner then added that he and Chapman never thought they would be rescued. "Neither of us really thought we were going to get out," Mallinson said, adding, "You knew you had as much time as when your life support ran out, and that would be it."
