Thanks for the headsup on the report Brucie, it made some interesting reading and looks to be a fair report.

There are good recommendations for further training on both the submarines themselves and more realistic firefighting training.

Like aircraft pilots, submariners spend a lot of time on simulators. These could be attack training simulators, also simulators for running the diving and trim systems, propulsion simulators too. On these the crew under training can be thrown various exercises which would not be able to be practiced on board a real boat as the potential for something to go wrong would be very bad indeed.

Most naval personel in all navies attend firefighting training. Cant say I enjoyed mine as I found it dead scary. HMS Pheonix in Portsmouth is the RN firefighting school. There they had a firefighting tank where fires can be lit in compartments and the crews trained in donning and using breathing aparatus in confined conditions as well as fighting the fires. Crawling into a hot compartment which is smoke filled and all you can see is the glow of the fire is not a bundle of laughs, but it is essential.

We had no firefighting simulators for boats, all of ours were based on surface ship designs. I wonder if a special will be built for the Canadian Navy?

Training at sea consists of many drills involving HP hydraulic and airmain bursts, how to isolate them and still keep the boat operational. Simulated fires are often fought.

For the planesmen and control room crew they will carry out high speed underwater manouvering, we called them 'angles and dangles'. The point being to drive the boat to the limit of its manouveability, not only so that an underwater collison might be avoided but also to learn how to crash dive and to try to avoid an incoming torpedo by diving through the bathythermic layers. Layers of sea water which have different temperatures and salinity. The layers affect the ability of sonar to operate and the refraction of the sound beam being sent out from a homing torpedo, so it is possible to have a fighting chance to avoid them. Angles and dangles when you are on a boat carrying them out give no indication of speed but the boats do take on some alarming anlges, bit like a blind roller coaster but without anyone screaming or shoving their hands in the air.

The old Oberon class do need replacing. Grand old dames, reliable like a maiden aunt but long in the tooth. They are over 30 years old and have restricted diving depths. As a hull ages max diving depths become more restricted.

There was a comment on a website that Canada has sufficient aircraft, helicopters and surface ships to operate against a foreign navies boats. True but with many restrictions.

In the RN boats we regularly avoided anti-submarine aircraft fitted with magnetic anomoly detectors. Both our own and the Russians.

Surface ships when fitted with sonar have to slow down to lower their hull outfits and use sonar as the self generated water noise over the sonar farings at speed prevents effective listening or pinging.

Helicopters were more of a problem they could use dunking sonar, sonar sets on a cable, to triangulate a boats position. A weapon could then be dropped. We did not like choppers!

They could also move quickly from one spot to another, we could never work out where they would go next. In the 70's and 80's the Russians did not use them in their arctic circle bases so we had better opportunities to penetrate some of the fjords leading up to their bases.

Submarines rely on sonar, either in the passive mode using them as big ears and much more rarely actively. I can only recall us using active sonar on a handfull of occassions and none of them when we were where we should not have been.

Submarine sonar operators are heads above surface ship sonar operators as they use them 24/7. They can detect ships very early and even what type of ship. A submarine has only periscopes for a visual look and even that is very restricted.

Submarines are an essential part of a modern navy. They can go and do things that a surface ship just cannot do. Most submarines are involved 80% of their time tracking surface units and other submarines and gathering operational intelligence.

Yes there are SOSUS systems around the world which consist on sonar arrays on the seabed which can detect submarines coming into ones territorial water, but they too can be fooled. A submarine in an ultra quiet state can penetrate these. The Russians have been doing it for years globally equally the navies of the west have been penetrating theirs.

Sorry to be posting yet again.