Underwater Plane

It is among the most amazing winged craft the world has ever seen. Part-airplane, part-submarine. It will soon carry the Silicon Valley billionaire who was supposed to be its second customer to the bottom of the sea. Now the delicate questions remains: Who gets the first one?

by Scott Eden

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Had Steve Fossett not gone missing over the Nevada desert this past September, by now he would likely have unveiled plans for his next, arguably most audacious, adventure. In a mission he had kept secret for nearly three years, Fossett intended to break the record for the deepest dive in history: 36,200 feet under the sea to the floor of the Mariana Trench, an enormous canyon in the middle of the North Pacific, the lowest known point on Earth. To take him there, he had commissioned the production of a highly irregular submersible aircraft — yes, aircraft, a machine inspired by and based heavily on the principles of aviation — designed by Graham Hawkes, a 59-year-old Englishman who is among the world’s best-known submarine engineers.


Rear Elevator: In this case, it works exactly like a plane’s.

I learned this in late October, just three weeks after Nevada authorities officially called off the search for Fossett, as I toured the Hawkes Ocean Technologies skunk works in Point Richmond, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. Inside one of the garages leased by Hawkes for his small design firm sat what looked like a cross between a bulbous experimental jet and a machine out of a Jules Verne fantasy. Fossett and Hawkes had christened the vessel Deep Flight Challenger, and though the name made an unfortunate allusion to the Shuttle disaster of 1986, it was actually a reference to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench — the Challenger Deep, itself named for a British navy ship, the HMS Challenger, whose crew discovered the trench in 1875. It was into those lightless, otherworldly fathoms Fossett intended to pilot the submersible.


Glass Nose: Provides far more visibility than tiny side portholes.

He and Hawkes had taken equal care in choosing the middle portion of the sub’s name. The result of nearly 30 years of Hawkes’s painstaking research and development, the craft — his brainchild and crowning achievement — is designed to use the principles of fluid dynamics to “fly” underwater. The submersible has wings, tail rudders, elevators and ailerons. It exploits thrust and drag; it has a push-propeller engine powered by an eight-kilowatt lithium-ion battery, and its cockpit holds one pilot, who lies prone on his stomach, like a man strapped into a pair of wings. The pilot peers through a large glass sphere at the nose of the vessel. With two joysticks, he can perform aileron rolls, rudder kicks and phugoid motions. The cockpit also features a heads-up display showing depth, speed, water temperature and bearing.


Twin Propellers: Powered by Lithium Ion Batteries “The prototype was kind of weak,” Graham Hawkes says. “Now we finally have a really good power source.”

By the time I saw it, the submersible’s components had been tested repeatedly; the ship was nearly ready for its first “dunk,” as Hawkes put it. Sometime around November it was scheduled to go into the water just outside his skunk works. There, in 10 feet of water, among gleaming white sailing yachts at dock, the Challenger was to “taxi” around just below the surface and receive a thorough debugging. “The initial dunks are the riskiest, like first flights in planes,” Hawkes says. “Normally on the experimental craft that I build, I’m the sole pilot, so there’s no risk to anybody else.” Then, a few weeks later, Hawkes planned to take it down to around 3,000 feet, in an area of Monterey Bay that has served as his preferred testing ground for the submersibles he has built since the mid-’80s. Further data gathering and debugging were to follow, after which Fossett would receive his craft. Four to six months later, from a catamaran mothership floating a few miles off the coast of Guam, Fossett was to ease the nose downward and plunge into the Challenger Deep.

Though Fossett merely wanted to be the first man to reach such depths, his ambition stood to revolutionize undersea exploration and, by extension, oceanography itself, a science of increasing prominence and importance. Mineral resources, climate change, strange biological wonders that show promise for medical and biochemical breakthroughs — the potential benefits from exploring the deepest ocean are only growing in number. It has been called the “real” last frontier — space notwithstanding — and Hawkes is a true believer. “I’ve always viewed it as an inevitable step in human progress,” he says.

The world record for the deepest dive was set in 1960, also in the waters of Challenger Deep, when Don Walsh, a navy lieutenant, and Jacques Piccard, the son of the inventor of the vessel used in the dive, descended to about 35,800 feet. Essentially a gondola hanging from a stabilization tank filled with gasoline, the entire contraption weighed a quarter of a million pounds. The goal of the dive was simply to see if Walsh and Piccard could get there and survive. The descent took almost five hours, and they stayed on the bottom for 20 minutes. At that extraordinary depth, they witnessed life. Small fish resembling miniature flounder swam around them. Since then, only an unmanned Japanese robot sub, in 1995, has gone as far down. Currently, Russia, France and Japan each have manned subs with depth ratings between 20,000 and 21,000 feet. The U.S. has plans for one that will go to 21,000, while China, determined to finish atop — or on bottom — of this competition, plans to launch a vessel it claims can reach nearly 23,000 feet.


The Wings: Note the shape is the same as a plane’s, just upside down.

But had Fossett put Hawkes’s Challenger in the water, it would have rendered all such geopolitical jockeying moot — and every government-funded submersible obsolete. With a pressure hull made of carbon fiber and its unique shape, the craft can, theoretically, withstand twice the external pressure of full-ocean depth (36,200 feet) — a force of 32,000 pounds per square inch. At around 8,000 pounds, Challenger is also extremely light. By comparison, Japan’s submersible, made of titanium, like most similar craft, weighs 26 tons. Because of their enormous mass, traditional undersea vehicles are costly as well — not only to build, but to operate and transport. They invariably require huge motherships with complicated block and tackle to lower them into the ocean. Challenger, by contrast, could be launched from a relatively small mothership — or even from your average megayacht. Indeed, it could be towed by a pickup truck (or fully loaded Range Rover) and dispatched off a boat ramp.

But the biggest difference between Challenger and any other deep-sea craft, recreational or government-built, is, of course, the embrace of flight. To explain this distinction, Hawkes makes an analogy: Conventional submersibles are like balloons. They use ballast to go up and down and have limited range and mobility. But since Hawkes’s ship resembles a fixed-wing aircraft, the small, lightweight Challenger can point its nose down, engage its engine and plunge to the bottom at 10 knots (nearly a third as fast as a nuclear submarine, which has nuclear reactors to help propel its dirigible-like hull through the water). By Hawkes’s calculations, Challenger would reach 36,200 feet in just 70 to 80 minutes. Challenger is what’s known as “positively buoyant.” When stationary, its nose peeks above the surface and into the air, but once it starts to move, the craft’s wings catch the rushing water, and it descends — a process analogous to the lift of an airplane’s takeoff. The physics of underwater flight, in fact, are the mirror image of aviation’s. Challenger’s airfoil, Hawkes explains, “is the typical wing section that any pilot would recognize. But it’s upside down. Air and water behave the same way, provided you account for viscosity and mass.” Take Bernoulli’s equation of fluid dynamics, throw in Reynolds’s Number to account for the difference between the two mediums, and voilà — this massive oversimplification aside — you’ve got underwater flight. The transfer between air and water, Hawkes says, is “perfectly literal.”

Hawkes’s own transfer between air and water occurred when he was in his early twenties, just out of college. Born on the southwest side of London, he had grown up fascinated by the pioneers of early flight: the adventurers, the aces, the dreamers and contrivers. “Where I really wanted to be was back 60 years, in the 1920s or teens — where an engineer in his backyard stringing canvas could build a plane and fly faster than anybody else,” he says. “But those days were gone. I bemoaned the loss, the passing of the days of real pioneering.” He applied to study aeronautics at the University of London but “messed up” on the entrance exams and instead enrolled at a three-year polytechnic school. After receiving his degree in mechanical engineering, he started a job at a British defense contractor, which assigned him to an “oddball project.” He was tasked with helping design a small submarine that would transport teams of elite amphibious soldiers (the British equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALs) secretly to shore. “To do that project, I asked for, and was given, a couple of months to look at the world of small submersibles, to judge the state of the art and make sure we didn’t reinvent the wheel,” he says.

What he found changed his life. Compared to aviation, the science of undersea transport was astonishingly primitive. “To give you some idea of the state of the art then, they were still building wooden skids on the bottoms of submersibles. Wood in the ocean absorbs water — it’s a ridiculous material to use. It was totally backward,” he says. “At that point, frankly, I wasn’t particularly in love with the ocean. But what I saw was an opportunity. There was an imagination gap.”

He left his position at the defense contractor and found a job at one of the few British companies that built submersibles, in this case a kind of elaborate atmospheric diving suit. He worked there for three years, during which he met, fell in love with and married Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer interested in using the suit. In 1979, she took it into 1,250 feet of water off the coast of Hawaii, becoming the first — and still the only — person to walk in an untethered suit that deep on the ocean floor. Earle would later become chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and explorer-in-residence at National Geographic. She is among the most renowned oceanographers in the world.


Pilot’s Belly Pad: Lying on one’s stomach is the most natural position underwater, Hawkes points out. “No snorkeler wants to sit in a chair. In fact, all animals go belly-down and head-first.”

After leaving the diving-suit company, Hawkes founded Osel Mantis, a sub-design firm based in Great Yarmouth, England, but soon joined Earle in San Francisco, where they started their own submersible company, Deep Ocean Engineering. Their idea was to develop sub-sea technologies for commercial customers (energy companies looking to prospect for oil and gas, for example). Hawkes designed and built hundreds of conventional subs, both manned and robotic, for relatively shallow waters. He took one of them into a movie-studio swimming pool and fought Roger Moore’s James Bond in For Your Eyes Only. In another, he descended alone in a globe of glass to 3,000 feet in Monterey Bay, setting a world record for solo-dive depth that stands today — the record Fossett would have shattered had he lived to go down in the Challenger. In the mid-’80s, Hawkes and Earle split (amicably; they remain friends and business partners). Around that time, he got the idea that would become the focus of the next quarter-century of his life. It dawned on him that much of the weight of a conventional sub came from the room taken up by the spherical shape of the internal pressure hull surrounding the diver.



A sphere, of course, is the optimum configuration for withstanding intense water pressure. But what if the hull could somehow be fitted around the human form? Hawkes was surprised by how much pressure capability he could retain by simply flattening out the sphere and making it elliptical — like a horizontal diving suit without arms or legs. The next problem, however, was comfort. The prone position is actually the most natural position for a deep dive, but such a snug configuration significantly limits one’s ability to go to the bathroom. Hawkes figured a diver would need to get down, do his work and get back up, in no more than perhaps four hours. To do this, the vessel would need to be capable of a vertical speed of at least seven miles per hour, about six times faster than any other traditional ballast submersible. As he thought about this problem, Hawkes’s mind naturally wandered back to his youth and the inspiration for his interested in sub technology in the first place, those old heroes of his, the pioneers of early flight. “We had to move an order of magnitude faster through the water than anything that had ever existed,” he says. “That meant you had to tear up everything you knew about submarines and throw it away. If you were familiar with drag, lift and the rest of it, you realized: We’ve got to go to the equivalent of a fixed wing.”

It took Hawkes almost 10 years to produce his first prototype. He called it Deep Flight I, and he launched it in Monterey Bay to much media fanfare — including an appearance on the cover of Time — in 1995. Long since decommissioned, the sub sits like a museum piece inside his Point Richmond skunk works. Compared to Challenger, Deep Flight I is primitive. It contains, Hawkes says, “vestigial” technology from traditional ballast subs. But as a proof of concept, Deep Flight I was an unmitigated success. He took it out that fall day and dived, climbed and barrel-rolled. He stood the craft up on its tail and down on its nose and shot it up out of the water in great porpoise-like leaps. “I wasn’t trying to be cute, but if you’re in that thing, it’s very obvious to do,” Hawkes says. “When you watch the video, it looks like somebody having too much fun.” After those theatrics, he realized it might not be a bad idea to build and market a version of his craft for recreational use.

He generated two business models from that initial test run: one for the scientific community and one for use in shallower water by wealthy aviators and underwater buffs. Hawkes decided to commercialize them both, nearly to the point of financial ruin. As successful as Deep Flight was, it was a niche product at best. He sunk his life savings — and those of his new wife, Karen Rubin, a former television broadcaster and publicity executive — whom he had married a few years before. In 1998, Hawkes started another business, having nothing to do with marine technology. He invented a weapons system — a remote-controlled gun platform — bought by the Pentagon and now being used in Iraq, and funneled the proceeds from that company into the development of his winged submersibles. In 2003, he finally created the prototype for his recreational craft.

A tandem-seater, it looks like a mechanical shark that has sprouted jet-fighter wings. To drum up interest, Hawkes and Karen conducted “flight schools” in the Bahamas and off Baja. Three months ago, they finally landed a customer. Hawkes will deliver his first production winged submersible, the Super Falcon, to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins sometime this spring. Perkins will keep the $1 million-plus sub aboard his megayacht, the Maltese Falcon, and he’s excited to get his hands on it. He’s been a scuba diver all his life, but, he says, “With this, I’ll be able to explore a much wider area, go deeper and have more fun — in a sporty way — doing loops, rolls and porpoising. I’m hoping to use it in the Pacific when I go to Fiji next year. It’s a great place to dive.” Hawkes is currently assembling the Super Falcon for Perkins, just as he had been assembling the Challenger for Fossett.

Hawkes is a member of the Explorers Club, the celebrated New York–based institution whose ranks also included Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Ernest Shackleton, Sir Edmund Hillary and Fossett. Fossett first became aware of Hawkes through the club and, about 10 years ago, approached the engineer with a proposal. He wanted to break the depth record, and he understood that Hawkes’s winged submersible would be the most efficient way to do so. Though excited by the prospect, Hawkes had entertained the notion of making that voyage himself, and for a while, Fossett’s proposal languished in dry-dock. But as the years passed and the nonrecreational version of Deep Flight remained on the drawing board, primarily due to lack of funding, Hawkes had a change of heart. Three years ago, the engineer and the adventurer came to an agreement: Fossett would underwrite the final stages of Challenger’s development, and in return, Hawkes would permit Fossett to go down into the trench alone.

No one, of course, could have foreseen that Fossett would vanish almost on the eve of Challenger’s unveiling. The entire Hawkes team participated in the search for him. As Karen manned communications and logistics in Port Richmond, Hawkes and his three engineers traveled into the Nevada desert with ground crews, spending a harrowing, frustrating and ultimately futile week out there.

The status of the Challenger project is now “in flux,” Hawkes says. For now, he has postponed its final assembly, and when he talks about it, his voice evinces disappointment and sadness — for the loss of his friend and, less so, for the uncertainty of the project’s future. “Steve provided the funds to take this to the next level,” he says. “Deep Flight I was a prototype for the concept of underwater flight, to show that it could work. But to take that same concept into the deep, there were no shortcuts. It couldn’t have been done on a shoestring, and it couldn’t have been done without Steve.”

None of this though, has shaken Hawkes’s belief in the value of sea-floor exploration, and he still intends to pursue the ultimate goal. “I really don’t think getting to the bottom of the ocean is optional for human culture,” he says. “I think Steve understood that. But if he can’t do it himself, at least he was an integral part of it happening,” Hawkes pauses. “Eventually.”

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