Legacy of the USS Thresher
08/04/13 09:28 Filed in: History
Before the USS San Francisco survived hitting an underwater mountain when cruising along as a submarine, the submarine loss that set the bar for SubSafe was the USS Thresher.
“Thresher was the fastest, deepest diving, most capable submarine in the word,” Rear Adm. David Duryea, Naval Sea Systems Command’s, deputy commander for undersea warfare told USNI News in a recent interview. “This was the pride of the U.S. Navy.”
On 9 April 1963, Thresher put to sea to conduct a series of sea trials following an overhaul accompanied by USS Skylark (ASR-20), a Penguin-class submarine rescue ship, according to the 1975 book The Thresher Disaster.
The next morning, Thresher descended to 1,000 feet in a deep-diving test.
Forty-six minutes after reaching test depth, things began to go very wrong.
Thresher suffered a mechanical failure and Harvey’s attempts to bring the boat to the surface failed.
Four minutes after Skylark learned there were problems, Thresher sent her last garbled transmission, “exceeding test depth.” One minute later Skylark detected a noise that shared the characteristics of an implosion.
The next day, Navy officials announced the ship was lost.
Read about it here.
Child’s picture of the USS Thresher
“Thresher was the fastest, deepest diving, most capable submarine in the word,” Rear Adm. David Duryea, Naval Sea Systems Command’s, deputy commander for undersea warfare told USNI News in a recent interview. “This was the pride of the U.S. Navy.”
On 9 April 1963, Thresher put to sea to conduct a series of sea trials following an overhaul accompanied by USS Skylark (ASR-20), a Penguin-class submarine rescue ship, according to the 1975 book The Thresher Disaster.
The next morning, Thresher descended to 1,000 feet in a deep-diving test.
Forty-six minutes after reaching test depth, things began to go very wrong.
Thresher suffered a mechanical failure and Harvey’s attempts to bring the boat to the surface failed.
Four minutes after Skylark learned there were problems, Thresher sent her last garbled transmission, “exceeding test depth.” One minute later Skylark detected a noise that shared the characteristics of an implosion.
The next day, Navy officials announced the ship was lost.
Read about it here.
Child’s picture of the USS Thresher
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