Real Submarine Technology & History Q&A

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by scott613

Either crash dive or normal dive seems to happen in well under 30 seconds?

A "normal" dive involves carefully flooding the ballast tanks to neutral bouyancy and using the planes to control the dive. A crash dive means flooding everything and putting the planes on full down. This is why a crash dive takes the boat so deep - it takes time to blow the tanks to neutral and pull out of a dive like that. A "normal" dive should take a lot longer to get under than a crash dive, possibly twice as long. I'm betting nobody ever timed a normal dive, because nobody cares how long that takes.