Amid a spate of recent media reports denigrating the Navy's new generation, locally built Collins Class submarines, readers should be under no illusions - these submarines will be world beaters!

The men and women who will man the new submarines know that every time they put to sea in their Collins Class boats, they can rely on the most comprehensive submarine safety regime in existence.

It is therefore difficult to comprehend recent media reports quoting a senior Federal Senator as saying "during early submarine trials, computer problems had nearly caused a new, billion-dollar Collins Class submarine to sink to the bottom of the sea, with the potential loss of all hands onboard."

Remark Damaging and Incorrect

The remark was unfortunate in that it was damaging to the morale of the men and women who will man the Collins Class and has the potential to cause anxiety and distress to their families. Besides, it is quite incorrect. No such incident has ever occurred in a Collins Class submarine and it seems likely that the Senator was confusing the incident with such an event which did occur on board a British Upholder Class submarine during builders trials in the late 1980's. On that occasion, crew training recovered the situation very quickly and the submarine was never in any real danger. However, the incident does raise the question "how safe are our submarines" and what confidence can the ships companies and their families have that every reasonable precaution has been taken to prevent a serious accident?

The answer lies in the RAN Submarine Safety Program (SUBSAFE) that was specifically developed within the New Submarine Project as part of the process of bringing the Collins Class submarines into service. Development of SUBSAFE began in 1989. Its aim is to "develop and implement a system safety program sufficiently comprehensive to identify the hazards of a submarine as a system, and to impose design requirements and management control to prevent mishaps, by eliminating hazards or reducing the associated risk to an acceptable level."

Reducing risk of accident

The Program is based on, and is a further development of, the US Department of Defence's - "Systems Safety Program Requirements", to identify hazards and track their resolution until an acceptable outcome is achieved. SUBSAFE comprises eight elements as follows:

• Material Safety: Maintains the integrity of the SUBSAFE Certification Boundary (the Boundary that keeps the water out of the submarine) to permit the submarine to recover from a credible flooding hazard condition.
  
  
• Quality Systems: Details the minimum requirements for processes and audits that must be carried out at all levels of submarine operation and logistic support.
  
  
• Escape and Rescue: Ensures that the submarines conform to the requirements of the RAN Submarine Escape and Rescue Policy.
  
  
• Combat Survivability: Addresses the submarine's design and its ability to withstand underwater explosive shock and torpedo impact, the use of redundancy to maintain services affected by damage and other areas that might affect the ability to fight the submarine, such as crew training, flooding, fire fighting and toxic gas management and control.
  
  
• Weapons Systems Safety: Ensures the safe handling, stowage and discharge of all weapons carried in the submarines.
  
  
• Inspection Test and Trials: Demonstrates compliance with the specifications and the maintenance of SUBSAFE Certification.
  
  
• Human Engineering: Optimises the performance of operator and maintenance personnel and ensures the health and safety of personnel in the working environment with particular emphasis on the management of hazardous materials.
  
  
• Software Safety: Ensures that individual system software which contributes to system safety is appropriate to system employment and that the integrity of that software has been demonstrated. Ongoing management of the SUBSAFE Program Elements is vested in the SUBSAFE Board, directly responsible to the Deputy Chief of Navy, through its three sub-groups, respectively responsible for Material Safety, Escape and Rescue and Operations Safety.

SUBSAFE, or indeed any safety program, can never guarantee that an accident will never happen - but what it can and does do, through its structured and systematic approach to all eight of its program elements, is to reduce the risk of accident to acceptable proportions.

COLLINS Class Submarine

And what is an acceptable level for accident occurrence? Ideally we would like to be 100% certain that an accident cannot occur - but that is unrealistic and the cost of achievement would be absolutely astronomic. For the US Apollo space program, NASA settled on a safety factor of 99.9% for crew safety; that is; one chance in a thousand that a catastrophic failure would result in loss of life, but as we all know, even at those odds, fatal accidents can and did occur. What then if we sought a safety factor of one in ten thousand? Or one in one hundred thousand? Would that be sufficient?

For the Collins Class submarine, the SUBSAFE Program acceptable level of risk for the loss of a submarine on any 70 day patrol is specified as not to exceed one chance in one million! In percentage terms, that is 99.9999%. This is the same safety criteria that applies to the chance that any given commercial aircraft will suffer a catastrophic accident on any given flight.

Even so, in the unlikely event that an accident does occur and provided the submarine's hull remains intact, the RAN has in place, through its "REMORA" manned submarine rescue vehicle, a state-of-the-art system capable of rescuing personnel from a disabled submarine down to its crush depth, even when it is lying at acute angles. This system, which remains at 24 hour readiness, is further supported as necessary by the full resources of the US Navy's own comprehensive submarine rescue service.

History continues to remind us that accidents can and do occur in submarines and some might say that it is simply due to the nature of the job and the unforgiving environment in which they operate. However, SUBSAFE supported by REMORA, applies established safety standards to the identification, management and reduction of risk to acceptable levels to ensure that our new generation of submarines are as safe as our current state of knowledge and modern technology will allow.