Great Machines: Submersibles: Scuba Driving
June 1, 2008
For all its sophisticated engineering, transitioning the car from land to sea happens with a charmingly pedestrian touch. Drive into the ocean, and watch it float. Then bite into a regulator, open both doors, and watch the sQuba begin to dive as it takes on saltwater. Surely, couldn’t that be done with a James Bond-like touch of a button? "We could have engineered many fancy systems, but why?" says Rinderknecht. "Sometimes a simple solution is the best. And cheapest."
In contrast to Rinspeed’s decidedly automotive effort is Graham
Hawkes’ Deep Flight Super Falcon, the latest personal sub from the San Francisco
Bay Area–based inventor of British origin. Hawkes has been building ocean-diving
crafts for the better part of four decades, and his most recent brainchild is a
$1.7- to $2.5-million winged, two-seat stiletto capable of diving 1,000 feet.
Hawkes is busy assembling two in his Point Richmond warehouse, one of which will
go to venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who plans to park it inside his epic $100
million sailing yacht, the Maltese
Falcon.
The other Super Falcon will become the first in a small,
personal-sub fleet that Hawkes plans to employ in what he calls, with a smile,
"Ocean Galactic"—essentially an underwater version of Branson’s space concept
that would charge five to six figures to expose the curious to remote areas of
our watery world.
"Most personal subs are simply about being underwater, and then staring out a small porthole," says Hawkes. "We’re about truly flying and staying with the animals."
The plane analogy is apt. The Super Falcon looks the part with stubby wings mid-ship and, fighter-jet like, horizontal elevators and vertical rudders act as stabilizers. The pilot and passenger sit one in front of the other, their heads popping out of a tight composite glass, carbon, and epoxy cocoon to gaze on sea life through clear semicircles. Hawkes, a longtime ocean explorer, sees camera-equipped Super Falcons as a great way to further our understanding of the ocean and its resources.
But he understands some may want a Super Falcon for bragging rights. "We’re still trying to assess what the market is for [personal] Super Falcons," says Hawkes’ wife Karen, who helps run Hawkes Ocean Technologies along with a tight-knit crew of six engineers and designers. "Tom [Perkins] really kicked it off, and now have more requests than we ever expected, largely from the growing mega-yacht crowd that really isn’t affected by economic dips."
Anyone questioning Hawkes’ ability to make the Super Falcon take wing need only know that sitting a few storage bays away is the sleek imposing craft dubbed the Deep Flight Challenger. More than 90 percent complete but mothballed at the moment, it belongs to the estate of recently deceased adventurer Steve Fossett, whose aim was to take Challenger to its designed limit—the ocean floor, 37,000 feet, or some 16,000 feet past the current manned-sub record.
But that’s John Glenn type stuff. For the merely curious, Super Falcon is a direct route to not just seeing a great white shark in its element, but stalking with one, too. And if he’s not around, there is always the simple joy of sub-aquatic flying.
"I’ve been underwater most of my life, and often the sea is a bit like a poorly stocked aquarium," says Hawkes. "So we’ve added this business of flight. The nature, if and when you see it, is just icing on the cake."
Deep Flight Submersibles, www.deepflight.com
Rinspeed, www.rinspeed.com
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