AS-28 Crew Back On Dry Land

These are some happy guys! The crew, led by their commander Lt-Captain Vyacheslav Milashevsky, appears to have displayed professionalism throughout the time when they were trapped. Now that the crew is safe and ashore, the post-mortem can begin. The gang over at Ultraquiet No More is starting strong; Rob discusses this quote from a NYT article:

"Two other Scorpio craft sent by the American Navy were still sitting on a ship in port on the Kamchatka peninsula when the Russian submarine was freed. Commander McDonald said Russian officials had been waiting for other advanced American diving gear to arrive before setting out on the six-hour voyage to the spot where the submarine was trapped.
"The British reached the scene first in part because they had a shorter flight to get their Scorpio to Russia. But it also took the Americans four hours longer than expected Friday to load the Scorpios onto a cargo plane in San Diego, with both the Air Force and the Navy citing each other for contributing to the delay."

The Air Force loadmasters are pretty exacting, and I could imagine that when they butt heads with Navy nukes it could get fairly intense. If there were any problems on our side, hopefully we'll schedule some more exercises to work out the kinks.

Willyshake offers up a couple of personal stories about what happens when submariners find themselves deeper than they want to be.

Zoe Brain has some thoughts from Down Under.

As usual, The Sub Report has the best links to the stories on all matters submarine related.

Some may be wondering how the Russians were in communication with the crew throughout the ordeal. I'm assuming here that they have an "underwater telephone", commonly referred to as a "Gertrude", similar to our WQC systems. This is a fairly simple system that can transmit voice comms underwater for several miles; on the more complicated American systems, you could even play the boat's theme song as you returned from deployment so boats in the harbor could hear it if they had their sets turned on.

Update 0800 07 Aug: Well, at least Michelle Malkin linked to one of my blogs; she still hasn't linked directly to me, though... {sigh} Two visits from Glenn so far, and none from Michelle; it's not as if Instapundit isn't nice, it's just that Michelle has that certain...

Update 0814 07 Aug: Nevermind... Welcome Michelle Malkin readers! Be sure to check our our group sub-blog coverage of the rescue that Michelle also mentioned over at Ultraquiet No More, and check out the home blogs of the contributors if you'd like to learn about what makes submariners such an interesting (read "eccentric") brotherhood.