A British man who spent more than three days trapped in a vessel on the Atlantic seabed off the Cork coast has said he was "very frightened" for those on board a submersible missing near the wreck of the Titanic.
Their small vessel became trapped on the seabed at a depth of 1,575 feet (480 metres), sparking an international rescue operation.
The two men were saved in the deepest sub rescue in history.
"It sounds very, very dangerous, I'm very frightened for them," Mr Mallinson, now aged 85, said of the five on board the missing Titanic submersible.
"If they are waiting to be rescued I think everyone wants to get into one area and make as much noise as they can," he told AFP.
"I can't understand how these people have been left abandoned out in the middle of the Atlantic without any communication, it just doesn't make any sense," he said from his home in the Lake District, northwest England.
Mr Mallinson recalled feeling pessimistic during his own ordeal, saying that "once everything goes wrong, it goes wrong, and everybody that comes down seems to do wrong".
"It was very stressful, very cold and you just had to try and keep warm, you didn't want to burn oxygen.
"You got dressed up properly. I had a big woolly jumper, so I got my woolly jumper on and then my overalls back on top," he added.
Rescue workers raced to beat a rapidly closing oxygen window today as they hunted for the submersible after noises detected by sonar raised hopes those onboard are still alive.
"Roger Chapman didn't have a woolly jumper so we had a lot of white rags and we mummied him," he said.
Mr Mallinson said he did not feel relief until the hatch opened, and a pod of watchful dolphins had left.
"When the dolphins disappeared then you realised you're safe. They stayed with us the whole 84 hours, thousands of dolphins arrived to look after us, they knew there was a problem.
"You couldn't talk to the surface on the underwater phone because thousands of dolphins chattered every time you spoke," he said.
Former Royal Navy officer Chapman died in 2020, having been awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to shipping.
"I've lost my mate," said Mr Mallinson.
"One wonderful thing was that when he died I was able to go to his funeral and play the organ for him."
From the RTÉ Archives: Submarine trapped on seabed
