The Collins Class Submarine Story

by Peter Yule

  tomers was the product being sold. The reason that Australia was

  building its own class of long-range submarine was that no other

  country built a submarine that met Australia’s requirements. The

  corollary of this was that few countries needed such submarines

  and, of the potential customers, only Canada had similar require-

  ments. Most countries were looking for smaller, short-range

  submarines.

  This in turn raised the issue of what Australia could actually

  sell, and pointed to an obvious conflict of interest between ASC

  and Kockums. The Type 471 being built by ASC was designed

  by Kockums, and any sales would be dependent on Kockums’

  support in the design area if nothing else. If ASC was to build

  smaller submarines in Adelaide to export, realistically these could

  only be derivatives of Kockums’ designs for the Swedish navy, and

  would rely even more heavily on Kockums’ support. For ASC to

  export submarines, therefore, it had to persuade Kockums that it

  would be better to work through ASC rather than export directly

  from Sweden. As Kockums’ order book shrank and its bustling

  yards fell silent, it was hard to convince the Swedes that it would

  not be preferable to keep the work in Malm ö.

  Nonetheless, in the early years of ASC some serious efforts

  were made to market the Collins class, with ASC, Rockwell and

  Kockums goaded by Oscar Hughes into cooperating with his sales

  efforts. Hughes was the driving force behind pushing for exports

  because he was determined to make full use of the capabilities that

  had been built up in Australia and sustain the industrial infrastruc-

  ture until it was time to replace Collins. The prospect of export

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  sales also had the effect of maintaining enthusiasm within ASC,

  but he realised that ‘to win an export market takes years of work,

  a lot of luck and a lot of money’, and that realistically the chances

  of success were slim.

  Rick Neilson was the Rockwell representative on sales trips

  to Canada, South Korea, Italy and Indonesia. He recalls that:

  ‘Canada was a shambles – the Canadians had no idea what they

  wanted to do.’12 The Koreans’ problem was they did not really

  need a big blue-water submarine – but the Japanese are their tradi-

  tional enemies and the Koreans wanted to have a bigger submarine

  than them, so there was cause for some optimism. Neilson had an

  appointment to see the chief of the Korean navy one Monday

  morning, only to hear the day before that the chief of the navy

  was one of five military leaders who had just been put in jail. In

  1998–99 there was a push by Celsius, Kockums and ASC to sell a

  derivative of the Swedish Gotland class design through ASC into

  Korea, to be followed by an unspecified ‘larger than 2600 tonnes

  submarine’, supposedly a Collins derivative.13 However, Korea

  chose to buy HDW submarines and is now firmly aligned to the

  Germans.14

  Neilson also went to Indonesia in President Habibie’s day –

  ‘He’d just bought the East German navy and had delusions of

  grandeur, but he was never really serious about Collins.’ The real-

  ity Neilson found was that other countries simply did not need a

  boat like Collins.

  By 1990 Canada had ended its flirtation with nuclear sub-

  marines and was once more considering conventional options.

  The ASC consortium responded by setting up an office in Canada

  to promote the Collins class. Pelle Stenberg was Kockums’ repre-

  sentative in Canada, Don Dillon represented Rockwell and Rick

  Canham went there for ASC. However, Stenberg soon felt that

  the Canadians were unlikely to spend the money needed for new

  submarines and that they would probably buy second-hand, as in

  fact they did, when they bought Britain’s redundant Upholders in

  1998. The ASC office was closed down in 1993.

  After Canada, Malaysia was seen as one of the most likely

  markets for Australian submarines, but the efforts in this mar-

  ket showed that the fragile unity of the consortium was breaking

  down. Malaysia wanted small, short-range submarines and was

  not interested in a submarine with the capabilities of the Collins

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  class. This brought out the conflict of interest between ASC and

  Kockums.

  By 1992, when Malaysia was inviting expressions of interest,

  AIDC was becoming interested in extending its involvement in

  military industries. Inspired by Peter Horobin, it attempted to put

  together a bid for a submarine for Malaysia, involving a pro-

  posal to build the Swedish A19 Gotland design in Adelaide, but

  with a Rockwell combat system. This proposal was made with-

  out telling Kockums, which submitted a separate bid, also for the

  A19, but with a Saab combat system. The consequence of the

  disunity between ASC, AIDC and Kockums was that Malaysia

  bought French submarines.

  A final strange postscript to the export story came with a let-

  ter from an unknown merchant banker claiming to be acting on

  behalf of the Taiwanese government. In the letter an offer was

  made to buy six Collins submarines, with a further incentive

  being an offer to buy South Australia’s entire wine production.15

  Although this was probably a hoax, it is likely that Taiwan would

  have bought Australian submarines if it had been politically pos-

  sible. Indeed the only rumours of export sales since 1999 have

  been for Collins class submarines to be built in America for sale

  to Taiwan.16

  An old retailing truism is: ‘You don’t make money yelling

  “Stinking fish for sale”.’ Any realistic chance of selling Australian

  submarines ended in the mid-1990s when a storm of media criti-

  cism made them virtually unsaleable.

  But was Collins a stinking fish? While the first submarine had

  been taking shape in the shed at ASC, its commanding officer had

  been appointed and the crew assembled. Training had been under

  way for several years and, with Collins back in the water, the trials process was about to begin. Would the submarine meet the hopes

  of those who had worked for years planning and building it, and

  the expectations of those who were waiting to sail in it?

  C H A P T E R 18

  The trials of Collins

  Even in its golden era in the 1980s the Australian Oberon

  squadron struggled to maintain its numbers and needed every

  sailor it had for its operations. The ideal complement of sub-

  mariners was over 800 but there were rarely more than 600, and

  this meant that the squadron was reluctant to release submariners

  to work with the project or to crew the first two boats, Collins

  and Farncomb.

  In late 1987 the project office prepared a ‘manpower forecast-

  ing model’ and told the navy the numbers that would be needed

  for the new submarines as they were built. The navy assumed that

  sailors would be excited at the prospect of being part of the firstr />
  crews and there would be no problems recruiting, but as early

  as 1989 the project was concerned that the ‘manpower available

  for early training and trials of the new submarines was critically

  limited and could disrupt progress’.1

  The manpower crisis was a constant problem throughout the

  test and trials phase of the project, and the original intention to

  have a trials crew and a commissioning crew was abandoned as

  there were not enough sailors to make up separate crews.

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  Commander Trevor Robertson, an experienced Oberon

  captain, was the first commanding officer of Collins, joining the

  submarine project in 1990. Robertson’s primary roles were to

  assemble the first two crews and supervise their training, and

  review the trials and operations procedures developed by ASC and

  the project. Robertson was aware that he was the only command

  qualified submariner connected with the project and by default

  was responsible for telling ASC and the project what the sub-

  mariners needed and wanted, although he found it hard to make

  them listen.

  The first members of Collins’ crew moved to Adelaide in early

  1992 and they soon discovered the reality of the Royal Australian

  Navy being the parent navy of the Collins class. With the Oberons

  all the training programs had been developed by the British and

  until 1986 much of the training was done in Britain. However,

  Collins required completely new training programs and these had

  to be ready for use well before the first submarine was launched.

  As with other ‘parent navy issues’ the challenges this involved

  were not fully appreciated by the navy.

  Under the contract ASC and its sub-contractors were respon-

  sible for developing and delivering training programs. As early as

  1989 there were concerns about their slow progress. The project

  office’s report for December 1989 fretted that:

  It is now apparent to the Project that ASC’s current ILS

  [integrated logistics support] development program has not

  sufficiently recognized the first major milestone of

  commencement of Trials Crew training in mid-1992 . . . [It

  is] now increasingly probable that continued delay with

  maintenance task analysis and documentation produced will

  impact on the quality of some of the training courses.

  In spite of this early notice, the prediction came true and the

  early training was patchy, superficial and often a waste of time.

  The chief source of difficulty for ASC was that the late comple-

  tion of the design of many systems and the failure of many sub-

  contractors to provide information on their equipment made it

  difficult to plan the training. It is obviously difficult to train peo-

  ple to use a system that has not been designed and of which the

  trainer has no knowledge.2

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  Mike Gallagher, who was the first commanding officer of

  Farncomb and the head of the submarine sea training group,

  recalls that the training for the combat system was designed

  around what the combat system was supposed to be like, but

  bore little relation to the patched up system that was put in the

  early boats. As a result they trained for a system they did not have

  and had to repeat the training for the system they actually took

  to sea. He acknowledges that the company responsible for the

  combat system training, Scientific Management Associates, ‘tried

  their hearts out to make it work’, but it was impossible with the

  material they were given.

  The simulator for the ship control and management system at

  the new submarine base at HMAS Stirling was more successful,

  although when the submarines got to sea the crews found that

  some of the procedures they had learnt in the simulator did not

  work in the submarines. Peter Sinclair, the commanding officer of

  Collins during its trials, recalls that:

  On our very first dive – having practised this procedure

  hundreds of times in the simulator – it was almost the

  complete reverse when we dived the submarine – the

  sequence of steps practised in the simulator were in the

  reverse to reality with the result that the submarine ended up

  with the propeller about 20 feet out of the water on her first

  dive. We quickly realised that the sequencing taught for

  opening the ballast tanks was different to the way the actual

  submarine reacted. It was one of the things we fixed quickly

  by changing the procedure.

  In the crew’s view, the training for Collins presumed that nothing

  would ever break down. The levels of redundancy in the sub-

  marines were believed to be so great that the crews would need

  to know little about maintaining systems while at sea. As a result

  there was little training given for this, so when things did break

  down the crews had to teach themselves how to repair them.

  Marcos Alfonso, the first marine engineer on Collins, joined the

  crew in January 1993, and says that they lost some crew because

  some older sailors were unable to grasp the ‘fly by wire’ concept

  of the new submarines. The Oberons were mechanical and manu-

  ally intensive, while the new submarines were electronic and auto-

  mated. In the Oberons the crew had to walk around to open and

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  shut valves manually; on Collins they sat at consoles and pressed

  buttons.

  While the new submarines were totally different from

  the Oberons they had many similarities with the Swedish

  V ästerg ötland class, and most of the officers and some of the

  crew of Collins were sent to Sweden for training. Trevor Robert-

  son recalls being told by one of the old-style Oberon comman-

  ders that he would never learn anything from the Swedes because

  they only had a ‘brown-water navy’. However, Robertson found

  the Swedish experience invaluable. The Swedes let him act as

  commanding officer of one of their submarines and operated it

  in English for him. He found they were experts in their shal-

  low, freshwater operations and their submarine was brilliant.

  The V ästerg ötland’s ‘X’ configuration rudder made it extremely

  manoeuvrable: it could turn in its own length and drove like a

  sports car. Ulf Edman, the commander of the Swedish submarine

  squadron, gave Robertson every assistance and he learned a great

  deal from the way the Swedes operated their submarines.

  The Swedes told Robertson of some of the problems they had

  with the V ästerg ötlands, and he wrote a report on these issues.

  He thinks that the report was probably filed away and forgot-

  ten because many of the same problems appeared on Collins. He

  believes that the Australian submarine project did not get the full

  benefit of the connection with Kockums and the Swedish navy,

  because of a reluctance to listen.

  When Australia’s Oberons wer
e built in Scotland in the 1960s

  and 1970s, the crews spent months with their boats during con-

  struction and, as Graham White recalls, they ‘knew every nut

  and bolt before they went to sea’.3 White joined ASC as sea tri-

  als manager and he was disappointed that the crews of the new

  submarines showed little interest in their boats while they were

  being built. He told the crews that they could have open access

  to the boats every night, but few sailors took up the offer. Trevor

  Robertson confirms this. He spent a lot of time on Collins during

  construction, and encouraged his crew to do the same, but few of

  them did so.

  Marcos Alfonso agrees that the crews spent little time on

  Collins, but thinks that this was not from lack of interest. Much

  of the training took place in Sydney and Western Australia and

  many senior sailors and officers spent little time in Adelaide. When

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  they were in Adelaide they were allowed to walk around the sub-

  marines but it was strictly a ‘look but don’t touch’ situation. They

  could learn about the components and their location but they did

  not learn how to operate them – this was learned at sea, ‘where

  equipment was damaged due to lack of knowledge of how to

  operate it’.

  Graham White felt that there was an attitude of complacency

  among the crews, which stemmed from the general view in the

  navy that the contractor would supply the submarines and the

  navy would simply take them over and drive them. They expected

  that new submarines would be like new cars, where you just turn

  the key and drive away. There was no understanding that the RAN

  was the parent navy for the submarines and had a much greater

  responsibility for the product than the buyer of a new car.

  One week before the launch of Collins Trevor Robertson

  resigned his command and left the navy. He felt frustrated that his

  attempts to fix the problems on the submarine had been ignored

  and more generally felt that he and his crew had been poorly

  looked after by the navy. However, the main reason he left was

  that he realised he would be posted away from Collins before he

  had a chance to take it to sea and, after the excitement of sub-

  marine command, he did not want to go and sit behind a desk.

  The timing of the resignation was not designed to embarrass the