HMS Turbulent (S87): One Hundred and Ninety Days Submerged

The Build: Barrow

HMS Turbulent was built by Vickers Shipbuilding at Barrow-in-Furness and commissioned in 1984, a Trafalgar-class submarine based at HMNB Devonport that was originally designed for the specialist Cold War task of hunting Soviet ballistic missile submarines before adapting, after the Cold War's end, to intelligence-gathering and commando insertion work.

First Home from Iraq

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Turbulent fired thirty Tomahawk cruise missiles in the campaign, and became the first Royal Navy vessel to return home from the war, arriving in Plymouth on 16 April 2003 flying the Jolly Roger, the traditional mark of a successful submarine mission.

A Gruelling Final Deployment

In 2011, Turbulent undertook an East of Suez deployment lasting 268 days, taking in operations off the Libyan coast in the Gulf of Sidra during the intervention there, as well as patrol duties in the Indian Ocean.

Of that 267-day deployment, she spent an extraordinary 190 days entirely underwater, covering more than 38,000 miles before returning to Devonport on 14 December 2011, a particularly gruelling test of endurance for both boat and crew.

A Hidden Ordeal

During that same deployment, a failure in her air-conditioning system caused internal temperatures to climb to 60 degrees Celsius, resulting in 26 crew members suffering heat exhaustion, eight of them seriously enough to be life-threatening, after barnacles had clogged the cooling system while she lay for an extended period at Fujairah, a notably serious incident that remained undisclosed publicly until 2014, when it finally came to light just how demanding conditions aboard her had become during that record-breaking patrol.

The End of Her Service

HMS Turbulent was decommissioned on 14 July 2012, having undergone modernisation and a nuclear refuelling in 1997, and now awaits dismantling in the number 3 Basin at Devonport Dockyard, a boat whose final deployment tested her crew's endurance quite literally to the limit.