David White – Testing new survival suits

We’re testing a brand-new type of survival suit.

Simon:  They look like crocodiles somehow. 

They do, but they’re quilted, and as I said they’re double skinned so when you pull this CO2 bottle, it [inflating noise] inflates it, and you blow up like a Michelin Man. Ok? So that’s that suit I was telling you about that you come up in the water in.

So, we’ve all got our visors sort of folded back but you can see the top half of it. So, we were doing … we were tasked with trialling this suit so what we decided to do was we’d get ourselves sponsored for a children’s charity, so we got people to sponsor us for the number of hours we could spend in the water.

Now when we teach submarine escape, we say, “This suit is good for 24 hours, mid Atlantic, unless you vomit yourself to death’ because it’s rough because there’s nothing worse than laying on your back in rough sea. But it will keep you, not warm but not hypothermic for a, quite a good few hours. 

Now, when you’re floating around in the ocean your biggest problem is passing water because, when you have a pee, it collects in the small of your back in that suit, if you’re laying down, it will.

When that gets cold that’s your kidneys immersed in cold liquid, and they don’t like it and they start to shut down. Because these guys have all been out there … I mean you wear a huge nappy, good for about 10 pints they reckon, or three pounds.