Midge Ure – SETT experience

I’ve only done it a couple of times because when I came through, what they realised that actually operating under pressurised training, you always heard of someone … now Dr Campbell will tell you more about this probably, but you always heard of someone having complications, or somebody died in that …

Simon: So, you go in in trepidation in some way. 

So you always go down there like, ‘God, is this my …’ so what they’ve tended to do is, quite rightly they’ve started to risk assess it and say, “Well if you have a cold when you turn up, you can’t do the training.”

Remember, I was based in Faslane so the first time I ever did it was here, travelled done there to do the Tank, and it’s all new and big blue column of water and you think, “Yeah, I want to go in there” but you’re also really, really scared about doing it. Of course, you are, you’ve got a column of water above you that they’re going to ask you to go through.

Simon: Because of the stories you’ve heard before you got there.

Well, because you’d heard that people had died, or they’re shutting it down and it’s not safe anymore, we don’t train, and of course you’ve been told to get in there and go up yourself, course it’s safe. But it’s one of those things. You don’t know until you do it. It’s like running a marathon.

You don’t know your fit to run a marathon until you do it. You don’t know that your heart’s good enough to sustain a shock, until you do it. Or you’re going to put me under that pressure in that water tank, what happens if my lungs collapse? You just don’t know do you?

Until you do something, you don’t know, and when you’re young, it’s ok. If you ask me to do it now, I’d go, “Wooah, stop.” I’ve seen a lot of programs about submarines safety and submarine rescue. You don’t escape from submarines historically.