This was in the 1970s, a time when there was a lot of pioneer work in subsea exploration and technology. Researchers and companies were really pushing the envelope of what was possible to do under water. OH&S today would give most companies an F for their safety procedures. A lot of workers died and suffered permanent injury during these years.
On the other hand, this was all unknown territory. A lot of the knowledge regarding safety under water hadn't been discovered yet. In contrast to the space exploration of the 1960s, the private companies exploring the sea bottom didn't have the budget to put safety first. Research into the biological effects of unfamiliar breathing gases and decompression was focused exclusively on survival, not long-term sustainability. Etc. Even governments were implicitly pushing for quick development, as large parts of this exploration was a gold rush. The judicial considerations about to whom resources belonged, were to a large extent determined by the technological capability to harvest them. An example is the oil pipeline from the North Sea to West Norway, which was built in terrain which was at the time "impossibly deep" to work in. For the Norwegian government, building this pipeline was a key move in getting the ability to sell their oil on the open market.
The modern notion of workplace safety was to a large extent developed during these years. In Europe, the Norwegian offshore unions and the then-new Law of Work Environments (Arbeidsmiljøloven) were instrumental in this development. Even today, these initiatives are among the most strict in the industrialized world when it comes to questions of workplace safety.
Today this kind of work would be handled by ROVs (remote operated vehicles, something like: http://www.f-e-t.com/our_products_technologies/subsea-soluti...), which is probably for the best - the pilot sits in a comfortable room onboard a ship on the surface and interfaces with the ROV through a terminal, which is hooked up to the ROV with a very long cable (tether).
I work on simulators that are used to train pilots for their upcoming jobs, which also helps to reduce mistakes, which makes this line of work a lot safer than it used to be.
>I wasn't in the best condition anyway as I had just suffered three or four days food poisoning from a horrible meat and potato pie.
>"It turned out it was the Queen Elizabeth II, which had altered its course from America to stand station with us in response to the mayday. But because it was so formal, we'd assumed it was the Queen. Then the message came 'sorry boys, wrong lady'."
And this reference from the above article shows a cut-away diagram of the vehicle, with people inside so you can get a sense of the size of the crew compartment:
> "We had 72 hours of life support when we started the dive so we managed to eke out a further 12.5 hours. When we looked in the cylinder, we had 12 minutes of oxygen left," says Chapman.
Sometimes unusual coincidences like that actually happen. Improbable doesn't mean impossible.
I'm reminded of the first time I watched Das Boot. I knew very little about the movie going in, aside from the fact that it was considered a classic. I enjoyed it a great deal, but thought they overdid it with some of the obviously artificial drama. Afterwards I was surprised to find that the stuff I thought was obviously fake had actually happened to the real submarine the story was based on.
