Graham Hawkes

Graham Hawkes (born 23 December 1947) is a London-born marine engineer and submarine designer. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Hawkes designed 70% of the crewed submersibles produced in those two decades. As late as 2007, he held the world solo dive record of in the submarine Deep Rover. the Telepresent Rapid Aiming Platform (TRAP), the first weapon he designed. He had been inspired to create a safer way for police to deal with situations after watching a shootout in North Hollywood, Los Angeles on television. Two years later, he designed the one-man microsubmersible Mantis, which included remote manipulator arms. In the same year, Hawkes founded Deep Ocean Technology (DOT) with Sylvia Earle, his wife from 1986 to 1992.

Hawkes also founded the San Leandro based firm, Deep Ocean Engineering (DOE), in 1982 with Earle. DOE has produced over 300 ROVs. A Deep Rover submersible was used in the 3-D IMAX film "Aliens of the Deep".

This exploit in 1985 set the world solo dive depth record in a submersible at , which was soon repeated by Sylvia Earle, and another team member.

After regular working hours, Hawkes and a team of engineers designed and started building Deep Flight, a positively buoyant submersible that would rely on winglets generating hydrodynamic forces for diving, targeting a dive rate of . To save weight, the single-person Deep Flight relied on a glass fiber-reinforced pressure vessel, impregnated with syntactic foam. Its design influenced the Ocean Everest concept, which was intended to be a two-person submersible using a carbon fiber hull and meeting American Bureau of Shipping certification for operation to .

In 1991, he made headlines when it was briefly thought that he and his team might have found the remains of 'Flight 19', missing in the Bermuda Triangle since 1945.

Hawkes Ocean Technologies Hawkes left the day-to-day operations of Deep Ocean Engineering to found Hawkes Ocean Technologies (HOT) in 1996. HOT would later launch the Necker Nymph and DeepFlight Super Falcon which Hawkes designed.

Hawkes completed the design for the Deep Flight II two-person submarine in 1998. It was also the first research submersible to attain a speed of underwater. The first example of the type is named Spirit of Patrick.

In 2008, Hawkes finished the first example of his design DeepFlight Super Falcon, which he subsequently delivered to venture capitalist Tom Perkins.

In 2010, the first example of his DeepFlight Merlin design was completed and delivered to Richard Branson. It was named the Necker Nymph

Filmography Year Title Role Notes1981 For Your Eyes Only Mantis Man