Andy heads up specialist rescue team

A Staffordshire man is fulfiling his dreams in the Royal Navy – both in the air and below the waves.

That's because Lieutenant Andy Sharp from Stafford is the head of an elite rescue team and is both an expert parachutist and submariner.

Lt Sharp gets to combine his love of throwing himself out of aircraft with his skills as a marine engineer in his role as the commanding officer of the navy's unique Submarine Parachute Assistance Group, or SPAG.

The specialist team, which is the only one of its kind in the world, is made up of trained water descent parachutists who are on call 365 days a year for any emergency involving a submarine at sea. If a submarine gets into trouble below the waves, their job is to parachute into the sea with rescue equipment including inflatable boats, life rafts, medicines and rations.

Once in the water, the team members, who have to be either trained submariners or doctors, establish communications with the stricken vessel and liase with the rescue planning headquarters before deciding how to get the crew to the surface.

Andy, who has just returned from a major international exercise off the coast of Norway, lived in Stafford from the age of 13 and attended Rising Brook High School.

The son of a servicemen, the 40-year-old joined the Royal Navy in 1987 as an officer's apprentice and started serving on submarines eight years ago. Andy said: "The exercise was an important international showpiece to show what the UK SPAG can do.

"What we do is unique in the world. We're now teaching other nations such as the Americans, the Russians and the Ukrainians who want to copy it – we've been doing it for 20 or 30 years but the rest of the world is suddenly thinking 'we want to be able to do that too."

Andy, who now lives near Portsmouth but still has several family members in the Stafford area, added that the exercise was not all hard about work.

"After the training was finished, members of the SPAG spent the night drinking vodka with Russian servicemen to toast the 70th anniversary of the formation of a unit in their armed forces," he said.

"That was the excuse anyway."