Only by partly submerging the vessel were they able to douse the flames on the hull's rubber coating, which minimizes noise and makes the submarine more difficult for enemies to detect.
Joey Thai, 52, an immigrant from Bangkok who ran a Thai restaurant in his native country, does the Thai cooking and makes the submarine sandwiches, as do his wife and three sons.
It's another feature that makes the submarine harder to detect.
Others pointed the finger at the government, saying lack of investment and corruption in the armed forces had made the submarine unsafe.
This made the submarine commander believe that the ship's crew were planning to regain their vessel and he immediately closed to just 50 yards (46m), surfaced and began angrily semaphoring to the "survivors" in the boats.
But he said it could be eight years before we start seeing those jobs in making the submarines.
At the heart of the issue is a claim that Netanyahu's personal lawyer, David Shimron, was representing the German arms manufacturer making the submarines at the same time Netanyahu was pushing for the submarine purchase.
The vessels are a good fit for the Kremlin's strategy of making do with less than its rivals, analysts say: Russia's foes need vast resources to track a single undersea craft, making the submarines' cost-to-mischief ratio attractive.
Two former Labour defence secretaries, Lord Robertson and Lord Hutton, have said the party's defence review is "sliding into chaos and incoherence" and have rejected claims that new technology could make the Trident nuclear submarine obsolete.
Devices like these have still to be perfected, but the world's militaries are pouring money into their development, At Nato's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation near La Spezia in northern Italy, and at more lavishly funded laboratories and workshops in Russia, China and the US, people go to work every day to make the big missile submarines redundant.
