Even when you're ten pounds heavier than the maximum weight it's designed to handle. Even when the sub's stabilization software isn't finished yet and the team is still in preliminary testing. Gizmag joins pioneering submarine engineer Graham Hawkes to drive the Deepflight Dragon, a submarine so idiot-proof even Loz Blain can drive it.

If you'd asked Graham Hawkes what he wanted to be when he was a kid, submarine designer wouldn't have been on the list. It was aviation that floated his boat, so to speak, and the wild and woolly early days where inventors like the Wright Brothers would cobble designs together on shoestring budgets, then jump right in and go risk their lives flying the things.

But Hawkes was born too late for aviation. "When I graduated in 1969, aviation had already taken off," he tells me at a marina on Lake Tahoe, California, seemingly unaware of his own pun. "If I was 60 years earlier, I could be building an airplane in my back yard with three wings instead of two, and go and fly faster than anybody else. Now, that's done. Look at Concorde – that took a team of countries."