I don't get your point here. They might not have a pilot. Sawyer doesn't, or might not know about Lapidus, and he certainly can't be counting on him to help, since he's with the other group, so Sawyer'd have no way of thinking there'd be a pilot available. As you say, you don't just go ahead and TRY to fly a plane, but a ship is a different matter. Navigation is still navigation, and there are likely to be charts and manuals and such aboard, including something with the heading you can use to get to & from the island (since they came in that way). You don't HAVE to submerge a submarine to make it float, and originally (and even as late as the days depicted in Das Boot) that was how they travelled for most of the time. Up through WW2 submarines went underwater the way soldiers went on their bellies - only when absolutely necessary, because it was an tediously slow and exhausting method of travel.

Submarines are perfectly capable of making an entire voyage surfaced, and in fact, naturally float, deliberately taking on

Furthermore, Sawyer WAS in the Dharma Initiative for three years, as the security chief of an outpost whose only means of departure was a submarine. You THINK he didn't look into the issue of submarine hijacking? The guy who was all about making careful plans and thinking things through didn't contemplate having a bolt-hole just in case? He knows that in his lifetime the Others are scheduled to attack and wipe out the Dharma Inititiative, and it seems his group has absorbed Faraday's assertion that you can't change things, wholeheartedly. It would be more surprising, and much less plausible if he had no knowledge of submarine operation principles than to see him successfully taking a boat out.



Because of the way the boat sunk in the movie? In any case, I want a better source than the director of Troy, before I go making definitive judgments about the feasibility of a means of transportation. This being Lost, what are the odds this plan will be realized anyway?