The flare could however expose a raft to hostile fire, as then-Lt. Stuart Bonham Carter found during the 1918 Zeebrugge Raid as he escaped the scuttled blockship HMS Intrepid.

[7] Simply by casting it over the side, the lightweight Carley float could be launched more rapidly than traditional rigid lifeboat designs, and without the need for specialised hoists.

[5] The crew of the Canadian minesweeper HMCS Esquimalt, sunk offshore of Nova Scotia in April 1945, lost at least 16 to hypothermia during the six hours in which they awaited rescue.

Chinese sailor Poon Lim survived for a record 133 days adrift in the South Atlantic aboard a Carley float after his freighter SS Benlomond was sunk on 23 November 1942.

The sun-bleached corpse had evidently spent a lengthy period at sea, and was long suspected to have come from HMAS Sydney, which was lost with all hands under mysterious circumstances off the coast of Australia on 19 November 1941.

On the eightieth anniversary of the sinking, the Australian Department of Defence announced DNA testing had shown the body to be that of Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark, a sailor who had been lost with Sydney.

[10] In Nicholas Monsarrat's 1951 novel The Cruel Sea the survivors of the fictional Royal Navy corvette Compass Rose gather on a pair of Carley floats after the ship is torpedoed south of Iceland.

In the 1964 film Ensign Pulver, after an altercation on deck during a storm, the captain (played by Burl Ives) falls overboard in an apparent state of shock.

The title character Ensign Pulver (Robert Walker), upon finding the captain cannot swim, releases a nearby Carley float as a life preserver.