I seem to recall in the late 80s and early 90s the idea of submarines being able to launch surface to air missiles being discussed. If you're a sub and a helicopter is dipping a sonar, you know exactly where the helo is but you cannot shoot at it, even if you surfaced. The idea, as I recall, was to release some buoyant device that, when it surfaced, would launch 1 to 4 SAMs that would go into active seek mode and then lock in on whatever flying object they found. Lots of things can go wrong with this idea... which is probably why nothing has been in the military media about it.
Now that you've got submarines with vertical launch cells like the latest Virginia class I've wondered about some of the possibilities. Since those are capable of holding Tomahawks, they certainly are large enough to hold an SM-2 or SM-6 SAM missile (though I doubt they could fire those unmodified). Having a submarine with long range SAMs open up some interesting tactics. You detect a bunch of enemy fighters sortieing out to engage one of your ships with an airborne early warning aircraft or fighter on a long range patrol. All of a sudden, way before they enter range of your ship's SAMs, a submarine surfaces, launches a bunch of SAMs, and the aircraft that detected the enemy fighters guides them to targets using cooperative engagement. With this technique all you need is a submarine and a fighter or early warning aircraft and you effectively get a guided missile destroyer which is profoundly hard to detect. Fighter might be a better choice, so it can chase off ASW helos and aircraft without needing the submarine to surface and waste some of its own SAMs.
Lots of things can go wrong of course, and I'm sure it would take a ton of engineering effort to make it happen, but it's certainly an interesting concept.
This was one of the operational concepts for Lockheed's Sea Shadow.
The Outer Air Battle was keeping Navy planners up at night, so the idea of laying a clandestine SAM trap far out in front of the carrier battle group seemed like a really attractive idea. Using a combo of LPI radar and data links from other sensors for targeting, the low observable ships could be in just the right spot to surprise that regiment-sized raid of Backfires with a bunch of missiles fired from VLS cells.
British and Israeli subs experimented with blowpipe slaved to the periscope, which was a truly useless SAM. Those kinds of details are buried in the articles on that site :)
I'd guess that the idea isn't so much to actually sneak up on aircraft, but rather to give them something to evade while the sub tries to make its escape.
"The fiber optical link would then be used by the crew to verify the target, confirm the intercept and perform battle damage assessment."
This thing is literally dragging a fiber optic cable behind it, with a sensor package that is apparently left behind at the sea surface when the missile transits into the air, that allows the submarine to see the helicopter target before and after missile impact, and to abort the missile strike if necessary.
