Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Shreveport (LA) Times
September 6, 2008
Ocean depths, physical obstacles make search uncertain.
By John Andrew Prime
Military searchers looking for evidence in the loss of a Barksdale Air Force Base B-52 in the Pacific Ocean in late July have "got a big, big task ahead of them," says a deep-sea diver and researcher with decades of experience in the field.
That work should begin in earnest this week, as the Military Sealift Command's fleet ocean tug USNS Sioux arrives at Guam with personnel and gear to search for the missing airplane, Louisiana Fire, and its crew, code-named Raider 21.
The 226-foot-long, 2,260-ton tug will be equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, cameras, video gear and sensors, all of which diver Richie Kohler, co-host of the History Channel's "Deep Sea Detectives," says will be needed.
"It's almost a safe assumption to say the aircraft did not land gently, but impacted at high speed," said Kohler, who with "Deep Sea Detectives" partner John Chatterton found and identified the long-lost German World War II submarine U-869, a saga detailed in the best-selling book "Shadow Divers."
"So they've gone from looking for something with a sonar footprint of say, 900 square feet, to now looking for multiple footprints that are maybe 20 square feet."
The five-decade-old B-52H bomber crashed July 20 into the Pacific Ocean, 25 miles northwest of Guam, less than an hour into a routine training flight that included a run over a parade celebrating the U.S. island territory's freedom from occupying Japanese forces in 1944.
Killed in the flight were five fliers assigned to the 2nd Bomb Wing: Maj. Christopher M. Cooper, the aircraft commander; Maj. Brent D. Williams, instructor/navigator; Capt. Michael K. Dodson, co-pilot; 1st Lt. Joshua D. Shepherd, navigator; and 1st Lt. Robert D. Gerren, electronic warfare officer. The sixth victim, Col. George Martin, 51, was a flight surgeon and deputy commander of the 36th Medical Group at Andersen Air Force Base, the Guam post where the aircraft and the other crew members were deployed.
Only the remains of Cooper and Williams have been identified publicly as having been recovered. Their funerals have been held, and all the others have been honored with memorials.
Air Force Times, a sister publication of The Times, reported in August that wreckage believed to be remnants of the lost bomber had been located.
But while the military found debris on the ocean surface and knows pretty much where the airplane hit the water, "we haven't pinpointed the physical wreckage yet," said Lt. Col. John Paradis, deputy director of Air Combat Command's public affairs division. The command is investigating the loss and will issue separate accident and safety reports in coming months.
The operations starting this month will help provide important clues as to how and why the airplane and crew were lost. Typically, this would be paired with other evidence such as maintenance records and surviving flight logs, any recordings made of radar or other trackings of the aircraft during its flight, any recording of transmissions between the airplane and controllers on the ground, as well as any recordings, photographs or witness testimony from military personnel or civilians who come forward.
The investigation is ongoing, and the Air Force has released few details of what has been recovered or collected. Like almost all military aircraft, the bomber did not contain any of the “black boxes” that typically are on commercial airplanes.
“The U.S. Navy Office of the Director of Ocean Engineering, Supervisor of Salvage and Diving and other U.S. Navy agencies as required, will conduct search and recovery operations to locate and recover wreckage from the B-52,” an email from Air Combat Command in late August, quoting Navy salvage personnel, said. The message said the estimated depth of the wreckage “is between 12,000 and 13,000 feet.”
USNS Sioux and its crew of 20 civilian and military mariners and divers “will deploy the Fly Away Deep Ocean Salvage System, or FADOSS,” the release said.
The system can lift wreckage weighing up to 15,000 pounds. “For large bulky lifts such as aircraft, the Ship Motion Compensator offsets ship’s motion to prevent high snap tension in lift lines.”
The searchers also will use the CURV III, a 12,600-pound Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV, that can lift lighter objects from depths as great as 20,000 feet, and the Orion side scan sonar, a dual frequency towed side-scan sonar system mounted inside a torpedo-shaped tow body.
The ROV is set up to accommodate skid-mounted tool packages that can include trenchers and other digging devices, specialized salvage tools and specialized instrument packages. It includes a variety of wide-angle black-and-white and color still and video cameras, strobe and halogen lights and other gear designed to help locate, identify and when possible retrieve debris.
But despite geographic positioning systems and other positioning aids, there’s still a lot of imprecision involved, he cautioned.
“For say a 10,000-foot submersion you’ve got to have three times that amount of cable behind the boat, and that means the ship has to maintain headway and then there’s the layback of the cable. The towed array will be at least 20,000 feet behind them and never directly behind them. It’s kind of like ‘Kentucky windage’ where they’ll have to figure where behind the boat the system is.”
The search should involved back and forth patterns to image the bottom, which he called “mowing the lawn, and if you’re using still cameras or even video, you’re using 50-year-old technologies. By the time you get the information, you’re way past the target, so you have to turn the ship around and re-acquire the target. Then if you’re relying on video, you are limited to what your lights can illuminate. It’s like trying to search a room using only a penlight with one eye closed. Can you find what you’re looking for? Yes, but it could take months.”
On top of that, even with sophisticated sonar units searchers are literally looking for shadows, he said. Those are the sound shadows cast by the objects on the ocean bottom, which can be flat or undulating terrain, and can also contain centuries worth of trash, cargo dumped from passing ships, and debris from ships and aircraft lost in the same area over a span of decades or centuries.
After marking promising spots with transponders, searchers then can try to lift the debris, which carries the risks of losing or damaging the evidence.
All of that, Kohler said, makes the task of the investigators “incredibly difficult.”
But it is work that needs to be done, he said, due to the need for the military to look for its own and provide closure, and because “each part they recover will tell a story in the forensic investigation. Not only finding the artifacts or pieces of the aircraft, but their position on the sea floor will help tell the story. It’s really going to take a lot of effort, but this can be a really intense project. Finding the ‘U-Who’ (the nickname he and Chatterton gave their mystery submarine until they identified it after years of research) was a cakewalk considering what these guys have to deal with. The good thing is they have the tools and the resources behind them.
“Now, will they ever be able to find the missing bolts that caused the aircraft to crash? We like to think so, but sometimes even when an aircraft crashes on land they can’t figure it out. Compound that with the fact this is spread over the sea floor several miles down in the dark, and the metal of airplane is deteriorating, quite literally weathering away in salt water.”
September 6, 2008
Ocean depths, physical obstacles make search uncertain.
By John Andrew Prime
Military searchers looking for evidence in the loss of a Barksdale Air Force Base B-52 in the Pacific Ocean in late July have "got a big, big task ahead of them," says a deep-sea diver and researcher with decades of experience in the field.
That work should begin in earnest this week, as the Military Sealift Command's fleet ocean tug USNS Sioux arrives at Guam with personnel and gear to search for the missing airplane, Louisiana Fire, and its crew, code-named Raider 21.
The 226-foot-long, 2,260-ton tug will be equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, cameras, video gear and sensors, all of which diver Richie Kohler, co-host of the History Channel's "Deep Sea Detectives," says will be needed.
"It's almost a safe assumption to say the aircraft did not land gently, but impacted at high speed," said Kohler, who with "Deep Sea Detectives" partner John Chatterton found and identified the long-lost German World War II submarine U-869, a saga detailed in the best-selling book "Shadow Divers."
"So they've gone from looking for something with a sonar footprint of say, 900 square feet, to now looking for multiple footprints that are maybe 20 square feet."
The five-decade-old B-52H bomber crashed July 20 into the Pacific Ocean, 25 miles northwest of Guam, less than an hour into a routine training flight that included a run over a parade celebrating the U.S. island territory's freedom from occupying Japanese forces in 1944.
Killed in the flight were five fliers assigned to the 2nd Bomb Wing: Maj. Christopher M. Cooper, the aircraft commander; Maj. Brent D. Williams, instructor/navigator; Capt. Michael K. Dodson, co-pilot; 1st Lt. Joshua D. Shepherd, navigator; and 1st Lt. Robert D. Gerren, electronic warfare officer. The sixth victim, Col. George Martin, 51, was a flight surgeon and deputy commander of the 36th Medical Group at Andersen Air Force Base, the Guam post where the aircraft and the other crew members were deployed.
Only the remains of Cooper and Williams have been identified publicly as having been recovered. Their funerals have been held, and all the others have been honored with memorials.
Air Force Times, a sister publication of The Times, reported in August that wreckage believed to be remnants of the lost bomber had been located.
But while the military found debris on the ocean surface and knows pretty much where the airplane hit the water, "we haven't pinpointed the physical wreckage yet," said Lt. Col. John Paradis, deputy director of Air Combat Command's public affairs division. The command is investigating the loss and will issue separate accident and safety reports in coming months.
The operations starting this month will help provide important clues as to how and why the airplane and crew were lost. Typically, this would be paired with other evidence such as maintenance records and surviving flight logs, any recordings made of radar or other trackings of the aircraft during its flight, any recording of transmissions between the airplane and controllers on the ground, as well as any recordings, photographs or witness testimony from military personnel or civilians who come forward.
The investigation is ongoing, and the Air Force has released few details of what has been recovered or collected. Like almost all military aircraft, the bomber did not contain any of the “black boxes” that typically are on commercial airplanes.
“The U.S. Navy Office of the Director of Ocean Engineering, Supervisor of Salvage and Diving and other U.S. Navy agencies as required, will conduct search and recovery operations to locate and recover wreckage from the B-52,” an email from Air Combat Command in late August, quoting Navy salvage personnel, said. The message said the estimated depth of the wreckage “is between 12,000 and 13,000 feet.”
USNS Sioux and its crew of 20 civilian and military mariners and divers “will deploy the Fly Away Deep Ocean Salvage System, or FADOSS,” the release said.
The system can lift wreckage weighing up to 15,000 pounds. “For large bulky lifts such as aircraft, the Ship Motion Compensator offsets ship’s motion to prevent high snap tension in lift lines.”
The searchers also will use the CURV III, a 12,600-pound Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV, that can lift lighter objects from depths as great as 20,000 feet, and the Orion side scan sonar, a dual frequency towed side-scan sonar system mounted inside a torpedo-shaped tow body.
The ROV is set up to accommodate skid-mounted tool packages that can include trenchers and other digging devices, specialized salvage tools and specialized instrument packages. It includes a variety of wide-angle black-and-white and color still and video cameras, strobe and halogen lights and other gear designed to help locate, identify and when possible retrieve debris.
But despite geographic positioning systems and other positioning aids, there’s still a lot of imprecision involved, he cautioned.
“For say a 10,000-foot submersion you’ve got to have three times that amount of cable behind the boat, and that means the ship has to maintain headway and then there’s the layback of the cable. The towed array will be at least 20,000 feet behind them and never directly behind them. It’s kind of like ‘Kentucky windage’ where they’ll have to figure where behind the boat the system is.”
The search should involved back and forth patterns to image the bottom, which he called “mowing the lawn, and if you’re using still cameras or even video, you’re using 50-year-old technologies. By the time you get the information, you’re way past the target, so you have to turn the ship around and re-acquire the target. Then if you’re relying on video, you are limited to what your lights can illuminate. It’s like trying to search a room using only a penlight with one eye closed. Can you find what you’re looking for? Yes, but it could take months.”
On top of that, even with sophisticated sonar units searchers are literally looking for shadows, he said. Those are the sound shadows cast by the objects on the ocean bottom, which can be flat or undulating terrain, and can also contain centuries worth of trash, cargo dumped from passing ships, and debris from ships and aircraft lost in the same area over a span of decades or centuries.
After marking promising spots with transponders, searchers then can try to lift the debris, which carries the risks of losing or damaging the evidence.
All of that, Kohler said, makes the task of the investigators “incredibly difficult.”
But it is work that needs to be done, he said, due to the need for the military to look for its own and provide closure, and because “each part they recover will tell a story in the forensic investigation. Not only finding the artifacts or pieces of the aircraft, but their position on the sea floor will help tell the story. It’s really going to take a lot of effort, but this can be a really intense project. Finding the ‘U-Who’ (the nickname he and Chatterton gave their mystery submarine until they identified it after years of research) was a cakewalk considering what these guys have to deal with. The good thing is they have the tools and the resources behind them.
“Now, will they ever be able to find the missing bolts that caused the aircraft to crash? We like to think so, but sometimes even when an aircraft crashes on land they can’t figure it out. Compound that with the fact this is spread over the sea floor several miles down in the dark, and the metal of airplane is deteriorating, quite literally weathering away in salt water.”