THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 9, 1996 TAG: 9602090433
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
The Navy will provide up to three electronic detectives to aid in the grim undersea hunt for the flight recorder and other wreckage of a jetliner that crashed Tuesday in the Caribbean, killing all 189 people aboard.
Officials disclosed Thursday that the remote-controlled deep-sea searching devices, including a boxy contraption that can locate and retrieve objects at depths of up to 20,000 feet, are being readied for shipment to Florida and possible deployment to the crash site near the Dominican Republic.
Capt. Raymond S. McCord, the Navy's supervisor of salvage and diving, said the first job, and the only one the service has been asked to undertake so far, is finding the ``black box,'' the flight recorder that should have information about the final moments of the doomed flight.
But equipment that could map the ocean floor around the crash site and then retrieve key pieces of the wreckage will be ready if the recorder is found, he said.
McCord, who showed off the high-tech salvage gear at the Maryland plant where it is assembled, said the task is akin to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. A homing beacon attached to the black box should help by narrowing the search area.
By early next week, McCord said, a ``towed fish,'' a small device that resembles a futuristic-looking model airplane, will be put to work to find the black box. Dragged slowly behind a ship in the crash area, the ``pinger locator'' can hear the flight recorder's signal from up to a mile away and fix its location on the sea floor to within 100 meters.
The Boeing 757's wreckage is believed to be in up to 13,000 feet of water. McCord said the signal beacon attached to the flight recorder is built to handle such depths and has a battery that, if properly charged, should keep it operating for up to 30 days.
Once the locator ``finds'' the box, the Navy would deploy ``Orion,'' an 8-foot, cigar-shaped sonar scanner that glides along just above the sea floor and makes a detailed map of what McCord called ``the debris field.''
Electric-powered and able to operate at depths of up to 20,000 feet, Orion carries high-resolution sonar equipment that not only locates objects but also provides an electronic picture of their size and shape.
With the area mapped and each piece of wreckage located, a ``Cable-controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle,'' or CURV, would actually retrieve pieces of the wreckage.
Described by McCord and officials of Oceaneering Technologies, the company that builds it, as a ``state of the art'' device, the CURV is controlled from the surface by an operator who sits at a computer console and steers it with a joystick. It carries strobe lights and high-resolution television cameras to view pieces of debris, and the operator controls mechanical arms that pick up the wreckage.
The Orion and CURV, which McCord and Oceaneering displayed for reporters Thursday, are manufactured and stored at Oceaneering's plant just east of the Capital Beltway and are the only devices of their kind available on the East Coast.
McCord and other officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command, which owns the machines, were unable Thursday to provide figures on how much each one costs or what the Navy will charge the National Transportation Safety Board for using them. The NTSB is investigating the crash because a U.S. built airliner was involved, officials said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic by KRT
Finding a plane's black box
by CNB