Robotic Vehicles Extend Crash Investigators’ Reach

With their sophisticated electronic eyes and dexterous joints, deep sea underwater robots can wrench unwieldy pieces of wreckage from the ocean floor or can cradle delicate aquatic creatures in their fine metal hands.

Then they carefully rise to the surface to deliver their precious catch.

On most of their missions, the machines are the eyes, hands and ears of seafaring explorers, who range from marine biologists eager to map the ocean floor to tourists who crave a glimpse of the deep sea but don’t want to get wet.

And sometimes the robots are the high-tech tools that offer the best hope to those desperate for answers in the face of disaster.

This week, remotely operated vehicles--or ROVs--have been used by investigators probing the cause of the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which plunged into the waters off Oxnard on Monday, killing all 88 on board.

The robots, whose powers are far beyond the reach of any human diver, retrieved the “black boxes” that recorded the last critical moments of the flight.

Named Scorpio and Deep Drone, the robots have also mapped the wreckage site 650 feet below the surface with sophisticated on-board sonar equipment. That work was expected to be completed Friday.

Owned by the Navy, Scorpio is housed in San Diego and Deep Drone in Washington. Scorpio’s proximity allowed for a quick transport to the crash scene to begin what would be a fast recovery of the black boxes.

Other factors contributing to the quick finds included favorable weather, the fact that the wreckage was relatively close--10 miles--to shore and that the National Transportation Safety Board had pinpointed the submerged data recorders within about 200 feet of their sites before the ROVs even arrived, said Navy Cmdr. Lee Hall, commanding officer of the Deep Submergence Unit.

In contrast, it took more than a week to salvage the flight recorders from TWA Flight 800 and more than two weeks in the case of EgyptAir Flight 990, even though identical equipment was used in those crash investigations.

Most recently, Scorpio was used to locate the wreckage of a Marine Corps helicopter off Point Loma in 3,800 feet of water and retrieve the bodies of six Marines and a sailor. Scorpio and Deep Drone have arms with nearly as much control as a human hand and sonar equipment that can detect infinitely more sounds than human ears.

They have crawled thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface for hours, sometimes days, in conditions that would be dangerous for even highly skilled scuba divers.

“It is simply beyond the capability of sustained diver operations,” said Hall, whose unit is leading the ROV operations at the crash site.

“Fifty years ago, it would have been very difficult to do anything of this sort,” he said. “When you marry the technology with the skill of the operators, this gives you the capability of doing what humans couldn’t do.”

ROVs vary in size but are all connected to surface ships with cables, which transmit power, pictures and other data.

Unlike deep sea robots that are battery-operated and have people on board, and autonomous undersea vehicles, which are battery-operated and controlled entirely by computer programs, ROVs rely heavily on skilled humans to operate them. Most have a pilot, co-pilot and captain.

They often are the deep sea investigators of choice for scientists, oil companies and salvage operators.

“It looks and operates much like a video game,” said Sean Durkin, marketing manager for Oceaneering International, a Houston-based firm that contracts out its deep sea services. “You have a joystick and a TV monitor and you’re looking at what the camera sees out in front of it.”

Though operating an ROV sounds much like playing an old-fashioned Atari video game, it is actually grueling, highly skilled work, Hall said.

Navy sailors must first have extensive experience on submarines before they can train for ROV placement--and then they must train for more than a year, he said.

Scorpio, which retrieved Flight 261’s data recorders this week, can dive as deep as 5,000 feet and is about the size of a Volkswagen, Hall said. It has four propellers in each direction, six high-intensity lights, two black and white video cameras and sonar detection sensors that have a 2,000-foot range.

Perhaps most important are its arms--also called manipulators --which can lift up to 250 pounds each.

“Those two manipulators are like extensions of [the co-pilot’s] hands,” Hall said. “He actually grasps the control panel in his hand and moves the pincher, if you will.”

ROVs are the smaller, more sophisticated descendants of old-fashioned submarines, Hall said.

From the unwieldy, expensive machines of yesterday, they began to evolve in the 1970s into robots that can be as small as a household trash can and cost as little as $15,000, according to Ivar Babb, director of the National Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point.

Today’s ROVs also can be massive--as big as a sport utility vehicle--and can cost up to several million dollars, Hall said. Such machines can delve as deep as 38,000 feet and detect subtle biological conditions in areas previously unexplored.

They have been used to examine the lost wreckage from countless vessels, including Russian submarines sunk in the 1940s, unidentified 18th century ships and the notorious Titanic itself.

ROVs got a big dose of publicity in the Academy Award-winning “Titanic,” which showed them searching for and filming the site of the sunken cruise ship.

Commercially, they are used most often by oil companies to build and maintain deep sea pipelines and inspect offshore oil platforms, said Durkin, whose company helped in the salvage operations of TWA Flight 800, South African Airways Flight 295 and others.

But, by far, most ROVs are used for underwater research.

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, scientists have conducted elaborate experiments on the sea floor and set up seismic equipment to listen to earthquakes from thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface, said Debbie Meyer, communications coordinator.

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Undersea Helper

The Deep Drone is one of the remotely operated vehicles being used to salvage the remains of Flight 261 and map the underwater debris field. Lowered from the research ship Independence, the rover pinpoints pieces of wreckage with sonar and lifts them to the surface. Operators on deck can see the ocean floor from cameras mounted on the rover. Here’s a look at how it works: *

Sources: Oceaneering International, Inc.; U.S. Navy Researched by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times