Page 33 - Auv News Today

Detailed imaging of the "titanic." >> the smaller ones go down to 5,000 feet. the next classes are much more expensive, larger device, 15 by 25 feet, very large. it adds a lot of batty capability, a lot of hydraulics capability. >> reporter: the autonomous underwater vehicles, auvs, can go as deep as 20,000 feet, sending acoustic pulses to the sea floor to find debris. then maps are drawn to guide search teams. then even find things up to 300 feet under the sea floor. the search zone needs to be...

>> the smaller ones are only going to down to 5,000 feet. the next is a larger device thats 15 by 25 feet. its very large because it adds a lot of battery capability and hydraulics capability. >> reporter: the auvs can go as deep as 20,000 feet sending acoustic pulses to the sea floor to find debris and then maps are drawn to guide search teams. they can even find things up to 300 feet under the sea floor. the search zone needs to be narrowed down first. this auv can only search eight square mil...

It keeps us out of the way of any obstructions. >> reporter: these types of searches can take months or years but the payoff is high. wreckage that gives clues about what happened, data recorders, and the thing that matters most, the fate of the people on board. >> so the auv narrows your search, it finds the actual wreckage and you step it up with something called an rov, a remote operating vehicle. its a robot that goes underwater, it has high definition cameras and little hands or claws that ...

Mobilized to search deep beneath the surface and would begin with the hopes of finding this sound. pings from the two black boxes, the data and voice recorders. the pings are picked up by the towed pinger locator system which is basically a small microphone towed under water that can pick up signals from as far as two miles away. scientists only have 30 to 50 days from when the plane hits the water and the beacons die making the search harder. >> its important to find them before they go dead. y...

Miles under water. were talking about incredibly deep ocean. so what type of equipment do you bring in to find the black box because if there is only one thing youre going to find to find out what happened the flight data recorder that they need to find? >> once theyve got a better idea of where the starting point is to find the debris field that the aircraft is at the bottom of the ocean. then you bring in your ship that is loaded with your underwater search and recovery equipment. that would b...

Which is a much bigger operation. >> it takes a while for the ship to turn around and get going again. >> the cable is the task. the cable weighs so much. you can put multiple auv on one ship and cover more ground. even with that technology, 150 years if you had ten of them. >> if you had the technology youre talking about and using, how quickly does that data come up to you and analyze? >> you do not get the data unless you recover it. if we launched the vehicle and it went down to 60 hours. yo...

Gets progressively worse. >> reporter: as a younger guy, tuttle and his buddies hit the sauce early and auv. >> i could drink a quart of whiskey and lunchtime and go back to wart. >> reporter: it came down to a simple choice. live or die. >> i was pretty fortunate that you know, i was able to get in a 12-step program. i went nine years straight and ip was afraid to miss a meeting. >> reporter: he began to change, but his friends didnt. >> just because i stopped drinking didnt mean anybody else d...

Black then you think that that stuffs going to go away as you get older, and what it does, it gets progressively worse. >> reporter: as a younger guy, tuttle and his buddies hit the sauce early, and auv. >> i could drink a quart of whiskey and lunchtime and then go back to work. >> reporter: after years of giving everything to alcohol, he realized it all came down to a simple choice. live or die. >> i was pretty fortunate that, you know, i was able to get in a 12-step program. i went nine years ...

Difficulties of even if we find -- if we relocate the pings, if we find where the black boxes, the difficulties of being able to actually retrieve it from the floor of the ocean, is this even possible. >> its possible, but it is extremely difficult and probably even more difficult than did he in the short sen op sis. were getting into depths over three miles. the auvs on site are good up to 2.7 miles deep. a whole new set of equipment will have to be put on place. as he said, its going to -- the...

And that is significant because they know theyre getting into the heart of hurricane season and that boom during a hurricane would do more damage to the wetlands than good. so once this well is killed for good theyll start to bring some of that boom in. as far as what is happening on the beaches, especially in north florida and alabama, well, they got hit pretty hard a few weeks ago with tar and tar patches and theyve done a good job of cleaning up the beach. as youll see in some of the video wh...