Salvage teams have recovered a US Navy fighter jet that was blown off the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea.
A US Navy fighter jet that was blown off the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean has been recovered from depths of about 9,500 feet (2,900 metres), underwater salvage firm Phoenix International said.
According to the US Navy, the F/A-18E Super Hornet had blown off the deck of Carrier Air Wing 1 on the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier ’in unexpected heavy weather’. It was the third time within a year that that a western navy had lost a carrier-based fighter jet to the sea, according to the British Forces Broadcasting Service.
In an operation that had to be kepot secret to prevent the jet falling into the wrong hands, salvage teams took less than 24 hours to bring up the jet from the seabed after it had lain there since July.
Under the direction of the US Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage and Diving, Phoenix worked on board the ice-class multi-purpose construction vessel Everest to carry out the salvage, using the navy’s CURV-21 remotely operated vehicle (ROV).
The 8ft x 5ft ROV is based on a 680 fibre-optic umbilical cable with a shared handling system that can switch at sea between side-scan sonar and ROV operations, the US Navy says.
It can be controlled in all six degrees of motion and has cruise control as well as 2m incremental movement capability. It is equipped with CTFM sonar for target location and pinger detection, has a high-resolution digital camera and colour TV cameras and includes a load-bearing, pressure-compensated, Electro-Optical Umbilical Swivel.
It has a full suite of communications technology and is customisable and scalable.
