America’s America’s Cup Boat Capsizes Hard
by Shrivathsa Sridhar (Reuters) – American Magic’s hopes of challenging Team New Zealand for the America’s Cup were dealt a blow when their yacht “Patriot” capsized on Sunday but the...
A plane crashes scattering debris across the ocean floor and boats, equipped with sonar tracking and ROV’s, begin their search for a black box containing answers. But what happens when a ship sinks?
Pictures taken just prior to the rig sinking suggest this is the case or, possibly, the brackets which secured it to the rig’s deck melted off. We’ll have to wait until ROVs dive on the wreckage to know if the VDR survived fire. A few companies manufacture VDRs design to store the data recordings in the vessel’s EPIRB. But EPIRBS require either manual activation, consuming valuable seconds in a high intensity escape, or automatic activation, requiring that the rig sinks prior to the unit melting.
And there are still more problems. Even if the VDR had been recovered we still would not know the primary cause of the blowout because maritime regulations do not require the mounting of microphones in the driller’s cabin or the logging of even the simplest drilling data. Even where microphones do exist there placement can lead to poor audio quality. Traditional VDRs also fail to record other information critical in the digital age like electronic distress messages, emails and telephone calls.
In looking at the next generation of VDRs it’s clear that the spectrum of information stored in these units needs to include drilling data. Microphones in other critical spaces should also be considered. We also have to ask if the storage of data needs to be redundant. Locating a secondary watertight VDR in the hull of a ship could improve the chances of survivability. Another option, on vessels equiped with high speed satellite internet, would be uploading the data via satellite to a secure data center ashore.The silver lining of all incidents is the lessons we learn, the improvements we make and the ideas generated thinking about potential failures. So we ask what features would you like incorporated in the next generation of VDRs? Please leave your ideas in the comments section below.
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