this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Short answer: ocean is very big, submersible is very small.
Long answer: Imagine going out on a football pitch with a white paint marker. Randomly walk around and pick a single blade of grass to paint white. Now grab someone that didn't observe you and tell them to find the painted blade of grass. Also tell them they have a limited time, and that you might have pushed the blade of grass doen into the ground.
There has to be a solution that would have allowed them to send a buoy up to transmit a mayday and coordinates like some life boats do. This would help the rescue teams to narrow the search grid. I wouldn't have gone down in that thing, but if I WAS, I would at least feel better with something like that.
A beacon should work as I described in a separate response. A buoy could work too, but the buoy a) would need to be designed to float up from 4 km and still be functional at the surface b) the sub doesn't necessarily know where it is below the ocean. GPS doesn't work down there!
they were two miles deep. sending up a tethered buoy means holding two miles of string on the sub, which would be completely impractical. sending an untethered buoy doesn't really help anything, because by the time it goes two miles up to the surface, it could have drifted way further than that in any other direction.
I was suggesting untethered. I understand it would drift, what I think it would do is 1) let everyone know they are alive and in trouble and 2) give folks who understand ocean currents the ability to try to hone in on a search area. Maybe they already have a tight search area and this would not help, I just don't know. It sure is starting to feel like the thing imploded and the magic untethered buoys from my mind would not help anyway.
One of their issues is the unit itself had no idea where it was. It relied on a communication back to a boat on the surface to figure out where it was, and that communication had failed during every dive so far.