Is Leslie Philips is alive and well, and serving in the Royal New Zealand Navy?

Sandy

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New Zealand loses first naval ship to sea since WW2

The Al Beeb article bigs-up the "heroic rescue" side of the story, but offers no insight at all into why a survey ship, equipped with all kinds of depth sounding and ocean imaging technology, would run aground on a reef it was surveying. Unless they were using a plumb line?
Interesting comment from the article.

All 75 people on board have now safely been rescued
When are people unsafely rescued?

Were the journalists struggling to make a word count for publication.
 

finestgreen

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New Zealand loses first naval ship to sea since WW2

The Al Beeb article bigs-up the "heroic rescue" side of the story, but offers no insight at all into why a survey ship, equipped with all kinds of depth sounding and ocean imaging technology, would run aground on a reef it was surveying. Unless they were using a plumb line?
There's reports elsewhere that it lost power first; I don't know how reliable those reports are but it seems more plausible than a navigation error.
 

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...and a Chinese Sub recently sank on launch.

The spirit of Sub-Lieutenant Phillips has gone global. :)
 

graham

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The nature of a survey vessels work means it spends more time close to shallow water than most other vessels .

Power failure close to a reef would be very different to power failure lots of miles out to sea.
 

AntarcticPilot

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I would have expected the "mother ship" to stay well away from the reef and send smaller boats in to do the survey work.
Major surveying instruments such as swath bathymetry can only be mounted on large vessels. Also, there will be requirements for ancillary measurements again requiring big ship resources (e.g. CTD profiling).
 

Mark-1

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I had to chuckle at this:

"there continues to be "no trace" of oil washing up onshore.

Samoan officials said it was believed that most of the ship's fuel had burnt off during the fire onboard"

It's like the famous Clarke and Dawe sketch. "Good news no oil spill.... ...because the fire burned off all the oil. :D"
 

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AntarcticPilot

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Seems that the RN is one amongst a number of nations pushing the unscrewed technology on though.

Future of mine warfare takes steps forward with latest trials
That's not survey and survey to Hydrographic standards is difficult to do from small boats. Antares and @tillergirl (and probably others) do an excellent job but a) only over small areas and b) would both be the first to say that their results aren't to hydrographic standards; for example they can't do corrections for salinity and temperature.
 

capnsensible

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Could this one do some kind of preliminary survey?

Used for hydrographic surveying, Seacat was successfully launched and recovered numerous times over a four-week period showing its reliability and robustness in a range of conditions.

It uses an on board echo sounder and camera to relay real-time information back which can then be used to make decisions. The trials were the latest step of the Seacat being transferred into service.
 
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