Since my elderly parents refuse to “get” the “Internet,” I am often tasked with looking up things for them online. Back in January the nightly news aired a story you may have seen about one of our most advanced fighter jets that had crashed after a failed attempt to land on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. The jet, an F35C Joint Strike fighter (a stealth jet) immediately sank into the deep, deep ocean, and lay submerged 12,400 feet beneath the surface of the South China Sea where the Carl Vinson had been patrolling (keeping an eye of the Chinese navy just as Vladimir Putin massed equipment and men in another part of the world for his invasion of Ukraine). The jet's pilot (who ejected) and five sailors were injured.
As Jason Sherman, writing for Scientific American
explains:
The fighter was attempting to land on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson on January 24. But coming in, it slammed its underbelly on the edge of the ship, careened across the short runway and spun 180 degrees before falling—intact—over the edge and into the sea. The pilot ejected and was transported, along with two deck crew, to Manila for medical treatment. Video of the mishap was leaked online within days, along with a photograph of the stricken aircraft, which appeared to float evenly on the turquoise sea before sinking. The 34,800-pound plane went down quickly, its engine thrust suffocated by seawater. With its movement now dictated by deep ocean currents that flow in layers, the jet likely zigged and zagged as it descended more than two miles to the pitch-black bottom, where it remained at a Titanic-like depth of 12,400 feet.
[Four enlisted sailors and a junior officer board the Vinson were later charged with leaking a video of the jet’s crash.]
This wasn’t just “any” fighter. It was our most advanced model fighter jet, costing over $76 Billion over two decades to develop (the plane itself cost $100 million), and “pivotal to nearly all Pentagon war plans, as well as those of more than a dozen allies, including NATO nations, Japan and Australia.” And lying there at the bottom of the South China Sea, it was our sovereign property, lost in international waters (a fact that China had contested). But that didn’t mean the Chinese couldn’t get to it first. According to Tai Ming Chung, an expert on Chinese military technology (interviewed for Sherman’s article), if China could retrieve the jet it would “represent a major technology coup and allow the Chinese military aviation industry to gain insights to support its indigenous FC-31 fifth-generation fighter aircraft program—that is heavily influenced by the F-35.”
For the next month afterwards my dad (former USMC and USNR) kept looking for a follow-up story, but he never saw one. News blackout. So he called me. And beyond the initial reports which ran for a day or two I couldn’t find much either. It was as if the story had submerged, along with the jet, never to be seen again.
There were some tantalizing tidbits, however. The Chinese officially claimed they had no interest in retrieving the jet, proving that comedy still exists even in the top echelons of the Chinese government. You bet they were interested. But how to retrieve something two and a half miles down, that hadn’t even been located? It took five weeks to figure out just where the thing was resting.
Enter a little known USN entity called SUBSALV (or Supervisor of Salvage and Diving). Formed in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941,
Within SUPSALV, a specialized team of 10 Navy sailors and civilians oversees about half a dozen ocean-floor object recovery missions each year at depths between 330 and 20,000 feet. They use a Navy-owned collection of deep-ocean salvage equipment—including a family of autonomous and remotely operated vehicles that, in tandem with a portable lift system, can pull up gear as large as a school bus.
The machinery used by SUBSALV is contracted out through a company called Phoenix, whose first task involves contracting with a commercial vessel “in the vicinity of the [submerged] object,” which will then transport the necessary equipment. That process, as Sherman notes, can take weeks. With an object as large as an F35 the task likely involved a great deal of welding and bolting just so the heavy Navy equipment necessary to secure the extraction of the jet wouldn’t accidentally slide off the ship as it traverses the high seas.
As Sherman writes:
Once it was on the scene and operating under SUPSALV oversight, Phoenix began its hunt using the latitude and longitude coordinates taken by the Carl Vinson crew when the aircraft fell in water. An autonomous vehicle began surveying the area in what search and recovery experts call a “mowing the lawn” pattern of adjacent scans—a tactic that in March helped civilian searchers find explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, missing since 1915, deep beneath the waters of Antarctica.
The exact details of how the jet was ultimately extracted have not been released, but the bottom line is that the plane was salvaged and is now back in the possession of the US Navy: “On March 2 a remotely operated vehicle called CURV-21 attached a hook to the newly found F-35C and lifted the sensitive salvage.” The national media widely carried the story on March 3, but for some reason (probably lack of cable news) my dad remained unaware until today.
I called my dad this afternoon to give him the good news.