In his novel Raise the Titanic, Clive Cussler imagined the sunken ship to hold an invaluable cargo of rare radioactive mineral, needing the ship to be somehow raised to the surface. This, the novel’s protagonist and Cussler’s famous fictional character, Dirk Pitt, achieves by having every opening on the dead ship sealed and then pumping air into the hull, turning the Titanic into a massive balloon that rises to the Atlantic surface on its own.
Recently, the US Navy was faced with a similar predicament. It lost a prized stealth jet, an F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, to the dark depths of the Pacific, after the aircraft sustained damages while trying to land on the carrier USS Carl Vinson. (The pilot ejected to safety.)
Unlike Cussler’s Titanic, the F-35C did not contain any radioactive mineral, but it did hold enough classified clues about its make and US Navy officials were anxious to ensure that the plane’s 16-tonne remains did not fall into Chinese hands. Though it lay at an inhospitable depth of 12,400 feet, the US Navy was well aware that in 2020, China had sent a crewed submersible, Fendouzhe, to similar depths in quest of minerals.
The first challenge was to locate the aircraft, which could not have sunk vertiginously down; it’d have been shunted hither and thither by ocean currents (underwater rivers) that flow in different directions at different depths. Anyway, the US Navy scanned the ocean floor and located the plane’s wreckage; on March 2, a remotely operated vehicle hooked its claws on to the fighter and hauled it up.
This episode has brought into focus several points of interest, such as the ownership of a sunken strategic asset in international waters, and the need for techniques to salvage objects from the deep.