Hydrographic Exploration Operation: Visual Inspection Underwater
A small commercial flight with five people on board went missing on October 6, 2013, between Mocha Island and Tirúa off the coast of Chile. The flight, a Cessna 172, took off from Mocha Island at 14:45 and was expected to land around 15:00 hours on the same day.
The search for the missing flight began after an exhaustive but unsuccessful search on land. The assumption that the plane had followed a regular flight route and had fallen into the ocean was taken as a starting point. The hydrographic and oceanographic conditions of the search area determined the types of vessels, equipment, and professional staff needed for the search.
The search was divided into sub-areas and assigned to different units. The Navy, Army, and Air Force were involved in the operation, with the Air Force leading. The operation involved the use of multi-beam systems, Side Scan Sonar (SSS) systems, Submarine Scan Robots, divers, and naval and maritime units for logistical support and visual scanning.
The search area's shallow depth, between 20 and 30 meters, extended the search due to the size of the areas and the coverage area of the multi-beam equipment. Existing sounding lines were limited and were used to compare differences with the first sounding lines. In areas where there were no previous sounding lines, the sounding lines required were between 30 and 45 meters wide, doubling the sounding time.
The Navy used a series of naval and maritime capabilities to search the ocean area. The multi-beam system, when used by the BMS Merino and the PSG Ortiz, detected what seemed to be a wrecked plane. However, the personnel have not had much experience in the search for sunken wrecks.
The only previous local experience for this type of search operation was in 2011 for a fighter plane that crashed into the ocean around Juan Fernández Island.
The general wave direction in the area is predominantly from the south-west, 1 to 3 meters high with a period between 12 and 20 seconds. During the search days, tidal waves were evident practically all the time, making it more difficult with the sounding operations. Variations of the sea level in the area were minimal with no influence on this operation.
The currents between Mocha Island and the continent are predominantly south-west and south-east with modeled intensities that vary between the 0.5 and 2 knots.
Lieutenant Nicolás A. Guzmán, a veteran in the Chilean Navy, led the search operation. He has been involved in various Naval assignments, Hydrographic and Oceanographic campaigns, and is currently the Head of the Information Technology Department, the Head of the Chilean Tsunami Warning Center, and a Hydrography and Oceanography professor at the Training Center of SHOA.
If you're interested in the lessons learned or the technologies used in the search operation for this specific event, more detailed information can be found in specialized aviation accident reports or search and rescue operation analyses from that period. Commonly used technologies in searches for missing flights, especially over oceanic areas, include satellite imagery for large-area scanning, radar and sonar systems to detect debris underwater, aircraft equipped with infrared and high-definition cameras for surface searches, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for more flexible and persistent searching, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and emergency locator transmitters for tracking.
- In light of the circumstances, environmental-science and data-and-cloud-computing became crucial in the search for the missing flight, as they aided in analyzing and predicting oceanographic conditions that could potentially help locate the plane.
- Technology played a substantial role in the search operation, with the use of modern tools like satellite imagery, radar and sonar systems, aircraft equipped with heat-seeking cameras, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), and Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system for tracking the lost flight.
- Climate-change and its impact on ocean currents were considered during the search operation, as the search team had to account for the predominantly south-west and south-east currents between Mocha Island and the continent, which might have influenced the trajectory of the missing Cessna 172.
