Amazing. And I thought soaring was dangerous . . .



Milton Hare wrote:

I've done a bit of underwater gliding - really cool, but it's got a
few drawbacks... like constantly worrying about those little windows
imploding and tasting the water on the wall to determine if it's just
condensation or a little hint of your impending doom. I would say it
is about like flying for the first few decades after the Wright
brothers got off the ground - thrilling but dangerous. I'd rather be
going for a long cross-country flight here in Northern California than
gliding in the ocean, but I'm glad I tried it out once at least.

I'll stick to soaring above sea level till the technology improves a
bit. Anyway, I lived through it and here's some more info on that
little adventure...

I posted this on RAS a while back:

I know of a "sea-glider" that was operational for a few years called
C-BUG (Controlled by Buoyancy Underwater Glider).

http://www.stanleysubmarines.com/Photos.htm (sub photos at the
bottom).

A boy genius named Karl Stanley built it
starting at the age of 15, and after about eight
years he actually finished the thing. In January 2000 while on
vacation on the island of Roatan (off the north coast of Honduras) I
went for two dives in this small craft. We dove along the vertical
wall of the Cayman trench to a bit over 500 feet living out my Jacques
Cousteau dreams. The wildly improbable life forms we saw might as
well have been from another planet. Visibility was about 400 feet and
not as dark as I expected, especially looking up (it is surpisingly
clear that deep). I found the underwater 'sandfalls' to be noteworthy
- they looked very much like waterfalls as the sand fell down the
various overhangs of rock along the huge dark cliff face that seemed
to be right out of the movie 'Abyss'.

During a night dive out in open water we dove at a very steep angle
without lights, going very slowly to avoid damage if we hit anything
in the dark. Watching tens of thousands of glowing green
bioluminescent creatures go by as we descended into the absolute
darkness of the deep ocean at night was spectacular. Karl has
actually spent the night in the deep a few times - pretty wild stuff.

As a glider pilot I was quite interested in its method of propulsion,
which was 'gliding' both up and down using buoyancy control and short
'wings'. We were able to glide forward much like a
sailplane, including banking and pitch control of speed if I remember
correctly. It had two small electric props for manuevering around the
cliff formations and underwater caves, but gliding was the primary
means of propulsion for forward travel. I don't remember what the
glide angle was - not overly flat as I recall - maybe 10 to 1. Since
this thing can have zero or positive buoyancy it's not exactly like a
glider, but there are definitely similarities to gliding. The ride
down was a long glide along the cliff until we were down to about 550
feet or so - coming back up was another story! We came up very
quickly, using something like thermalling turns - very tight banking.
I think that was just for fun. We were on the surface in nothing
flat. We travelled some distance on our trip, but I have no idea how
far.

This homebuilt craft was far less 'hydrodynamic' than even the worst
2-33, and our forward speed was slow - maybe 5 knots at most, often
much slower as we 'hovered' while inspecting various unlikely
creatures. The fuselage was formed out of a converted pipe, with 2
foot long wings on either side (a bit shorter than the ASH-25 I'm used
to).

It had done about 200 dives prior to mine and it seemed to work quite
well on our dive. The initial descent mode was quite alarming as it
nosed straight down amidst a huge amount of bubbles - this feels more
like sinking than controlled diving, especially at night. An engineer
friend of mine who had built a small sub while at Stanford was
concerned about the number of cycles it could handle, which is why we
didn't go to its max depth of about 700 feet. We had enough info from
the local diving community to feel reasonably comfortable about the
safety aspects and history of the operation, but I can't say that it
was my shining moment of good judgement. Even with the numerous
redundant systems on this little sub, the risk of diving that deep are
serious indeed - absolutely not for the faint of heart.

Karl had tried unsuccessfuly to interest the Navy and various other
entities in his concept, but to no avail. I have heard that he
eventually sold the little sub as an anchor of all things, and it was
sunk somewhere in Honduras - not sure if that's true. He's working on
a new sub now.

I think he's on to something - sounds like others might agree.

I found some links for those interested. C-BUG (the yellow submarine)
was the glider I went for a ride in.

http://www.stanleysubmarines.com/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ad...211/q_n_a.html

Regards,

Milt

milt
at
soar ingnet (nospaces)
dot
org