Flying Lessons...

June 6th @ 11:45pm – Just a quick note as it’s late at night. I was just up in the ROPOS control room and the crew had something that they don’t normally get during a dive… free time! They had finished installation of the equipment at the end of the 25km cable we laid over the last three days, and they needed to wait on the ocean floor while the folks on shore tested the equipment.

I was asking Keith, the senior pilot and head of the team, how the controls worked, and he invited me to take the helm and ‘fly’ ROPOS. I jumped at the opportunity, and had a crash course (not literally) in maneuvering a multi-million dollar robot around near the seafloor under 2,600 metres of water. If you were watching the live feed at that time… ‘That was me!’

To pilot an ROV like this you need to have a good 3D spatial sense of the environment around you, and motions are made gently to nudge the ROV around. I managed to get the hang of it fairly quickly, but nowhere even remotely near the level of finesse that these guys display. They make it look effortless and easy, and I can now vouch first-hand that it is definitely not easy. Add in the operation of the manipulator arms as three of them (‘pilot’, ‘starboard manip’, and ‘port manip’) work as a team, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what it takes to do industrial work like this in the deep ocean.

This wasn’t consciously on my bucket-list, but I’ve definitely put it on and crossed it off in one fell swoop. It was a privilege to take the helm and was an amazing experience, and I thank Keith and his crew for the opportunity.

Blog post by Scott Doehler
Marine Educator