Fam training in armed forces

[Rwy in Sight]

If the buoys are not recoverable, aircraft operated ASW exercise can be very expensive material wise.

How do you calculate salinity of the water to take it under consideration?

[Pontius Navigator]

You drop a bathysphere bouy that measures the temperature as it's pribe descends. One thing that doesn't stick in my mind is how long that cable was.

I don't know the cost of each buoy but £100 a pop was probably a minimum. In a training sortie you would load 12 and maybe drop 6-8. On an opera sortie you carried 63, later 94, then when they made them smaller even more. When I left 50+ per Op sortie was possible - say 16 for starters and then 5-6 every 30 minutes for 6 hours.

The earlier active sonobuoy was said to be the cost of a Mini. The latest much more capable ones probably much more!

[CharlieOneSix]

This may well be an apocryphal story but it was doing the rounds in the late 60's. Apparently an aircraft, don't know what type, probably a Shackleton, had dropped sonobuoys when it located an unknown submerged submarine. The sub commander, recognising a new type of sonobuoy transmission, surfaced and scooped one up before diving again. It's a good story but no idea if it was true.

[Pontius Navigator]

C16, this one was absolutely true:

The very first Tango, having been on trials in their Black Sea for a long time eventually transmitted to the Baltic. It was on the surface in the North Sea. We were tasked to lay a barrier a few miles wide in front of the boat so we could record its noises as it crossed the barrier and build up a picture of its noise radiation. It was a brilliant day, sunlight sparkling on a blue sea, our line of sonobuoys with their dayglo painted bodies clearly visible.

The Tango sailed through the centre of the line then stopped. A rating, stripped to the waist, was lowered over the side and netted our buoy. He and the buoy were then hauled up onto the casing and the hydrophone 60 feet below was pulled up too. Then things became surreal.

For some strange reason they carried the hydrophone up to the sail and lowered it in to the Ops Room. The buoy itself still lying on the casing obediently transmitting everything from inside the Sub. At first it was along the lines of look what we have here, it will be a great trophy in the ward room bulkhead. Followed by a loud interruption of WTF you doing and then silence as they cut the cable.