FLIP…

In contrast to yesterday’s post, I’ll give you a system that was developed many (actually 50) years ago for a 5 year program.

FLIP is a rather interesting little Navy testing asset, and truly a one of a kind…

The first time I saw this thing was in about 1973, and they were onstation off San Francisco (and I thought they were sinking)… 🙂

This is a research platform that can either drift or take a deep mooring, and is ‘acoustically quiet’, e.g. it doesn’t put any self noise in the water.  It’s a great platform for doing acoustic and other types of research, and they’ve kept it in service LONG past it’s original end of life…

A good article HERE, and a little video of it actually flipping…  I knew Bill Gaines back in the day when we were both still on active duty…

THIS was back in the day when “good enough” was actually a working principal…

Comments

FLIP… — 13 Comments

  1. Wow! Impressive! I’m going to share this with a couple of co-workers who love this kind of stuff!

  2. I saw something remarkably similar sail past us in the Atlantic off southern Brazil. That was maybe 18 years ago and we were on position about 160 NM offshore. This thing was heading south and we didn’t know what it was, but maybe this is it. Very interesting. Thanks.

  3. Carteach- Yeah, we’ve got some “strange” minds that work in R&D 🙂

    Alison- Please do!

    MB- It probably was, that thing has been all over the Atlantic and Pacific!

    Keads- Yep 🙂