PANAMA CITY, Florida - For the U.S. Navy's 40 saturation divers,
requalification on the Fly Away Saturation Diving System (SATFAD) here this week
ensures the Navy retains its deep water recovery capability.
The Sailors train on the SATFAD system three to four times a year
to retain their qualifications on the unique system that allows these Navy
divers to execute missions such as deep ocean salvage, aircraft or black box
retrieval.
"We train so the procedures become routine, and we're using this
opportunity to train now until a real disaster happens," said Saturation Diving
System Program Manager Paul McMurtrie, who is also a retired U.S. Navy Master
Diver. "We train here in Panama City, Florida because this is where the
expertise is located, and we can conduct training operations here year
round."
The March 2015 SATFAD testing is conducted pier-side, and only in
30 feet of seawater, simply to give the divers the opportunity to practice
operations such as manned pressurization, manned launch and recovery, watch
stander drills and emergency procedures.
"It's a lot of hands-on training," said McMurtrie. "There is a lot
to learn here from the divers who have been doing the job for decades, either in
the military or as civilians."
This one-of-a-kind system is owned by Naval Sea Systems Command and
maintained by a crew of five civilians from the command's Supervisor of Diving
and Salvage organization. It is a complex combination of pressured
dive chambers and metal containers that allow the Sailors to work and live on a
barge at sea and dive in the ocean's depths for up to 30 days. The main chamber,
the deck decompression chamber, allows the Sailors to achieve desired and
pressurized depth only then to connect to a Dive Bell that is then "locked out"
and submerged into the water by way of a hydraulic arm that picks up the dive
bell and places it and the men inside into the ocean.