The former Navy research platform R/V FLIP has been described variously from its launch in 1962 to retirement in 2023 as a giant baseball bat, huge caterpillar, soda straw or floating bottle.
“Spar buoy” was the term the builder and the Navy used to described its shape.
And now Research Vessel, Floating Instrument Platform as it is best known, which officially retired after more than 50 years of naval service, has been rescued from a Mexican scrapyard for a new mission.
Bought by DEEP, subsea design firm developing the next generation of underwater human habitat, had the platform towed through the Panama Canal to a French shipyard for modernization and mission change. The work is expected to take 12 to 18 months.
FLIP does not have a propulsion system.
Kristen Tertoole, chief executive officer of DEEP, based in the United Kingdom, said in a statement: “FLIP is from a time of bold engineering and optimism for our future and our oceans, an ethos DEEP shares and seeks to embody. Our mission is perhaps equally bold: to make humans aquatic by enabling our species to live, work and thrive underwater. FLIP will play a key role in the DEEP fleet, providing a one-of-a-kind platform for ocean research and being capable of supporting DEEP’s Sentinel habitat deployments.”
David Ortiz-Suslow, a research assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, said in an email interview with USNI News, “I had the fortune to be a young scientist on FLIP’s final science mission [2017], and the experience had a deep impact on me personally and has shaped my professional career.”
Ortiz-Suslow described “flipping” the 355-foot by 12 ½- to 20- foot platform that usually carried research teams of 11 and a crew of five.
“Flipping is achieved by quite literally scuttling (a nautical term for purposefully sinking) the ballasted tubular end of the platform. This controlled, partial sinking—often with the full complement of personnel and equipment aboard—is executed precisely and expertly by the crew, who must be eternally commended for their perfect record in 390 attempts.
“Although the whole process takes 20–30 minutes, most of the motion occurs in about 90 seconds, taking the platform from an angle of less than 20 degrees to fully vertical. During this time, crew and passengers execute a slow-motion, Fred Astaire–like dancing-on-the-ceiling routine, sans tuxedoes.”
To return to horizontal, an operator blows the tanks. All the machinery was designed to be operated in either position.
FLIP was built at Gunderson Brothers Marine in Portland, Ore., with $500,000 from the Office of Naval Research. Fitting out costs ran to about $100,000. Over the course of its naval service, it was owned by ONR and managed by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Interviewed by the Portland Oregonian in 1962, retired Cmdr. Earl Bronson, representing Scripps, said he could “see future lightships and ‘Texas Towers’ for various offshore purposes designed after this vessel.”
Since this was during the Cold War, but before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bronson’s reference to “Texas Towers” were off-shore radar platforms that looked like oil-drilling rigs.
Scripps in its history of FLIP noted “in the late 1950s, F.N. Spiess and F.H. Fisher embarked on experimental work to address these problems [of undersea acoustics} with Spiess attacking the effect of bottom topography and Fisher attacking the effect of horizontal gradients and fluctuations on bearing accuracy.” The Scripps scientists determined submarines could not deliver that data reliably to meet Navy requirements.
FLIP as a project dates from that point.
Speaking for Scripps today, Bruce Applegate, head of Ship Operations and Marine Technical Support, said, “FLIP became globally recognized as one of the most innovative oceanographic research tools ever invented” that went far beyond its creators’ conception.
In 2023, as the Navy was turning over the platform, Thomas Drake, head of ONR’s Ocean Battlespace Sensing Department, said, “whether investigating air-sea interaction, ocean mixing, boundary layer dynamics or acoustic thermometry, FLIP’s unique properties and capabilities enabled the collection of exquisite datasets that served as the gold standard for numerous process studies and extensive model development, ultimately increasing our understanding of the maritime environment.”
That date with the scrapyard changed when DEEP raced into the picture with its offer to buy.
“I’m delighted by DEEP’s decision to revitalize and modernize the R/V FLIP,” Drake said in a gCaptain report. “This modernization will significantly expand her capabilities in ocean science, breathing new life into a vessel that has been vital to our mission.”
For Giulio Maresca, FLIP’s new captain, said, “she’s inspired generations of scientists and engineers. To be part of her next chapter is beyond rewarding.”
DEEP’s project Sentinel calls for an underwater habitat by 2027. Forbes described the habitat as offering individual bedroom suites with showers and toilets, completely configurable workspaces, and social and dining areas, with communal rooms included for research. By placing the Sentinel on the ocean floor, scientists and researchers can stay underwater for long periods.”
On FLIP itself, Ortiz-Suslow wrote, “After the flip is complete, the ‘boat’ section perches above the water surface. This section contains most of the usable space and sleeping quarters, which meet the comfort standards that satisfied a 1960s era Navy sailor—the word spartan comes to mind.
“All the interior scientific laboratory space, a galley, and other workspaces are connected by a network of exterior steel ladders and grates. Together with three foldable booms, they give the platform the appearance of a giant mechanical cephalopod or perhaps the treehouse of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys reimagined for the movie Waterworld.”
He added in the USNI News interview, ‘“FLIP-ers’ I have spoken to, they feel similarly about their own time on the vessel. We were all sad to see FLIP retired, and even sadder to see its end come potentially in a scrap yard. I am very curious to see what new role FLIP will play in marine science and exploration under the ambitious direction of the team at DEEP.”
So for the moment, the script for the Floating Instrument Platform has been flipped.
