Trevor Collins

So, like I said, 50,000 square miles, they're looking for floating wreckage.

At this point, the Coast Guard shifts from capturing debris that's floating on the surface as the Navy then begins its efforts for dredging for wreckage on the ocean floor.

And so...

I'll pull up the image here in a little bit, but just to get you thinking, the flight path I showed you that had that red, green and yellow boxes, those are the three distinct areas that they're dredging for, I believe.

They're diving to depths between 105 and 150 feet in order to complete the underwater search and recovery operation.

I don't believe that that necessarily is the full depth there, but I'm trying to say that there are divers in addition to this.

They're not just kind of using sonar and dropping cranes, essentially.

It's a very hands-on active search under the water.

That was an issue.

That was definitely part of the challenge with this particular search and recovery.

Yeah.

These operations were ultimately directed by, again, the NTSB, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.

Now, the first Navy ships arrived at the East Mauritius Coast Guard Station on July 18th, 1996.

This is the day after the crash.

And they used sonar technology to kind of survey the sea to identify bodies, luggage, seats, and other debris on the ocean floor and try to figure out where they need to be focused at and kind of looking.

according to reports one of the dramatic findings was actually in doing the sonar kind of scanning they did find a 20-foot section of intact fuselage and the scan showed down to the detail this is wild it showed letters on the side of the fuselage tra which would be for the trans world airlines painted on the side they could even see windows

and so in some weird sort of way like titanic comes to mind i know that's separated by decades and this is more like a day if not hours but there's something so deeply unnerving about seeing photos or scans of an otherwise common object a boat a plane in a place it doesn't belong the bottom of the ocean that's so weird 100 agree the perfect visual you're talking about is that titanic

Yeah, yeah.

And so this is where those three major debris fields come from, right?

We have divers looking around, you have sonar being activated, a lot of effort to search and dredge underwater.