Posted on 06/12/2009 5:24:36 PM PDT by james500
In what a U.S. military official calls an "inadvertent encounter," a Chinese submarine hit an underwater sonar array being towed by the destroyer USS John McCain on Thursday.
The array was damaged, but the sub and the ship did not collide, the official said. A sonar array is a radar towed behind a ship that listens and locates underwater sounds.
The incident occurred near Subic Bay off the coast of the Philippines.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Ping...ping...ping...BANG!!! "Contact, directly behind us, Captain!!"
Can a “tail” go active? I honestly don’t remember. I thought the active pulses came from the ship-mounted sonar, but I could be wrong on that. I was never really a sonar guy except for one small project.
Actually, radar works well into the MF range, depending on the size of the target, but you are correct that SONAR is not RADAR.
/johnny
If they name anything after Sedona John it will be a crashed airplane, the only thing he does well.
That's just wong.
wong way wang, wasn’t he a fighter pilot that had to ditch?
An active/passive array consists of two parts. One active trailing down below the ship and the tail trailing out behind several hundred yards. The idea is to get the active transponders down under the surface layer for better detection.
“Cap’n! Sir, we got a nibble!!”
Chinese on sub: “I think we’re on to something here. Oh wait, I think we are being towed!”
Mongolian BBQ, that is. Tasty!
RADAR and SONAR are just acronyms for electromagnetic waves generated in different mediums, namely above or below surface. Maybe the reporter interviewed a snipe. Towed arrays can be used, as already mentioned,in either passive or active mode. My take is that the active mode (ECCM) worked too well for the Chicom boat driver/sonar man/ and the officer in the conning tower.Just gotta miss the professionalism of the old Soviet fleet. They would have responded by getting a Sovremenny to light you up with a two bin SS-N-22.
Sub driving while Asian?
China demands US apology for spy plane collision
I suspect they dragged the array across the sub. Not good for the Chinese that we could actually hit them with a towed array. It wasn’t an accident that the array was being towed in proximity close enough to hit the sub.
It probably means the sub was noisy enough that we clearly knew they were there.
The odds that you would hit a sub with a towed array by accident are astronomical.
I think you have it backwards. It is not that the acoustics of the sub are good, it is likely they are bad.
The Chinese economy would fall apart without exports to the U.S.
Didn’t the Soviets hook an array back in the 1980s? I remember something about it getting caught on the conning tower, they tried to run, but then it fouled the Soviet props and they had to (fortunately) cut it loose.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.