After Reports of Sighting, Mystery Russian Ship Still Missing

"How is it that the US Navy has tracked ever vessel on and beneath The Oceans for at least the past 30 years but we cannot tell the Russians where this ship is?"

As a practical matter, we don't know where every Ivan is at all times. If a US sub, surface ship or MAD equipped aircraft happen upon a a Russian sub, then we can track it. But, you have to be relatively close to do that.

The same is true of a satellite. Satellites look at the Earth through what is commonly called a "soda-straw" perspective. It's terrific if you know the coordinates of what it is you're looking for. But, military imaging satellites are anywhere from 100 to 350 miles from the Earth. You can imagine the difficulties looking for something only 500 or so feet long in an area as immense as the Atlantic ocean, or adjoining seas.

If they knew where the ship was, the spooks could tell you literally what the captain was reading with his morning coffee. But, actually finding the ship in in the vastness of the second largest body of water in the world, that's quite something else.

Lastly, once a vessel leaves the normal shipping channels, they really are "lost". With only 16 miles to the horizon, it becomes quite difficult to spot something even as large as a ocean-going vessel.

Don't the P3's still go out to drop the sonar buoys? Don't they still track all vessels above a certain size. Doesn't the NSGA's successor organization still track all SIGINT transmissions of a suspicious nature?

I know there were Cold War cutbacks when Ivan was no longer considered a critical threat but high tech should have taken up any slack. We were still using vacuum tubes 30 years ago.

"Don't the P3's still go out to drop the sonar buoys? Don't they still track all vessels above a certain size. Doesn't the NSGA's successor organization still track all SIGINT transmissions of a suspicious nature?"

To answer your questions in order...Usually only during training exercising, and not nearly to the extent they did during the cold war. Even so, that's not how the Navy would find a ship like this. Since 2004, all ship's weighing over (I believe) 300 gross tonnes, were required by SOLAS to install AIS transponders. This is what the pirates would need to disengage. A Navy would then sweep an area for surface traffic, compare that traffic with the AIS squawks and the one blip that wasn't squawking an AIS code would be your pirated vessel, fairly simple.

We do track all vessels, but only those either heading for or in close proximity to our territorial waters - the oceans are a big place. And, if whomever boarded and took control of the vessel disengaged all communication equipment and radar equipment, it would disappear electronically.

Lastly, as of now we aren't looking for it, the Russians are (so they say), with a little help from the French. If we were to actively look for, we could find it in relatively short order. But, that would be at tremendous expense. I personally think the Russians know exactly where it is, because they put it there - at the bottom of the Atlantic.

wild huh....with all this publicity and that being a rather distinct and newish vessel she will be hard to hide unless scuttled but that makes no sense either

her pics were first class looking small ship....huge very nice super structure for her DWT size , great gear and hatchcoamings-covers and even that fancy and pricey lifeboat launcher on the stern

shoot...I woulda given anything for one like that in my day

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