DIVING NEWS
Petrel scores again – with aircraft-carrier
International Harvester aircraft-tug on the wreck. (Picture: Vulcan Inc)
The wreck of one of the most significant aircraft-carriers of WW2 has been located off the Solomon Islands by the expedition team aboard Petrel, the US wreck-research vessel operated in the name of the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.
The discovery of the USS Hornet, made during Petrel’s first mission of 2019, comes hot on the heels of the announcement of its positive identification of the IJN Hiei, the first Japanese battleship sunk by American forces during WW2, as reported recently on Divernet .
The Hiei, also sunk off the Solomon Islands in 1942, was found almost 1km deep, and the Hornet is similarly beyond the scope of scuba divers but deeper still, resting at 5.3km.
13 February 2019
USS Hornet was commissioned in 1941 and played a short but pivotal role in WW2 naval history.
In April 1942, four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she took part in what became known as the “Doolittle Raid”. From her deck, US Army Lt-Col James Doolittle led the first airborne assault on Japan itself, including the capital Tokyo.
Two months later at the Battle of Midway USS Hornet helped to sink four Japanese aircraft-carriers.
She met her own end at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in late October 1942, following intense bombardment by Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo aircraft, and was finished off by torpedoes from two Japanese destroyers. She lost 140 sailors from her crew of nearly 2200.
“We had the Hornet on our list of WW2 warships that we wanted to locate because of its place in history as a capitol carrier that saw many pivotal moments in naval battles,” said Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Vulcan, the company that operates the Petrel. “Paul Allen was particularly interested in aircraft-carriers, so this was a discovery that honours his memory.”
Petrel’s 10-person expedition team located the Hornet by piecing together data from national and naval archives, including official deck-logs and action reports from other ships engaged in the battle, says Vulcan.
Positions and sightings from nine other US warships in the area were plotted on a chart to generate the starting point for the search grid.
The carrier was discovered on the first dive carried out by Petrel’s autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and confirmed by video footage from its ROV. Both vehicles are capable of diving to a depth of 6km.
