The US Navy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography's unique FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP) has been saved at the last minute from the breaker's yard. Scheduled to be scrapped in Mexico, it was purchased by undersea design company DEEP.
One of, if not the, most unusual ships ever built, FLIP looks like a giant gray stalk of steel asparagus with a conventional ship's bow slapped onto the narrow end. It was originally built by the US Navy to help in the development of its UUM-44 SUBROC (SUBmarine ROCket) anti-submarine weapon.
This required gathering underwater acoustic data from many different depths simultaneously and the solution was a barge that displaced 700 gross tonnes and measured 355 ft (108 m) long with a 26-ft (8-m) beam. Along its length were strung a system of hydrophones and other sensors. Once towed into place, ballast tanks at one end flooded and FLIP, well, flipped. The result was a highly stable platform that stretched down a record-breaking 300 ft (91 m).
This bizarre-looking craft that more than once caused a false alarm about a ship sinking became an extremely valuable floating laboratory from its commissioning in 1962 until it was decommissioned in 2023.
That's where the story should have ended as FLIP was towed to Mexico to be broken up and converted into so many teaspoons, but that all changed recently when DEEP founder and CEO Kristen Tertoole learned of the scrapping and put together a team to secure the barge, telling them, "Save her. Don't come back without her."
Several months later, FLIP was secured by DEEP and saved from the cutting torch. According to the company, the vessel has been towed through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic Ocean to the MB92 shipyard in La Ciotat, France, where it is undergoing renovation and modernization over the next 12 to 18 months.
"FLIP is an iconic research platform – anyone in the maritime research or engineering communities knows about her, and many have a war story or two," said Tertoole. "We're incredibly proud to confirm FLIP's arrival in European waters. 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 as part of our extended research network. We look forward to announcing her relaunch in early 2026, and I'm thrilled to confirm that many oceanographic and research groups are already in contact to ensure access."
Source: DEEP
