![]() ![]() About 20 percent of Britain’s sonar operators have done the course. The navy sees the “A” course as the best way of building up skills to steadily improve the chances of correctly identifying the threat that may be out there. ” said Street, the trainer, clicking a mouse and running a video of a British frigate being torpedoed in an exercise. ![]() “It comes down to one guy sitting at a sonar set trying to detect an enemy submarine and if he doesn’t get it right. Separating the noise of a single diesel sub, which are quieter than nuclear submarines, from the sonic bedlam created by an ocean full of whales, seals, icebergs, underwater landslides and cruise and merchant ships can be nerve-racking. ![]() The hours can be long, particularly on a submarine that might not surface for months at a time, and the work taxing. Surface ships and some helicopters also have sonar operators aboard. These days sub hunters still go down in Britain’s 15 nuclear submarines, but also work in coordination with the air force and its fleet of Nimrod patrol aircraft. You build up a database in your head so you can identify almost anything. “We call it the ‘black arts’,” said Richard Horsburgh, an aural analysis expert and “A” course trainer who spent 25 years as a sonar specialist in the navy, including on submarines. The best can identify individual potentially hostile subs merely from their acoustic pattern. What’s more, a trained ear can quickly calculate not only what type of sub is moving through the water, but how fast and in which direction. Watching graphs of sonar patterns and listening to sounds captured by underwater microphones, the trainees learn to separate merchant ships from trawlers, the noise of whales from that of seals, the creak of pack-ice from the screech of icebergs - and amid it all the hum of submarines. The month-long course, dubbed the “Top Gun” of the sonar world, teaches up to two dozen trainees the most advanced techniques for detecting submarines amid the cacophony of marine life and merchant shipping emanating from the ocean depths. ![]()
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