Swimmer Deliver Vehicles (SDVs) are the unsung heroes of littoral covert naval action. Its that “covert” part that keeps them that way. News of them rarely eeks out and when it does its normally bad as most of the “good” stuff is classified.
Well about that.
HII recently put out a presser on their prototype Proteus dual-mode underwater vehicle (DMUV). That’s a submersible able to operate as a conventional manned swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) and as an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), which gives the warfighter a bunch of neato options that the old X-boat and Chariot drivers of WWII would have loved.
The news is that two females, Chloe Mallet, an ocean engineer, and Andrea Raff, a mechanical engineer, have now been certed to drive Proteus.
Mallet and Raff are the only two women on the seven-person dive team that works with Proteus.
When in use in the manned mode, the vehicle is flooded with water and can submerge to depths up to 150 feet, weighs 8,240 pounds, is 25.8 feet long (the Navy’s DSS has an inside dimension of 26 feet) can carry almost 2-tons of cargo and uses a 300kHz Multi-Beam Sonar to keep her steady and away from undersea collisions while traveling at 10 knots.
So if you are around Panama City where all the small boat secret squirrels live, and see a 25.8 foot whale in the water, now you know.
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