Last week SEAMOR Marine’s Chinook ROV was used by Honolulu-based Sea Engineering, Inc. to help locate and survey a downed Boeing 737 cargo plane. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff about two miles offshore from Ewa Beach in Oahu, Hawaii, and sank to the seafloor at a depth of 350 to 450 feet - a depth too dangerous for divers to navigate. The only two passengers onboard Transair flight 810, both pilots, were rescued by helicopter.

A multi-skilled team of subsea engineering experts representing the UK has advanced to the semi-finals in the $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, a prestigious international competition which aims to create the next generation tools, technologies and techniques for rapid, unmanned ocean exploration and discovery. Teams are challenged to design and build new ways to map the ocean floor at depths and a resolution never achieved before using advanced deep-sea technologies for autonomous, fast and high-resolution ocean exploration. Based in the National Centre for Subsea and Offshore Engineering in Newcastle, Team Tao is the only UK team to make the semi-final and will compete against 21 teams from 13 countries vying for their share of the $7 million prize purse. Team Tao brings together industry experts from Tyneside-based subsea engineering specialist Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd (SMD) and Newcastle University who are together developing an autonomous swarm system for rapid surface to deep ocean exploration.

New action plan to cement Scotland’s leading position in £50bn global subsea market. Enpro Subsea has announced a research and development grant from Scottish Enterprise which will see the firm investing £1.5million to develop its flow assurance technology further to address emerging markets in deeper waters. The news came as Scottish Enterprise revealed a new Subsea Engineering Action Plan with the aim of capturing an even bigger slice of the current £50 billion global subsea market. Scottish Government Minister for Business, Innovation and Energy, Paul Wheelhouse, visited oil and gas firm, Enpro Subsea Ltd to announce its new £1.5 million investment to support innovation, a key theme of the plan.