WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Transportation Safety Board will resume its search Monday for the voyage data recorder of the sunken El Faro cargo ship.
El Faro left Jacksonville in late September 2015. The ship sank during Hurricane Joaquin Oct. 1.
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The new search is being conducted with the National Science Foundation and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The research vessel Atlantis is scheduled to depart Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.
The vessel is scheduled to search the accident site for 10 days before returning to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, around May 5.
The Atlantis will carry a sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV Sentry, to search for the voyage data recorder.
"It's great technology," said maritime attorney Rod Sullivan. "It'll take over 2 hours to descend from the surface to the bottom and then once it's close they control it using acoustic signals."
The VDR should contain critical information for NTSB and U.S. Coast Guard investigators.
Besides basic navigational data, the recorder memory is expected to contain voice data from El Faro’s navigation bridge in the hours before the ship sank in more than 15,000 feet of water.
In addition to the information contained in the VDR, investigators will obtain digital high-resolution imagery of the hull and wreckage of El Faro.
"That means they are going to be able to go into the hull, close to the hull and take high resolution photographs of stress fractures, paint swelling, anything that might indicate what caused the ship to sink," said Sullivan.
Sullivan thinks the odds of finding the data recorder are very small. He said there are 15 feet of silt on the bottom of the search location.
"When the VDR hit the bottom it likely got impacted into that silt," said Sullivan. "So actually seeing it on the surface will probably be a tough chore. And even finding it with a magnetometer is tough."
Sullivan said the most important thing on the data recorder is the bridge recording.
"They're going to be looking at what the captain and the officers were saying to each other on the bridge before the ship when down," said Sullivan.
He said that would be a wealth of information as to where water was coming in, how fast El Faro was sinking and what was happening in the engine room.
If they don't find the VDR, Sullivan said the most interesting thing to come out of this search are the high resolution photographs of the hull. He said you will be able to see racking stresses, bending stresses and other hints as to what happened to the ship.
The 790-foot El Faro sank after losing propulsion near the Bahamas on its way from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. All 33 aboard died.