Plane to search for four missing British sailors..[ 4310 ]

Missing yacht: MoD sends aircraft to help with search

BBC., 21 May 2014 Last updated at 09:14 GMT

The Ministry of Defence has sent a plane to help search for four British sailors missing in the Atlantic.

The C-130 Hercules aircraft set off on Wednesday morning and is expected to reach the search area in the afternoon.
The 40ft Cheeki Rafiki was sailing back to the UK from an Antigua regatta when it started taking on water on Thursday.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said he hoped the yachtsmen would be found "as soon as possible".
The US Coast Guard has resumed the search, which was called off on Sunday, following an official request from the UK government. The coastguard said it had searched a total of 2,878 sq miles so far.
But it warned it was battling against six-foot seas with wind speeds of less than 18.5km per hour.

The US Coast Guard has met British officials to discuss the progress of the search

 

The HC-130 Hercules took off from Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina on Tuesday afternoon

The MoD confirmed the military aircraft was deployed from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire at 05:00 BST. It flew to Lajes in Portugal to refuel, before heading to the search area over the Atlantic.
The plane is expected to join the international search effort at around 14:00 BST.
"The RAF's contribution to the search operation for the four missing British sailors will provide additional capability and resilience to the resumed search led by US and Canadian forces," the defence secretary said.
"We all hope that the extensive resources being provided by our allies and the further support from the UK can help locate the missing yachtsmen as soon as possible."
'Difficult task' The four missing crew members are Paul Goslin, 56, from West Camel, Somerset; Andrew Bridge, 22, from Farnham, Surrey, the yacht's skipper; Steve Warren, 52, also from Somerset; and 22-year-old James Male, from Romsey.
Three planes and six ships have already been deployed to search the area where the sailors are thought to have disappeared - approximately 1,000 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

One of the last known photographs of the crew captured them at an awards ceremony at the end of the regatta

Admiral Richard G Gurnon, president of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told the BBC the search from the planes and boats was an "extremely difficult task".

Involved or en route to the search

Crews from

• A US Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, HC-130 Hercules aircraft
• US Coast Guard Cutter Vigorous
• US Air Force C-130 aircraft, from Moody Air Force Base, in Valdosta, Georgia
• Canadian military C-130 aircraft
• The 672ft vessel Premium Do Brasil
• The 751ft AM Hamburg
• The 600ft Bow Flora
• The 477ft Chem Venus
• The 551ft Independent Accord

"The weather is nasty, rarely is it calm and flat," he said.

"And when you have four or five people staring out windows for four hours at a time looking for what is about the size of basketballs in the ocean, it's extremely difficult. It's tiring, so this is not an easy task."
Adm Gurnon defended the coastguard's original decision to call off the operation, describing the organisation as "an extremely small outfit" faced with huge costs.
'Very positive' The Cheeki Rafiki began taking on water 620 miles (1,000km) east of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and diverted to the Azores on Thursday. Contact was lost with the crew on Friday.

The BBC's Rajini Vaidyanathan reports as a search plane takes off from North Carolina

The Americans called off the operation, saying the estimated survival time past the time of distress was approximately 20 hours and that their crews had searched for 53 hours.
But the decision to resume the operation came after family members insisted they could still be alive in the yacht's 12-man life raft.

Twelve-person life raft A raft, such as that on board the Cheeki Rafiki, is required to meet the international standard ISO 9650, which stipulates how the craft must be constructed and what it must have on board. The rafts are highly visible and buoyant and can be boarded quickly in an emergency.

• One man is known to have survived 133 days on a raft after ship was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1942, and experts have said the warmer water, the better chance of survival
• The water where the Cheeki Rafiki is understood to have encountered trouble is believed to be around 15C

Patrick Michel, skipper of The Malisi, one of around 30 private yachts helping with the search and the first on the scene, said he had a "gut feeling" the search would end well.
"It's the first day yesterday that we saw dolphins and they seemed to indicate a certain direction to turn the boat, and that is what we did going south instead of going north which was my intention," he told BBC Radio Solent.

The crew of the 1,000ft Maersk Kure took this picture of what appeared to be an overturned yacht 'Great comfort'

  "This is a positive note from the mammals in the sea."

The father of James Male, one of the youngest yachtsmen, said the skipper's assurance was "absolutely excellent".
Graham Male said: "It's really nice to have somebody like that who has a lateral thinking on things - that certainly gives me great comfort that you have people out there like that captain thinking like that and seeing those dolphins and saying this is an omen, we'd like to thank him for that."
Families of the sailors thanked the UK, Canadian and US authorities and urged people to continue signing an online petition, which has attracted more than 200,000 signatures, to keep the search going.