HMS Blackburn was the lead ship of the s built for the Royal Navy in World War II.[1]
She was launched on 25 March 1944[2] at Blyth Shipbuilding & Dry Docks Company in Blyth, Northumberland, England. With a length of 172feet and a beam of 300NaN0, she displaced 990 tons. Her propulsion consisted of two 8-cylinder diesel engines. The ship's purpose was to transport aircraft and spare parts along the coasts of the British Isles.
In 1950 she became a RNVR training ship.In July 1968 the ship was sold to Pounds Shipowners and Shipbreakers Ltd in Portsmouth, but was subsequently sold again to Gardline Shipping in Great Yarmouth, a company founded in 1969 to provide offshore services to the oil and gas industry in the North Sea. Gardline Shipping had the ship converted into a deep sea research vessel and renamed her Gardline Locater (IMO number 7048063, 747 GRT).
In July 1985 the ship played a key role in the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) of Air India Flight 182 that disintegrated in mid air after a bomb explosion on 23 June 1985 with 329 people on board off the southwest coast of Ireland. Gardline Locater, equipped with sophisticated sonar, and the French cable-laying vessel Léon Thévenin, with her robot submarine Scarab 1,[3] were dispatched to locate the CVR and FDR boxes. They would be difficult to find and it was imperative that the search commence quickly. On 4 July, Gardline Locator detected the signals of these boxes on the sea bed at a depth of more than 2000 meters. On 9 July, Scarab 1 pinpointed the CVR and raised it to the surface; the next day, she also located and recovered the FDR.[4] [5]
In August 1997 the ship was sold to Singapore to be scrapped.