R/P FLIP (floating instrument platform) was an open ocean research platform owned by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) and operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The platform was 355sp=usNaNsp=us long and was designed to partially flood and pitch backward 90°, resulting in only the front 55sp=usNaNsp=us of the platform pointing up out of the water, with bulkheads becoming decks. When flipped, most of the buoyancy for the platform was provided by water at depths below the influence of surface waves, hence FLIP was stable and mostly immune to wave action, similar to a spar buoy. At the end of a mission, compressed air was pumped into the ballast tanks in the flooded section and the platform, which had no propulsion, returned to its horizontal position so it could be towed to a new location. The platform was frequently mistaken for a capsized ocean transport ship.
FLIP
The Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) of Scripps Institution of Oceanography created FLIP with funding from the Office of Naval Research and the assistance of the commercial naval architecture firm The Glosten Associates. FLIP was originally built to support research into the fine-scale phase and amplitude fluctuations in undersea sound waves caused by thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms. This acoustic research was conducted as a portion of the Navy's SUBROC program. Development started in January 1960 after a conversation between MPL researcher Frederick H. Fisher and MPL Director Fred N. Spiess regarding stability problems that Fisher was encountering when using the submarine as a research platform. Spiess recalled a suggestion from Allyn Vine that upending a ship might make it more stable, based on Vine's observation of a Navy mop floating in waves. Fisher was subsequently assigned to work on the feasibility and later development of such a vessel. The Gunderson Brothers Engineering Company in Portland, Oregon, launched FLIP on 22 June 1962.
FLIP was designed to study wave height, acoustic signals, water temperature and density, and for the collection of meteorological data. Because of the potential interference with the acoustic instruments, FLIP had no means of propulsion. It required towing to open water, where it drifted freely or was anchored.
FLIP was 700 gross tons. It carried a crew of five, plus up to eleven scientists. It was capable of operating independently during month-long missions without resupply. It could be operated around the world, although it normally operated off the west coast of the United States from a home base at Scripps' Nimitz Marine Facility in San Diego, California. The ship had specially designed interiors: some fixtures, such as the toilet seats, could flip 90°, and the shower heads were curved 90°. There were overhead lights on the surfaces that were the ceilings in both the towing (horizontal) and flipped orientations.
FLIP was used on a number of research expeditions at Scripps, often towed off shore of California, with the last cruise being September-October 2017.
Research conducted on FLIP[2] has included studies of:
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced funding, the decision was taken to scrap the platform. In August 2023, Rob Sparrock, the program officer overseeing ONR’s research vessel program noted that it “... would cost about $8 million to make FLIP useable for another five or 10 years, but that funding could be better used elsewhere.”[3]
On August 3, 2023, the storied vessel departed for a scrap yard in Mexico, apart from an instrument boom which will be installed on a pier at Scripps.[4] [5]
At the decommissioning, Scripps’ Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) Director Eric Terrill lauded the system and the spirit that inspired it, saying “FLIP set the stage for thinking big about what could be done with technology to enable new scientific discoveries ... It was built in an era of risk-taking; a spirit that we try to embrace to this day and encourage in the next generation of seagoing scientists.”