Ready to Dive: Five Decades of Adventure in the Abyss

In Ready to Dive, Curt Newport describes his role in some of the most daring and consequential deep ocean search and recovery operations of our time. Newport was there on the front lines and in the trenches, rigging lift lines, piloting underwater vehicles, and dealing with the carnage following both military and civilian plane crashes. Starting with his life as the son of an army aviator during various international postings before covering his conflicts with his father during the turbulent 1960s, the book details how he got into the subsea field. In a career lasting nearly fifty years, probing waters deeper than three miles, Newport describes unwinding passenger clothing from submersible propellors during the Air India salvage, recovering tons of volatile fuel-laden solid rocket motor parts from the Space Shuttle Challenger, thumbing through the wallet of a young girl lost during the crash of TWA flight 800, and deciphering the navigational mystery of the USS Indianapolis. Ready to Dive is a gritty, blunt, and real firsthand subsea account unlike any other.