Meet the Alvin 6500 Team: Danik Forsman

During an overhaul period, members of the Alvin Group who spend most of their time at sea return to WHOI to work closely with the shore-based operations team. The same people who pilot and maintain human-occupied vehicle Alvin during cruises, take it apart, inspect each part, and repair or upgrade anything that needs work. Danik Forsman is the mechanical section leader of the group, the most senior person responsible for maintaining the sub’s mechanical systems while at sea. He is also an Alvin Pilot. He took some time to tell Oceanus what the overhaul looks like for him and how a series of apprenticeships has given him a unique path to his current position.

Oceanus: When it is not an overhaul period, what does your work look like?

Danik: I go to sea with Alvin about five months a year and oversee all the mechanical maintenance for the sub and several mechanical techs. I am also a pilot and am in the sub every third dive day. My job piloting the varies: photographic work, surveying, mapping, sampling, recovering, or deploying stuff. The terrain varies wildly. Sometimes you’re in volcanically-active sites with super-heated vents or exploring deep sea valleys. You’re kind of in this all-terrain vehicle. I also interface with the chief scientist on each cruise to make sure that they're getting what they need.

We have the launch and recovery of the vehicle on a daily basis. And then there's all the other random jobs. Alvin is a working prototype. Even though we're doing this big upgrade now, every year leading up to this we were swapping new parts and new systems and testing things to get data to be able to design for the future. It’s a team effort, the ship crew, scientists, Alvin, is all one big cohesive team. We’re all here to support science.

Alvin Pilot and Mechanical Section Leader Danik Forsman securing the crane hook to Alvin while offloading the sub from R/V Atlantis in March. Alvin Group Manager Bruce Strickrott, left. (Jayne Doucette © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Oceanus: You don’t have a formal background in mechanical engineering, but you’re a pilot and one of the senior members of the team that maintains Alvin. How did you get where you are today?

Danik: My background is in commercial diving. I’ve had a lot of mentors in the ten years I've been at WHOI. My first job here was a temporary contract that turned into a permanent position. After a couple years I started working as a primary diver under Ed O'Brien who is the divemaster here. I would get sent out around the world to do whatever projects were going on at the time, in Japan or Canada or Scotland, wherever. And I would oversee the diving part of a scientific project.

But I got to a point when I was 25 and diving every single day that it started taking a toll on my joints and nervous system. At that time the Alvin Group had an opening for a junior mechanic. I started out as a tech and went through a provisionary period to show that I was serious, and then they entered me into the pilot-in-training program.

Oceanus: What was becoming a pilot like?

Danik: The Alvin Group has a very stringent system of qualifying people. It’s very much based on a person's personality, their maturity, their ability to handle stress. When it came time to qualify as a pilot, my career thus far had built me up for that. A lot of it came from working with Ed O'Brien. I have to give him a lot of credit because he was definitely one of the people who helped sculpt me into the right mindset for dealing with tense situations underwater. And then on the mechanical engineering front, I was apprenticed under Jefferson Grau, who was the mechanical section leader when I was hired.

Because I don't have an engineering degree, I had to teach myself everything I needed to know to be able to pass my engineering board: the basics of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials, everything I could. One cool thing about Alvin is that it is a really old program. We have this crazy archive of information, so I was digging through all these old pilot board notes reading stuff from the 60s and 70s.

I was the first pilot since the last overhaul. It had been years since they had made a new Alvin pilot. The program itself goes through just as much change as the sub itself. We are constantly adapting to new times, conditions, and personnel. There is a very serious understanding that this whole thing runs on trust. It’s high stakes right off the bat.