What would this 'transmission' be?
Where would it come from?
Changes in salinity and temperature at different depth block sonar.
Anti Submarine vessels use variable depth sonar arrays to dip down through the various blocking layers to hunt for submarines which are very good at exploiting them to avoid detection.
Don't underestimate Russian activity. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Baltic region was one of the most militarised in the world (and it still controls the old Prussia region, now called Kaliningrad, which is one massive Russian military base). Likewise, the remnants of the old Paldiski Soviet base in Estonia by 1994 was one massive military junk yard, after the nuclear reactors were decommissioned. This effectively was like an Iron Curtain / Berlin Wall between East and West. Russian presence, even if unofficial is ubiquitous as was apparent from seabed tracks and acoustic signalling.
Russian military presence includes signal blocking. On the night of the accident 28 Sept 1994, the two nearby cruise liners,
Viking Mariella and
Silja Europa used their emergency VHF channel 16 from which they'd got the May Day to rescue centre but had to switch to Channel 2182, which covers the whole Baltic Sea. When they received no response
they had to call the inland rescue centres on their mobile phones. In addition, because of this signal failure - coinciding with
Estonia sinking, the Helsinki Rescue centre used a pan-pan instead of relaying the high alert one.
There was also silence at St Petersburg, at Russia's Marine Rescue Coordinating Centre, which links up to Russian and US satellites providing emergency beacon signals that send the exact coordinates of the ship in distress to the rescue centre. You recall, the
Europa captain had to wait whilst third mate Tammes* had to go away and find out the coordinates, which he couldn't provide because of a 'black out'. He called back some minutes later and a voice in the background provides Tammes with the corrodinates, which in Tammes' distress he misrelay's once or twice. At this point Tammes says the ship is at 30° - 40°, within minutes it was 90°. So a whole series of totally avoidable delays because
the signals were jammed. This COPSAS-SARSAT collection of satellites relay the ships location to the rescue centres. Yet on the night of the accident, just when the ship was fated to sink completely outside of radar within 26 minutes the satellite system was down.
When Jutta Rabe and Gregg Bemis made their expedition to the wreck, on approaching they discovered their GPS was suddenly unavailable. They had to use old-fashioned methods of navigation to locate the wreck, not easy as few maps provide coordinates for one object measuring 'just' 155m.
In addition, all of the
Estonia emergency buoys transmitting EPIRB were mysteriously switched off on the night of the 'accident'.
The telephone company concerned said its entire network was down from 1:03 to 1:58 within the exact time frame of the accident, from the time of the bangs/collision sensation through the May Day and throughout the rapid sinking.
In addition, there was a continuous radio signal from Russia's Hoagland Island transmitter, which a Finnish commission member Heimo Iivonen believed blocked VHF international May Day channel 16.
So given the Russians' absolutely undoubted history of stealthy incursions into Swedish and Finnish waters, there is little doubt it had the technology to not only evade sonar listening posts and being registered with an acoustic signature, it likely also had techniques to block the sonar equipment of others. These secret submarine manoeuvres were not even known by Yeltsin and had nothing to do with the Russian Northern Fleet (its official navy) but was run by the KGB and its successor - which in 1991 - 1994 was one V Putin. This is how Yeltsin could categorically deny it had any vessels in the region of the
Estonia - even though the
Leonid Bykhof was caught just an hour later, about to run into rocks. Yeltsin likely never knew what Vladimir was up to.
So, when Rene Arikas turned up for his eight-day survey 8-16 July 2021 of the wreck for digital imaging - whoa! lo and behold! - strange difficulties in getting a proper signal, as reported in
Baltic News.
Coincidence? I think not.
Whoever wanted those secrets stopped from reaching Sweden, the US and the UK, made darn sure they would not reach their destination...and took almost 1,000 innocent people with them.
*Re Tammes: we need to ask why was he using a handheld contraption to send the May Day? Where was Captain Andresson? How did Tammes manage to get the heck out of the bridge at that late stage? (His body was recovered from the sea.)
