It has assigned its divers to examining the main wreckage and has limited Suffolk divers, equipped with simpler scuba tanks mounted on their backs, to recovering bodies and hunting through outer parts of the search area. Nassau divers, there at the request of Suffolk police officials, have already been taken out of the water, a Nassau police official confirmed. Divers describe their job as an intense, methodical process driven in the TWA case by a military precision. Each diving day starts with an early-morning briefing by a Navy commander in a white tent on the grounds of the Coast Guard command center. Each diving team is told to identify a piece of wreckage found by sonar.
Orders can change at a moment's notice.
Cordara sat on his boat for five hours Wednesday with seven other divers until given the latitude and longitude of a new piece of wreckage to identify. When they surface, divers immediately sketch what they saw and fill out a questionnaire with such specifics as the estimated length, height and weight of debris and its condition.