sir dyson yacht

Vacuum cleaner billionaire, James Dyson’s 95-year-old Nahlin Yacht, is a testament to his maverick nature. The 300-foot vessel, featuring a gym, stately cabins, and viewing rooms, once carried kings and boasts a glamorous past.

About Sir James Dyson –

Once you learn about Sir James Dyson, the inventor worth $13.5 billion , it’s easy to see what drew him to the Nahlin Yacht. This entrepreneur has devoted his life to solving problems and developing products—so a straightforward superyacht would hardly appeal to his maverick nature. The founder and Chairman of Dyson, which now employs more than 5,000 engineers worldwide, attended art school in London and doesn’t even have an engineering degree. As a child with a passion for competitive long-distance running, Dyson attended Gresham’s School, followed by the Byam Shaw School of Art, before studying architectural design at the Royal College of Art.

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James Dyson retrofits classic steam yacht

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Sir James Dyson, the renowned English industrial designer has refitted a 300 feet classic steam yacht named Nahlin.

The 1930 steam yacht Nahlin was completely restored at Blohm + Voss (B+V), a German yacht building firm. The yacht has been refitted with new diesel engines and period-correct paneling and moldings.

Sir James Dyson, who is best known as the inventor of the Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, has refurbished the classic yacht and has re-launched it. Nahlin was originally designed by G.L. Watson for a British heiress and was later owned by the Romanian Royal Family. The 1,574 ton Nahlin, which is 91.4m in length and can hold 58 crew and 351 passengers, was built for Lady Annie Henrietta Yule in 1930.

The historic super yacht was involved in the abdication of King Edward VIII, and has spent much of the last 70 years as a floating restaurant on the river Danube until it was reportedly bought by Dyson. It is believed that Dyson has shelled out GBP25 million ($38.7 million) for the retrofit project.

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Return of the royal love boat: Back in Britain, the yacht on which Edward VIII and his married lover enjoyed a voyage of scandalous hedonism

By Glenys Roberts Updated: 20:24 EDT, 20 July 2010

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Sliding gracefully into Dartmouth harbour yesterday, the sun playing on the lines of its graceful white hull, a 250ft yacht dwarfed the fleets of smaller boats and drew the attention of hundreds on the quayside.

This remarkable craft is the property of inventor Sir James Dyson. Now, after a major refit overseas, she has returned to Britain in tip-top shape for the first time in 70 years.

But the Nahlin is not just the plaything of a rich man. Though few observers in Devon were aware of the fact, this is the same boat that served as the backdrop to an extraordinary royal drama played out as the country became convulsed by a constitutional crisis

Glorious: Returned to Britain in tip-top shape for the first time in 70 years.

It was on the Nahlin that the newly succeeded King Edward VIII chose to take his married lover Mrs Simpson on an extended cruise around Eastern Europe in the summer of 1936, to the horror of the government.

During the trip, they cavorted with the leaders of several Nazi-supporting countries, drank vast amounts of alcohol and generally made a spectacle of themselves.

Within months, Edward had abdicated and thrown the future monarchy into chaos. 

In the years that followed, the Nahlin was bought and sold several times until it ended up at its lowest point - as a floating restaurant on the Danube.

Now, however, it has been returned to its former glories, but the shadow of that royal scandal will forever be associated with it.

As Prince of Wales in the Thirties, the new king had enjoyed a series of affairs with older women.

A restless young man who was not allowed to pursue a career in the Armed Forces because of his high-born destiny, he capitalised instead on his good looks and celebrity status.

In short, he was just the sort of person who felt completely at home on a luxury yacht. King George, who knew his son's frailties well, always said Edward had never grown out of adolescence and predicted the prince would ruin himself within a year of his death.

Luxury class: Mrs Simpson, above, and her lover King Edward, below, shocked the nation with their on-board romance

As long as his mistresses were society wives, everyone turned a blind eye, but then he met Mrs Simpson and his father's worst fears were realised.

Introduced to the future king by another of his women friends, Lady Thelma Furness, Wallis Simpson had already divorced one husband and was married to her second, ship broker Ernest Simpson.

But soon Edward had climbed into bed with her, though he never dared tell his father she was his mistress.

When George V died in January 1936, his son watched through a window in the company of the still married Mrs Simpson as he himself was proclaimed king. It was an unforgivable lapse of protocol.

Any hope the 42-year-old new king might mend his ways was dispelled when, a month later, he announced he was taking Wallis, 40, on a cruise aboard the Nahlin - and that her husband would not be going with them.

The latest word in luxury, the ship - built on the Clyde in 1930 by the then richest woman in Britain, Lady Annie Henrietta Yule - boasted six guest staterooms with ensuite bathrooms, a special ladies' sitting room, a gym and a library.

That is until the king had the books removed to provide extra space for the alcohol he planned to take on board.

Worse was to come. With war on the horizon, Edward even planned to start the cruise in Venice, part of Mussolini's fascist Italy.

The Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden finally managed to dissuade him from this course of action, but he was soon blundering on his insensitive way.

The Nahlin was perfectly equipped for long, ocean-going cruises, yet the couple restricted their movements to Eastern Europe, which provided more cause for blushes. Indeed, the king managed to embarrass Britain with a series of visits to Nazi-supporting states.

When they stopped off in Yugoslavia, the country's Regent, Prince Paul, organised a motorcade that sped across the countryside scattering peasants in its wake - behaviour which, once again, horrified the Foreign Office.

Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the couple were greeted by dictator Kemal Ataturk, who treated Wallis as though she were already married to the king.

And when they cruised down the Danube to Budapest, they abandoned all pretence of behaving appropriately.

In the Hungarian capital, Wallis showed off her gipsy dancing until the small hours and the king took over the bar-tending in the Ritz Hotel. Then, after a heavy drinking session, he proceeded to shoot out a row of street lights along the embankment to demonstrate his marksmanship.

Before the era of the paparazzi, most people were unaware of the couple's exuberant behaviour: we now know that this included driving 3,000 golf balls into the Mediterranean to practise their golf swings.

Indeed, their own photograph albums reveal just how they be-sported themselves on board while back home everyone worried about whether the country, never mind the monarchy, would survive.

The king, wearing a gold chain on his bare chest, looked every inch the continental roue. Rarely seen without a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he posed in shorts with a striped matelot sweater and oversized sunglasses, while his lover showed off her figure in fashionable one-piece swimming costumes, floppy sunhats and playsuits.

Though they were in the company of friends and, indeed, Edward's equerry John Aird, they had eyes only for each other.

By the time they returned home at the end of the summer, the king's credibility was ruined. In December, he abdicated the throne, married Mrs Simpson and the couple went to live abroad as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The yacht, too, rapidly fell from grace. In 1937, the Nahlin was bought by King Carol of Romania for £120,000 and - renamed the Luceafarul - enjoyed a brief spell of Royal patronage.

But within a year, King Carol was forced into exile and the boat was put to work by the Romanian Ministry of Culture as a charter yacht, sailing museum and finally a floating restaurant on the Danube.

In the years that followed, she was reduced to a wreck, fit only for the breakers' yard and was picked up by a broker for a six-figure sum.

She was then briefly owned by JCB boss Sir Anthony Bamford, before passing into the hands of vacuum cleaner entrepreneur Sir James Dyson, who has paid for a £25 million refit at a German shipyard.

What the future holds for her, we must wait to see, but it surely cannot be as controversial as the summer she spent conveying a king and his most unsuitable lover one step closer to their scandalous marriage.

Share or comment on this article: Return of the royal love boat: Back in Britain, the yacht on which Edward VIII and his married lover enjoyed a voyage of scandelous hedonism

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Sir James Dyson's luxury yacht in Cornwall after Boris Johnson text message controversy

The 300ft Nahlin which has turned up in Falmouth was previously part of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson's abdication romance

• 17:18, 23 APR 2021
• Updated 09:02, 24 APR 2021

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Vacuum billionaire Sir James Dyson may well have scarpered to Cornwall to escape the fallout from ‘Textgate’ as his 300ft yacht has been spotted in Falmouth harbour.

One of Britain’s most prominent businessmen has been caught up in what the Labour Party has called “new Tory sleaze” after texts between him and Prime Minister Boris Johnson about tax and the provision of ventilators were made public.

Mr Johnson has said he will publish his text messages and “makes absolutely no apology” for the exchanges with Mr Dyson promising to “fix” tax status for the firm to help build ventilators.

Number 10 sources have accused the PM’s former senior advisor Dominic Cummings of leaking the text messages.

A trip to sunny Cornwall can fix most problems and this might be what Mr Dyson is hoping as his luxury yacht Nahlin is currently in Falmouth , moored on the harbour’s Cross Roads buoy.

You can stay up to date on the top news and events near you with CornwallLive’s FREE newsletters – enter your email address at the top of the page.

Launched in 1930, she is one of the last large steam yachts constructed in the UK having been built by John Brown & Company at Clydebank and was constructed immediately before the RMS Queen Mary.

In 1936 Nahlin was chartered by King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson for a cruise in the Adriatic Sea, photos from which sparked rumours of the impending abdication. Informal photographs of Edward and Simpson on board together during the cruise were not published in Britain but became front-page news in America.

The yacht was then bought by King Carol of Romania in 1937 and later became a floating restaurant in the country.

Sir James purchased the yacht from Sir Anthony Bamford, chairman of JCB, in 2006. The inventor spent five years comprehensively rebuilding and restoring it and the ship was recommissioned in 2010 as the Nahlin and registered again in Glasgow, Scotland.

The name Nahlin is taken from a Native American word meaning "fleet of foot" and the yacht has a figurehead depicting a Native American wearing a feathered headdress beneath the bowsprit.

She was originally furnished with six en-suite staterooms for guests, a gymnasium, a ladies' sitting room with sea views on three sides, and a library.

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From Edward VIII to James Dyson: the yacht that tells a tale of British wealth

The fortunes of industry and a handful of ultra-rich individuals are woven through the history of the Nahlin

I n the early years of this century, soon after he began moving production of his bagless vacuum cleaner from Wiltshire to south-east Asia , James Dyson bought a superb yacht. The Nahlin is exemplary in the beauty of its lines and instructive in its history, though how much of this history Dyson understands or relishes is hard to know. Despite spending a fortune (at least £25m) on its restoration, Dyson has never talked publicly about his yacht, no more than he has about his purchase of Singapore’s most expensive flat (£43m) and its sale soon after, at a loss. For a time, a kind of omertà prevailed about the vessel’s ownership among its team of restorers, though to own and care for such an elegant piece of naval architecture would surely be no shame.

What Dyson certainly knows is that it was on the Nahlin that King Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson shed any discretion and “came out” as a couple – a relationship reported across the world, though not at the time in Britain – precipitating the crisis that ended with the king’s abdication a few months later, in December 1936. “The cruise of the Nahlin” became an inevitable chapter in any telling of the event, though how the king came to be aboard such a mysteriously named vessel tended to be overlooked. In fact, the name is said to have Native American origins, and reportedly means “fleet of foot” – the yacht’s figurehead wears a chieftain’s headdress – and the king was aboard because the Foreign Office, worried by social unrest in France, had warned against his original plan to rent a villa there.

So instead he rented the Nahlin, to avoid the fuss that a voyage in the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, would create and perhaps also because the Nahlin, commissioned only six years earlier, appealed to his appetite for cocktail modernity. Fuss, however, was unavoidable. At Šibenik, the Dalmatian port where the king and Mrs Simpson boarded the yacht, an exuberant crowd of 20,000 turned up and (thanks to reports in the American press) showed as much interest in her as in him; at sea, two Royal Navy destroyers, the Grafton and the Glowworm, accompanied the Nahlin wherever she went – a leisurely August progress down the Adriatic, through the Corinth canal to the Greek islands, and eventually to Istanbul. The “nanny-boats”, as Lady Diana Cooper called them; she and a few other prominent society figures were also aboard, as well as a crew around 60-strong.

Of course, the term yacht is misleading. No sails have ever been involved. The Nahlin, like its bland modern equivalents, was a yacht only in the sense that its sole purpose was its owner’s pleasure, the owner being in this case a Lady Yule. Launched in 1930 from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown & Co – builder of celebrated liners such as Cunard’s two Queens – it measures 300ft in length and was originally powered by four steam turbines. Characteristically of the steam yacht, of which the Nahlin was among the very last examples, its hull preserves elements of the sailing ship, with a curved clipper bow and a counter stern, each stretching well beyond the waterline. The shape and colour of steam yachts – white hull, cream funnel – made people think of swans. Their costs and months of idleness meant they were an indulgence that only the richest magnates on either side of the Atlantic could afford: JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sir Thomas Lipton.

And Lady Yule? She was thought to be the richest widow in England. How had she come by her money? Jute, was the short answer. A longer one involves a story of British innovation and industrial expansion overseas that Dyson might recognise, beginning in the 1820s when Dundee manufacturers began to look for an alternative to hemp in the making of sacking, rope and sailcloth. Jute was cheap and reliably available from Bengal in British India, but it was tough and brittle and broke easily when it was spun or woven. After years of experiment, it was successfully made pliable by the application of whale oil, of which Dundee as a whaling port had no shortage.

The demand for jute fabric and jute rope boomed, and Dundee enjoyed a near monopoly until the 1870s, when British industrialists began to open jute mills in Bengal itself because, as economic historian Morris D Morris has pointed out, “jute manufacturing was not a complicated process [and] cheap labour was a very great advantage”. Bengal had five jute mills in 1870 and 69 jute mills in 1914, as cheaper Indian-made jute conquered foreign markets previously served by Dundee, and exports of jute cloth from India grew 272 times over the same period; even better was to come with the first world war, when the word “sandbag” must have sounded like a ringing cash register in the inner ear of every Indian jute trader.

The Yule family benefited enormously. Annie Henrietta (Lady) Yule was the daughter of Andrew Yule, the son of a small-town draper in Scotland who arrived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) in 1863 as an agent representing several British firms, and whose family eventually owned tea estates, coalmines, cotton and flour mills, railways, and 2,400 square miles of productive land – as well as the jute mills that Andrew Yule’s nephew and successor, Sir David Yule, had taken an especial interest in expanding. Sir David was a shy workaholic who rarely left Kolkata. Aged 42, he married another Yule, his cousin Annie Henrietta. When he died in 1928, soon after ordering his steam yacht, the Times described him as“one of the wealthiest men, if not the wealthiest man, in the country”.

Where did it all go? Lady Yule and her daughter Gladys made a long and expensive world cruise in the Nahlin in the early 1930s. She invested heavily and sometimes unwisely in the British film industry; she opened a stud farm. She had, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “strong religious opinions, a sharp tongue, and imperious habits”. Her attempt to force teetotalism on the Nahlin’ s crew was probably not a success. At any rate she sold the ship to King Carol II of Romania in 1937, after which the Nahlin disappeared from the map of British interests – missing, presumed dead – until an English yacht broker, Nicholas Edmiston, discovered it moored in the Danube as a floating restaurant in the 1990s. It passed briefly through the ownership of another Brexit-supporting tycoon, Sir Anthony Bamford, before Dyson bought it in 2006.

This week, thanks to the wonder of digital ship location, I traced the yacht’s present whereabouts to the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg; it had reached there from the Caribbean via Gibraltar and Falmouth. Blohm+Voss spent millions of Dyson’s money when the yacht was first restored and re-engined, and it may be there now for its annual overhaul. The shipyard is old and distinguished, and still fills the harbour with the sounds of building and repair work. They even build luxury yachts there; the clients include Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Putin.

Nothing remains of the Nahlin’s birthplace at Clydebank, apart from a large crane that stands useless at the river’s edge. Ships, like bagless vacuum cleaners and jute, are made elsewhere.

Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist

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What happened to the Dyson electric car?

James Dilkes

Back in 2017, Dyson announced that it had been secretly working on a “radical and different” electric car, aimed for a launch in 2020. But, just two years later, in October 2019 and after sinking half a billion pounds into the project, Dyson pulled the plug. So, what went wrong? 

It certainly wasn't a lack of investment. Dyson made bold moves in trying to make it a success – including recruiting proven talent from the automotive world and buying up land and buildings at the disused Ministry of Defence airfield at Hullavington, Wiltshire. 

Two hangars at the site were quickly renovated to serve as the base for Dyson’s automotive program, with further plans in place to build a 10-mile test track for R&D use. At least 400 staff were working on the electric car project before it’s demise. Now, though, the Hullavington location is being used for work on “air treatment technologies and robotics”.

Up until the project was cancelled, Dyson kept the details of their car closely guarded, but it has since revealed the key specifications the engineers were working towards and shown what the interior and exterior of the car would have looked like. 

The car, codenamed N526, was to be a large seven-seat SUV promising a huge 600-mile range and 150 kWh battery. From the very outset, Sir James Dyson made it clear that the car wouldn’t be aimed for the mass market and that it “would not be cheap”. 

We now know that plans were to produce 5000 cars per year initially, with a base price of £150,000. Dyson’s products are widely known to be targeted at the premium-end of their markets, usually with rather large price tags. Evidently, the N526 was set to follow this pattern, with a price almost double that of a Tesla Model X or Lotus Eletre .

One of the distinctive design features of the N526, aside from its Range Rover-esque 5 metre length, is the enormous 24-inch wheels, which are said to offer advantages in both efficiency and ride comfort. 

While the exterior of the car is pretty good looking, albeit quite conventional, the interior is where things get more interesting. Fed up with modern car seats, Sir James made it his mission to design seats that would provide posture support in all the right places.

To maintain a minimalist aesthetic and allowing the driver to keep both hands on the wheel as much as possible, Dyson opted to have all the interior buttons and switches on the steering wheel. A heads-up display also adds to the modern feel that Dyson were trying to achieve.

Dyson was determined to deliver a car with a 600+ mile range, despite the weight disadvantage of lugging around a huge 150 kWh battery pack – which contributed to an expected kerb weight of around 2600 kg. The company was banking on being able to reduce the weight of the car significantly as battery technology progressed and formats with a better capacity-to-weight ratio became available. 

The car was designed to have two 246 bhp motors sending power to all four wheels to give a 0-60 mph time of under 5 seconds. Dyson was very proud of the fact that the motors and control systems were all of original design, and that they hadn’t tried to “borrow parts from other manufacturers”.

So, what killed off the project? Well, trying to design and build a car from the ground up without borrowing parts from other manufacturers is a very expensive exercise. And, even with the hefty price tag, Dyson eventually realised that the car was not going to be commercially viable. Part of the problem, according to Sir James, was that existing car makers can sell electric cars at a loss and offset it with their profits from selling traditional cars, effectively pricing the Dyson car out of the market. The obvious exception to this rule is Tesla, although even this success story needed a lot of investment to make it a profitable company.

It’s clear that Dyson set their sights very high and weren’t prepared to compromise on their vision by sharing parts or tech with another company. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that an enormous amount of passion went into the venture and that its early end wasn’t due to a lack of trying. 

Shades of Sinclair?

Dyson isn’t the first valiant but vain effort to crack the electric transport market. Sir Clive Sinclair, also a successful tech entrepreneur, went on to found Sinclair vehicles in 1983 to fulfil his childhood vision of creating clean electric cars. 

His plan was to build a whole range of cars, but it started at the bottom with the left field Sinclair C5 – a single occupancy trike which promised to be a compromise between a car and a bicycle. 

Ultimately, though, it proved to have much of the worst of both worlds: little to no protection from the weather, but without the manoeuvrability of a bike. 

It was not short of innovation, with a tough plastic body and engineering by Lotus. Power was from a 12v lead-acid battery similar to those fitted in (conventional) cars, fed to a converted washing machine motor. The claimed range was 20 miles, but the reality was nearer 10, especially if the driver didn't pedal and it was cold outside. 

The press were sceptical, and so were the public. Only a few months into its life, C5's where being sold off at half their original £399 price to clear stocks and production was halted. It became one of the most well-known marketing flops in recent history and Sir Clive shrunk into the shadows.

What might have happened if Sinclair launched the C10 - a planned two-seat city car - first? We'll never know.

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One of Britain's richest men spotted on his 1930s superyacht in Devon

Alicia has been named for the daughter he lost in a car crash, aged 11 months old

• 13:57, 30 OCT 2018
• Updated 12:50, 14 NOV 2018

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One of Britain's richest men has been spotted in his newly refurbished 1930's super-yacht - named after his daughter who was tragically killed.

Ian Wace, 55, who has a net worth of £505m, was spotted on board the Alicia, previously known as the Janidore.

The multi-millionaire hedge-fund manager has recently taken back the vintage vessel after it underwent a three-year refurbishment.

It was released following a christening ceremony where it was re-named in honour of Mr Wace's daughter Alicia, who died in a car crash aged 11 months alongside his son Guy, four, and wife Joanna, 34.

Images showed him getting off the vessel after it docked in Dartmouth, Devon.

The 50-metre classic yacht emerged following a major refit at the Southampton Marine yard after work began in 2015.

The ship's systems were rebuilt and the yacht underwent "major structural works".

The yard said that Alicia, which was originally launched in the 1930s as one of the eight yachts to be built by US yard Defoe, had been restored to 'the splendour of her era'.

Alicia is the third iconic super-yacht refit for the yard following Sir Charles Dunstone’s Shemara and Lord Sugar’s Lady A.

Mr Wace's boat also bears more than a passing similarity to James Dyson's 250ft Nahlin. In 2010 it also emerged from a lengthy refit and was pictured pulling in to the same Devon port.

The Nahlin, once owned by newly succeeded King Edward VIII was built in 1930 and boasted six guest staterooms with en-suite bathrooms, a special ladies' sitting room, a gym and a library.

The ship found fame when the royal chose to take his married lover Wallis Simpson on an extended cruise around Eastern Europe.

Mr Wace has now followed in James Dyson's footsteps and has had his own 1930s motor yacht professionally restored and birthed in the same port.

Mr Wace is the chief executive officer, chief risk officer, and founding partner of London's Marshall Wace hedge fund.

He became a successful businessman after witnessing the haunting death of his first wife and their two young children.

Speaking in 2011 Wace said: "The motivating force of my life was the accident.

"It's no use avoiding it - it's the elephant in the room. Something terrible happened to people very dear to me.

"It is what it is, I can't undo it. But a positive force did emerge, in Ark, and I'm happy to be part of that."

Peter Morton, the CEO of The SMS Group, described the yacht as “unquestionably beautiful” and said the launch was “a major positive milestone in another huge refit project.

He said: “The project has seen the best of British design, innovation and engineering and we now look forward to a successful period of trials pre-handover."

“Today’s launch is a major positive milestone in another huge refit project for The SMS Group, all our colleagues and all our suppliers.

"It’s big, big news.

"As a company, we are genuinely thrilled to have had the inspiration and support of another truly exceptional British businessman; and whilst the project has been challenging the end result is simply outstanding.

"MY Alicia is unquestionably beautiful.

“MY Alicia, MY Shemara and MY Lady A were all managed by SMS in a totally transparent and honest way – working directly with the owner.

"This ensures the very best value for money and complete control of the project; owners are therefore, masters of their own destiny, which is so very important to all those involved.

"In this case, it was the owner’s vision that has inspired the growth and creation of a business as opposed to just another project; we’re extremely grateful and look forward to very many future successful projects.”

The christening of MY Alicia was caught on camera by Jacek Prawdzik, who also shared many pictures of the boat on social media.

On deck two other boats can be seen, one a motorboat and the other by sail, and a tender is located towards the front of the vessel.

As per tradition, a bottle of champagne was broken on the hull - although it took a few attempts for the bottle to its target. There was also a well-stocked bar at the event.

Alicia is now expected to head for the Mediterranean and join modern and classic yachts for the 20th Les Voiles de Saint Tropez in September.

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Divers probing how Bayesian superyacht sank make breakthrough discovery as they retrieve surveillance cameras

• Annabel Bate , Foreign News Reporter
• Published : 0:12, 15 Sep 2024
• Updated : 0:44, 15 Sep 2024

DIVERS have recovered video surveillance equipment from Mike Lynch's Basyesian superyacht that could reveal key details of its sinking.

The entrepreneur and dad-of-two, dubbed "Britain's Bill Gates ", died alongside his teenage daughter when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily on August 19.

Prosecutors investigating the sinking deployed six elite divers from special forces unit "Comsubin" who have made repeated dives down to the sunken vessel.

Divers from the Italian Navy were able to retrieve the surveillance equipment including computers and hard drives.

Now they are to be analysed in specialised labs, according to a report.

The devices will be examined to see if any data can be revealed, or potentially a video showing how the yacht sank - including whether any doors were left open.

read more world news

Four Bayesian victims survived sinking but died in air bubble, autopsy says

Yacht captain ‘says he did everything to save passengers & abandoned no one’

This is done by using a hyperbaric chamber.

The captain of the doomed Bayesian,  James Cutfield, 51, is being investigated for manslaughter .

Kiwi Cutfield, along with two other members of his crew, are being investigated by Italian authorities for culpable shipwreck and multiple manslaughter.

Prosecutors are also probing ship engineer  Tim Parker-Eaton, from Clophill, Beds, and sailor Matthew Griffith, 22  under the same charges.

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The investigation does not imply guilt or mean formal charges will be brought against any of the men.

At a press conference at the Termini Imerese Courthouse on Saturday, Chief Prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio said there may have been “behaviours that were not perfectly in order with regard to the responsibility everybody had.” 

His team will probe if hatches were left open, allowing water to flood in.

They will also look into whether the crew raised the alarm before escaping. 

He vowed to “discover how much they knew and to what extent all the people (passengers) were warned.”

Mr Cartosio added: “There could be in fact the question of homicide. But this is the beginning of the inquiry, we cannot exclude anything at all…We will establish each element’s (crew) responsibility.

"For me, it is probable that offences were committed — that it could be a case of manslaughter.”

The body of Mike Lynch and his four guests, Chris, Neda, Jonathan and Judy were found in the first cabin on the left.

Divers recovered five of the six missing passengers - including Lynch - in one cabin on the left side of the yacht which settled on its right side on the sea floor.

A judicial investigation into the yacht tragedy is ongoing.

The  luxury  vessel was caught up in a horror storm which caused it to sink in the early hours of the morning.

Of the 22 onboard, 15 survived with 11 including Mike Lynch's wife rescued on an inflatable life raft.

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Lynch’s  18-year-old daughter Hannah  was the last passenger to be discovered in the third cabin.

The survivors of the wreck, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, 57, left Sicily in a private jet last Sunday.

Inside The Bayesian's final 16 minutes

By Ellie Doughty, Foreign News Reporter

Data recovered from the Bayesian's Automatic Identification System (AIS) breaks down  exactly how it sank  in a painful minute-by-minute timeline.

At 3.50am on Monday August 19 the Bayesian began to shake "dangerously" during a fierce storm, Italian outlet  Corriere  revealed.

Just minutes later at 3.59am the boat's anchor gave way, with a source saying the data showed there was "no anchor left to hold".

After the ferocious weather ripped away the boat's mooring it was dragged some 358 metres through the water.

By 4am it had began to take on water and was plunged into a blackout, indicating that the waves had reached its generator or even engine room.

At 4.05am the  Bayesian fully disappeared  underneath the waves.

An emergency GPS signal was finally emitted at 4.06am to the coastguard station in Bari, a city nearby, alerting them that the vessel had sunk.

Early reports suggested the disaster struck around 5am local time off the coast of Porticello Harbour in Palermo, Sicily.

The new data pulled from the boat's AIS appears to suggest it happened an hour earlier at around 4am.

Some 15 of the 22 onboard were rescued, 11 of them scrambling onto an inflatable life raft that sprung up on the deck.

A smaller nearby boat - named Sir Robert Baden Powell - then helped take those people to shore.

• Bayesian yacht sinks

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Mike Lynch: Seven key unanswered questions around the sinking of the Bayesian

With the search continuing of the sunken bayesian an investigation has been launched to establish what caused the disaster off the coast of sicily, article bookmarked.

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With the Bayesian lying on her side 50 metres underneath the now gentle waters of the Mediterranean, mystery still surrounds how the 56-metre superyacht, sank in the typhoon off the port of Porticello.

Remotely controlled underwater vehicles and cave divers are looking to raise the yacht , which experts will examine in the coming days.

Italian publication Giornale di Sicilia reported post-mortem examinations were completed at a Palermo hospital and the bodies have now been returned.

The Bayesian was hit by a suspected “downburst” of strong wind early on 19 August. The 56m-long, £30 million yacht drifted for about 400 metres from its anchorage near the fishing port of Porticello before sinking.

Fifteen of the 22 passengers and crew survived the incident by clambering onto an inflatable liferaft.

The bodies of tech billionaire Mike Lynch, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates“, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and four other people were found by divers on board. Post-mortem examinations suggest they had been trapped in a room below deck.

Jonathan Bloomer, the international chairman of Morgan Stanley Bank; his wife Judith, a psychotherapist; Christopher Morvillo, a US lawyer; and his wife Neda, a jewellery designer, also died in the sinking.

It will take weeks for Ambrogio Cartosio, the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, and his team to establish whether the sinking of the Bayesian was down to human error, an unpredictable weather event or whether anyone is liable.

Italian Navy divers have recovered video surveillance equipment from the wreckage parts of the deck, computer material, video surveillance systems, hard drives and various other equipment, that could explain how the Bayesian sank.

Prosecutors have said they will interview the survivors – some of whom were pictured leaving the Domina Zagarella hotel in Santa Flavia, which has become the headquarters for survivors, police and rescuers.

Many questions face the investigators:

Were access hatches left open?

One expert at the scene in Sicily said an early focus of the investigation would be on whether the yacht’s crew had failed to close access hatches before the tornado struck.

Yachting experts have suggested that the hatches being open could have allowed the Bayesian to fill with water quickly and sink.

But Andrea Ratti, a nautical design professor at Polytechnic University of Milan, said a boat the size of the Bayesian could only sink so rapidly by taking in a huge amount of water.

“One can make plausible assumptions that leave room for doubt,” he said, before suggesting that one or more portholes, windows or other openings may have been broken or smashed open by the waterspout.

The recovered video could show whether the crews left doors open, which might have allowed the yacht to flood.

Was the boat prepared for a storm?

Prosecutors will look at whether appropriate measures were taken in preparation for the storm.

The yacht’s captain, James Catfield, from New Zealand, told Italian media of the suddenness of the waterspout that turned a luxury super yacht into a death trap.

“We just didn’t see it coming,” he said.

Luca Mercalli, the president of the Italian Meteorological Society, said on Tuesday that the crew should have made sure that all the guests were awake and given them lifejackets in light of the forecasted heavy rains.

The coast guard said bad weather had been forecast, but added that it was more virulent than expected. Some locals spoke of a waterspout, or sea whirlwind, of exceptional force.

“It was a strange thing,” fisherman Andrea Carini said. The Bayesian was at anchor, its sails down, when the tempest hit, with another yacht moored nearby.

A nearby yacht, the 42-metre Sir Robert Baden Powell, remained anchored and weathered the storm after its captain turned on the engine to keep control of the vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian.

The captain, Karsten Borner, said he did not know whether the crew of the Bayesian had managed to switch on its engines.

“I don’t think they did things wrong, I think they were surprised by the power of the storm,” he said.

“I only know that they went flat with the mast on the water and that they sank in two minutes,” he said, adding that the storm was “very violent, very intense”, bringing in “a lot of water and I think a turning system like a tornado”.

Did the world’s largest aluminium mast have anything to do with the sinking?

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 with a 75m (246ft) mast which it claims is the tallest aluminium mast in the world.

Scott Painter, who took over Lynch’s multi-billion dollar software company called Autonomy, founded in 1996, said Lynch’s yacht may have been more vulnerable due to the mast.

“The mast was the ultimate sailor’s bragging right,” Painter told the outlet. “That mast must’ve been over 240 feet tall, which is either the tallest or second tallest in the world.”

He added: “That could certainly contribute to a capsize as it would destabilize the yacht. And if it were to lean over too far, it could absolutely capsize the yacht.”

Captain Borner said: “If the mast had been broken they wouldn’t have capsized.”

Would a lightning shock wave damage the mast?

Colonel Attilio Di Diodato, director of the Italian Air Force’s Center for Aerospace Meteorology and Climatology, said the agency had registered intense lightning activity and strong gusts of wind in the area.

The Bayesian had one of the tallest aluminium masts in the world, according to its builder, Perini Navi.

“Having a tall aluminium mast would not make it the safest port to be in case of a storm,” said Andrea Ratti, associate professor of nautical design and architecture technology told the Politecnico di Milano.

The type of intensity unleashed by a violent lightning storm “could have created a significant shock wave”, he added.

Was the Bayesian keel retractable and was it down?

The Bayesian had a retractable keel, a fin-like apparatus under the hull that helps stabilise boats and acts as a counterweight to the mast. It is not known whether it was down at the time of the vicious storm.

Both Ratti and Mattioni questioned whether the yacht had been anchored with the keel up, reducing the vessel’s depth under water and making it less stable. Ratti said strong winds might have caused the boat to start oscillating wildly, “like a pendulum”, putting exceptional strain on the mast.

Was the the Bayesian properly anchored?

Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander and defence commentator, told CBC News that a mast the size of the Bayesian’s is designed for a massive sail, and without that sail raised and catching the wind, the gusts likely would’ve had a negligible impact on the aluminum pole.

He instead suggested the anchor may have played a pivotal role.

“My kind of working assumption is that she was probably a bit further in at anchor, and it’s very likely, in these sort of conditions, that her anchor dragged,” he said.

He added the 10-strong crew was better off steering toward the anchor to stabilise the yacht or even raising the anchor and steering into the open Meditteranean to ride out the storm.

“They might have got caught in that middle ground where they’re not on a particularly good anchorage but the anchor is now controlling the bow of the ship”, he posted.

Prosecutors have said their investigation will take time, and will require the wreck to be pulled up from the sea bed.

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