US Navy destroyer collision

[Astrid]

It's possible that the bridge watch on the Fitz was fixated on some other contact and lost situational awareness. They shouldn't have, but it's happened before.

[Three Sisters]

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[Lodesman]

Originally Posted by svHyLyte

I can only guess that something that ship was transmitting--some radar or whatever--completely scrambled Otto's little brain. Accordingly, whenever we observed one of those ships on the horizon, and we seemed too often in the vicinity of Long Beach and/or San Diego, we shut Otto's power off to avoid any more excitement!

Originally Posted by donradcliffe

I was headed up the Potomac into Washington DC, and just as I was passing under a bridge the autopilot did a crazy Ivan. I looked around and saw that I was passing the Navy Electronics Laboratory. I still believe there was somebody in that building that said 'watch this' and pushed a button...

Small boat APs are usually fed directional info from fluxgate compasses. Going under a bridge (a lot of steel) can through them off. I could guess also that Hylyte's fluxgate compass was thrown off by passing the Navy vessel - as he suggested by something they were transmitting. Both radar and HF comms put out a lot of energy, that can muck with stuff that's unshielded.

Commercial vessel APs get their directional info from a gyro, which is a lot less susceptible to EM interference. Moot point about this as Crystal was reportedly steering "in hand".

[Viking Sailor]

It is my guess that the Navy ship was making a very slow turn to port and assumed that due to being overtaken he was the stand-on vessel.

Whereas the cargo ship assumed he was the stand-on vessel due to closing on the Navy ship's starboard quarter.

This visual aspect continued for sometime due to the Navy ship's slow rate of turn and the cargo ship's speed. This resulted in the cargo vessel maintaining the same apparent quartering angle to the Navy ship's starboard side. As a result, neither crew had reason to reassess their status as the stand-on vessel.

In addition to the above, the need to process other traffic and the late hour probably contributed to this most unfortunate mishap.

[Pelagic]

Again all conjecture without them releasing the track of the Fitz.

http://gcaptain.com/uss-fitzgerald-s...re-went-wrong/

[TwoBlocked]

Originally Posted by Tx J

...

If at impact the Crystal's course was ~066-070 degrees, the Fitzgerald's course was roughly ~000-010 degrees, with probably similar speeds.

* Hesitate to include lowly self with the upper echelons of master mariners around CF...but do have ~64 years on water experience on one craft or other, and few 'incidents' , and a few paper credentials.

Uh, your suggested courses at impact do little to confirm your qualifications.

[Sandero]

what went wrong... incompetence, Master was asleep... no communication... failure to observe COLREGS... insufficient training... US Navy seems to have a problem with showing lights of letting other vessels see them.... and so on...

[estarzinger]

Well . . . .

Originally Posted by Sandero

what went wrong...
incompetence - obviously, but these are mostly motivated and intelligent people, so the question is why were they incompetent. ,
Master was asleep - should not be a problem on routine transit - XO/OOD 'should be competent' to handle this situation...
no communication... Should not be a problem, can do collision avoidance without vhf, in fact there is a strong school of thought that vhf is often a hindrance in close in collision situations
failure to observe COLREGS...Not really the problem here as apparently they did not realize they were in a collision situation
insufficient training... Well, you can always have more training, but if you look at a Navy career you will see just a metric ton of training. If fact fatigue from studying after duty for exams is not an unlikely contributing cause of some of the 'incompetence'. Training on the right sudjects and in the right culture is probably a better path forward than just 'more training
US Navy seems to have a problem with showing lights of letting other vessels see them....Not in this case. Container ship apparently saw Navy just fine. As they did in the Porter incident also.
and so on...

I still believe there are pretty fundamental culture and process flaws on these vessels.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by estarzinger

Well . . . .




I still believe there are pretty fundamental culture and process flaws on these vessels.

Agreed! It's easy to say "they are all idiots".

But in fact that is never the root cause of a big failure of an organization, or practically never.

The human factor is always present. People are sometimes smart and sometimes dumb. Sometimes diligent; sometimes lazy. Sometimes pay attention; sometimes don't. They are human. A well-designed and well-functioning organization takes the human factor into account in all aspects of the organization's processes.

A big failure of an organization is always a failure of "culture and process". You can't always compensate for the human factor, but almost always.

In this particular case -- there was x number of watchstanders on the bridge of the Fitz. There is no statistical way that all of them were blithering idiots. This is a very obvious, very dramatic failure of process.

[transmitterdan]

As with almost all big human caused disasters there will likely be multiple causes with no one single root cause. Even so, I think we tend to trivialize the difficulty of navigating congested waters at night with the identification light system now used. I believe the present system of lights is long overdue for improvement. The larger vessels are especially poorly identified by the minimum lighting requirements. Autos and large trucks have had better light indicators than ships for decades. Lights on cargo ships are not that easy to read in my experience and they tell you very little at a glance. You have to watch for an overly long time to discern important details such as direction, speed and turn statistics. With a lot of vessels around it's often a brain overload to keep the entire situation in mind. That's why AIS was invented. And you can never be 100% sure every vessel is transmitting accurate AIS data.

I agree it will likely be determined to be a failure of culture and process. But the standard process has a lot of room for improvement IMO.

One other thing not mentioned is that a naval vessel has to contend with monitoring not only the surface but overhead and below the surface too. That multiplies the work load many times over for them.

[hpeer]

Agreed they have all the technology they need. Simplisticly all you really need to not have a colission is a working AIS receiver. Which I assume they did. I also assume they can understand it.

The question then becomes what prevents the OOD from looking at and understanding the AIS?

Lacking Navy input here the best precedent we have is the Porter, where it seems they also ignored the AIS. so I'm assuming they ignored it here also.

Why? Is it considered low class because it's civilian?

But, from posts over at gCaptain that clarified that CIC does indeed compute CPA solutions and inform the bridge it seems that besides the normal watch standees they also had the CIC as watchstanders. But their input was ignored. I mean, if the OOD had a target why not ask CIC to give him a CPA?

All this leads me to believe that the guy in charge has largely isolated himself from his environment. Why?

Is it some kind of GOD complex? Something they get in their training? Is it a psychological defense because they are over loaded? Or one of a thousand other explanations?

But it also seems somehow tied to the concept of not following typical traffic patterns, an attitude that it's OK to blast around in the dark, hot dogging like a teenager. It's funny that I have not seen any reports from mariners of close calls. Are they being suppressed?

These are some of the questions I'd like to see an inquiry answer.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

One other thing not mentioned is that a naval vessel has to contend with monitoring not only the surface but overhead and below the surface too. That multiplies the work load many times over for them.

That is what the train for.

[Snowpetrel]

ARPA has a fairly slow update rate, or rather a long averaging cycle of around 38 seconds for low level accuracy and 3 minutes for full accuracy. So it lags a fair bit. And can have accuracy issues with the changing returns from big targets as their aspect changes. You always pick up course changes by eye much faster than the arpa shows. Then you need to wait a fair while for the info to settle before it is trustworthy again.

Course changes are one thing, they happen and then the ship settles reasonably quickly on her new heading. Changes in speed take a lot longer and screw up the arpa much more, plus visually they are harder to notice. This is one reason why the colregs prohibit a series of small alterations of course or speed, and numerous ARPA and radar assisted collisions have been caused by ignoring this.

The Navy tends to like speed changes, but in many cases it makes plotting (either by arpa or manually) with any accuracy impossible. All your CPA data becomes dangerously wrong, while still looking wonderfully precise.

Big Merchant ships almost never alter speed for collision avoidance. The engineers tend to get upset, and its usually less effective anyway. So its not something they are as used to dealing with, or expect.

So there is a close quarters situation developing. Containership alters to stb, warship increases speed. Due to the dynamic behavior of both vessels the ARPA is misleading the bridge teams.

AIS tends to compute this stuff quicker, having near realtime updates (class A at least) when maneuvering. But even so it can't predict the final outcomes ahead of time and is still misleading during manouvering stituations.

[hpeer]

Snow
Re AIS:

I don't think the issue is accuracy, its awareness.

Consider the Porter incident, they didn't even know there was a second ship. Did it or show up on AIS?

Is it good enough to avoid collisions if you attempt to maintain 1nm minimum separation?

[Astrid]

Snowpetrel, might the range scale on the ARPA have been set wrong?