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Have this image of the Navy, strict protocols, attentive crew all responding quickly to the commands of a hardened captain. For this accident to happen, nothin

by tux1968 9y ago

Have this image of the Navy, strict protocols, attentive crew all responding quickly to the commands of a hardened captain. For this accident to happen, nothing close to that was going on. It's hard to comprehend just how many people had to drop the ball for this accident to happen.

mpyne 9y ago
An attentive crew responding quickly to orders is by no means incompatible to what happened here. The question is, who was in a position to know about the incoming container ship? And who was in a position to act on that knowledge? The helmsman would have promptly responded to an order to take evasive action, I'm sure, and the engineering crew would have very quickly "answered the bell" -- but the order was never given. In fact, the more there was a central point of focus within the watchteam (in this case the Officer of the Deck, not the Captain), the more likely it is for things like this to happen. If the OOD were to have been mistakenly convinced that the ACX Crystal was not a threat (whether due to its old course or because it was an overtaking vessel) then the OOD alone could have prevented a proper watchteam response. We've seen similar things with airline disasters, where a pilot loses their situational awareness and the crew failed to speak up in time. Sadly, I could easily come up with plausible and workable theories of how a Navy watchteam would have this slip through the cracks. They involve complacency, or contact density, or misapplication of the navigation "Rules of the Road", or a mixture of all of those. The hardest part to explain is how a lookout didn't spot the Crystal in the lead-up to the collision -- dark or not, she would have been lit up to some extent by her nav lighting alone, and can't have been overtaking so fast that there wouldn't have been minutes of warning.

mpyne 9y ago

An attentive crew responding quickly to orders is by no means incompatible to what happened here. The question is, who was in a position to know about the incoming container ship? And who was in a position to act on that knowledge? The helmsman would have promptly responded to an order to take evasive action, I'm sure, and the engineering crew would have very quickly "answered the bell" -- but the order was never given. In fact, the more there was a central point of focus within the watchteam (in this case the Officer of the Deck, not the Captain), the more likely it is for things like this to happen. If the OOD were to have been mistakenly convinced that the ACX Crystal was not a threat (whether due to its old course or because it was an overtaking vessel) then the OOD alone could have prevented a proper watchteam response. We've seen similar things with airline disasters, where a pilot loses their situational awareness and the crew failed to speak up in time. Sadly, I could easily come up with plausible and workable theories of how a Navy watchteam would have this slip through the cracks. They involve complacency, or contact density, or misapplication of the navigation "Rules of the Road", or a mixture of all of those. The hardest part to explain is how a lookout didn't spot the Crystal in the lead-up to the collision -- dark or not, she would have been lit up to some extent by her nav lighting alone, and can't have been overtaking so fast that there wouldn't have been minutes of warning.