14 ms·

Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Collisions at Sea

221 points by sus_007 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
spyspy 9y ago
> More sleep and no more 100-hour workweeks for sailors That's the far more important solution.
- imglorp 9y ago
  There was a similar shakeup in the airline industry after tired pilots made fatal mistakes. Regs were adjusted to improve pilot sleep schedules.
  - travmatt 9y ago
    Have we instituted similar reforms for med students, or do they still compete on the basis of how little sleep they get?
    - imglorp 9y ago
      I don't know, but least doctors have a reason for 30 hour shifts: continuity of care improves patient outcome. If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch.
      - imnotlost 9y ago
        How about two or three doctors rotating in shifts? You get continuity of care, and more rested eyes looking at the same issues.
      - tedsanders 9y ago
        Can you share your sources for that? I've heard from medical residents that longer shifts do not result in better patient outcomes. The first paper I Googled agrees - it shows longer shifts for surgeons are not safer (longer shifts had 9.1% rate of complications/death and shorter shifts had 9.0% rate): http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724
        arkades 9y ago
        What the literature consensus largely shows is that there's a roughly equal swap between more sleep/shorter hours resulting in more mistakes due to hand-offs, and longer shifts resulting in more mistakes due to exhaustion. People in favor of longer shifts (read: docs who are long out of training and hospital admins that rely on residents as some of their most cost-effective man-hours) argue this shows that shorter shifts do not provide patient benefit, so fuck it. Those in favor of shorter shifts (read: pretty much everyone else) argue that if it's all equal for patients, we shouldn't be torturing residents (they're people, too), and that what this really shows is that the hand-off process is shit and needs to be improved upon. More sleep and better hand-offs are the road to better patient outcomes and happier (or at least sane) residents. And it's worth noting that the fight for sane hours has, thus far, only extended to first-year residents. Second+ are still dogmeat. ...and that's the literature position. From first-hand experience, though, I can tell you true horror stories. Mistakes due to hand-offs can be reduced; mistakes because one of my colleagues had a dissociative episode during a way-too-long period without sleep is harder to catch. But no one discloses lapses in sanity during these studies.
        yardie 9y ago
        Thank you! I kept hearing this "doctors need to be on call 30+ ,40+, 50+ hours because of handoff issues." Rarely has anyone mentioned they need to fix the handoff issue instead they prefer to keep the status quo.
        mattkrause 9y ago
        You also have to look at the baseline in these papers. Many of these studies do daft things like compare 24 and 28 hour shifts, neither of which is likely to be anywhere near optimal performance. Hand-off also seems like a thing that could be improved in many different ways, while fatigue is driven by fundamental limits of human physiology.
      - protonfish 9y ago
        I'd like to see data on that. I highly doubt anyone who hasn't slept in 30 hours can think straight.
        chrisseaton 9y ago
        I think they're on call for 30 hours. I don't think they literally stay up for 30 hours routinely. They have a mess where they can sleep.
        Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        Being on call for 30 hours might as well be the same. All it takes is one patient that has a few emergencies in a short time frame for the sleep to get messed up. We have better regulations for train engineers and conductors - all for safety. My uncles do it, and my brother did for a while. Always on call, but once their shift starts, there is a strict limit on how long their shift is and a strict limit to how long they have free to sleep.
        dnautics 9y ago
        there have definitely been cold, calculating, studies done on the cost/benefit of doctor sleep to shift changeover ratios, and I don't know if it's 30 hours, but i do recall that it does not comport to your 'feel good' notions of how much a doctor should sleep.
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Yeah, and when we had a newborn, we could "sleep when she sleeps". Guess how well we felt, and how capable we were of anything but the most routine tasks?
        kobeya 9y ago
        I would certainly not want my doctor or surgeon to be as “alert” as a new parent..
        9y ago
      - thearn4 9y ago
        I understand the issue with continuity of care, but to be honest that sounds like a communication problem at its core rather something that absolutely can only be addressed with aggressive scheduling.
        FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        It is a communication problem, but it needs a good filter because you can generate so much information through the EMR and other systems feeding into it (even plain-text sentence generation which just string-interpolates data -- naturally this takes time to read and it builds up quickly). Plus, multiple people can contribute to the medical record simultaneously. Unfortunately the definition of a good filter is going to vary as much as workflows from hospital to hospital.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch. Every time my wife or I or my kid have been in the hospital, we've been there for more than 30 hours. So the problem still exists - someone still has to read up on our situation. I'd much rather those notes be written down by someone who isn't on their 26th hour awake.
        euyyn 9y ago
        > So the problem still exists It's obviously statistical. It exists, yes, but to a lesser extent.
      - amalag 9y ago
        I don't understand how that make sense. What if you have a patient who comes in at the end of a shift. Wouldn't it make more sense to have more overlap in order to transition patients? I think doctors egos wouldn't handle that well.
      - kwhitefoot 9y ago
        > continuity of care improves patient outcome. This is brought up in every such discussion. Is it really true that US and UK hospitals have better outcomes than EU/Scandinavian ones where the EU working time directive is taken at least a bit more seriously?
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  The problem is that increasing manning doesn't really contribute to the military industrial complex...so there isn't a real incentive to make room in the budget for additional personnel. When I was in the Navy we routinely had 100hr+ workweeks while in port and the older guys said it was the same back in the day.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - euyyn 9y ago
    Honest question from someone that has no idea: Does training in these shitty conditions help performance in case of war, where those conditions might be necessary?
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      No, they are there to break people and get them to rebond as a temp family. You really get to learn who is what kind of guy/girl doing repeated 100 hr weeks
      - euyyn 9y ago
        Is that an official reason, or speculation?
        moftz 9y ago
        Probably more along the lines of a ship requires X number of crew working 24 hours a day to run properly and the ship can only hold a crew of less than 3X (8 hours shifts, 7 days a week). It's not going to be a simple 9-5 job for everyone on the ship but there should at least be some scientific justification behind whatever shift scheduling the Navy decides on. Do people work better when doing long shifts with long breaks in between or short shifts with short breaks? Can people doing day shifts work longer than people doing night shifts? Do people work better with regular shifts or with ones in different lengths? It's obviously going to be different for every position, anyone making critical decisions shouldn't be overworked but the guy cleaning toilets isn't going to do too much damage being tired. It all boils down to how much can you work someone until it becomes an issue.
- hectorr1 9y ago
  It's actually much worse than that. At sea, those with operational responsibilities don't work a normal day or week. Not only are you working over 100 hours, but you destroy your circadian rhythm. While it shows 23 hours of sleep in every 72, that's under optimal conditions when things aren't breaking and operations / drills aren't interrupting everything. This is what my full 72 hour rotation looked like in 5 on / 10 off: DAY 1: 0600: Wake up, shower/shave, breakfast, make rounds to Engineering and Combat to get situational updates, head to bridge for turnover. 0700-1200: Watch 1200-1300: Lunch, maybe some personal time 1300-1700: Work, maybe catch a nap for an hour (1) 1700-1800: Dinner, or skip it for a workout 1800-1900: Intel Brief 1900-2100: Work, personal time, or nap 2100-2200: Coffee, round for watch, get to bridge early to adjust eyes 2200-0200: Watch DAY 2: 0200-0700: Sleep (5) 0700-0800: Breakfast 0800-1100: Work 1100-1200: Lunch and rounds 1200-1700: Watch 1700-1800: Dinner 1800-1900: Intel brief 1900-0100: Sleep (6) DAY 3: 0100-0200: Coffee, rounds, more coffee, turnover 0200-0700: Watch 0700-0800: Breakfast 0800-1200: Work, maybe nap (3) 1200-1300: Lunch 1300-1600: Work 1600-1700: Dinner, turnover 1700-2200: Watch 2200-0600: Sleep (8)
  - xapata 9y ago
    Have they stopped dispensing amphetamines? My father's experience was that several crew members became addicted, including one of the ship's doctors.
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - revmoo 9y ago
    I got to get my life together, this is practically my schedule.
bradleyjg 9y ago
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo... "For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers. But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold. “The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen. After 2003, each young officer was issued a set of 21 CD-ROMs for computer-based training — jokingly called “SWOS in a Box” — to take with them to sea and learn. Young officers were required to complete this instructor-less course in between earning their shipboard qualifications, management of their divisions and collateral duties. ... In recent years, there’s been a push to re-energize SWO training. And on paper, they’ve got a course for every level of SWO — all the way up to the commanding officer level. Young SWOs now get about nine weeks in fleet concentration area classrooms. Generally, these new officers report to their ship first and then get a seat in school within the first couple of months on board. But, Parin said, “only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills. The rest is damage control and other material division officer-specific training.” Another eight weeks of school comes between an officer’s first and second division officer tours. They are taught more advanced skills, but still, the professional mariner instruction isn’t what it should be, Hoffman said. That’s still just a fraction of the original training."
- mmanfrin 9y ago
  Skipping on training to save money -- with a budget the size of nearly half the world's military expenditure.
  - drawnwren 9y ago
    Unfortunately the way that it gets handed to the service components, they can only spend the money on what it's budgeted for. This leads to situations where training budgets are very tight but you have a huge office supply budget. So units buy $1000 chairs but can't afford to send their troops to training
mschuster91 9y ago
> A Government Accountability Office report from May said sailors were on duty up to 108 hours each week. ... and people are wondering why accidents happen. If one sailor on the bridge is overworked, there are his fellow sailors to correct the mistakes that are bound to happen, but when the entire bridge is next to collapse from sleep deprivation, that's next to impossible.
- imnotlost 9y ago
  We love tax cuts more than operational safety.
yardie 9y ago
As a transoceanic sailor I'm still shocked by how little our Navy knows about seamanship. Complete disregard for colregs, disregard for other vessels in confined spaces, and just general lack of knowledge on navigation. From talking with other sailors our Navy is like the elephant in a china shop. An angry, armed elephant deathly afraid of little mice. USCG on the other hand are pretty great. Ocean rescue gives way to drug enforcement so I know not everyone has a good experience with them. My few interactions with the Coast guard have been courteous and uneventful.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  The difference there is the level of detail in annual or semi-annual colregs certification exams; In the navy you have a multiple guess exam. I have been told, in the coast guard you answer the question and then write the full rule or applicable paragraph of the rule longhand.
- matwood 9y ago
  Sounds like I had more instruction on water navigation in my HS drivers ed class than some officers in the Navy are getting. Not a good place to be when piloting large vessels in potentially tight and dangerous conditions.
ranger207 9y ago
Something's going to have to give here. Between budget and scope, one or the other will have to change in order to increase staffing, sleep, training, and maintenance and reduce errors like this. It's only going to get worse in the future, too. China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing. Procurement of the F-35, Columbia SSBNs, FFX frigates, and Ford class carriers (and that's only the Navy!) means that there's going to be less budget to go around too. Something is going to have to give.
- vkou 9y ago
  > China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing. Maybe it's time to realize that the global imperial ambitions of a country of 350 million people are not sustainable in the 21st century. Oh, who am I kidding, of course that will never happen.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - wahern 9y ago
    Counter balancing those "threats" wouldn't be a problem if the U.S. was't constantly engaged in warfare in the Middle East. But the fact that 1) conservatives are more interested in shifting attention back to Iran than dealing with North Korea, and that 2) both conservatives and liberals criticized Obama's restraint in Syria, tells you everything you need to know about the ultimate, unfortunate fate of American foreign policy. People criticized Obama for drawing a red line wrt chemical weapons in Syria and then flinching. But IMO his decision to flinch is probably one of the greatest acts of presidential leadership we've seen in generations. Obama's mistake was drawing the red line, but that's something every American president does almost habitually, paving the way to normalizing the bombasticism of Donald Trump. Not only did Obama realize his mistake, he resisted making an even larger mistake just to save face and supposedly preserve our deterrent (as if it wasn't obvious we were already overextended), despite universal advise to do otherwise. In many respects it's on par with Kennedy's decision to cut a deal with Khrushchev, though the optics are less flattering this time around. The atrocities in Syria are morally repugnant. But while most European allies criticized Obama for not getting the U.S. more involved, precisely none has chosen to get more involved themselves. The situation is fundamentally intractable given the politics and level of commitment that could be sustained. Obama stood up, _alone_, to make the hard choice. It took Obama years to develop that kind of spine. It's a shame he had to go because that's something we sorely need when it comes to North Korea. Like Syria, North Korea is a losing proposition every which way, except with greater global consequence. Either 1) there's a major war with hundreds of thousands or even millions dead (including tens of thousands of Americans) within days or weeks, 2) global nuclear proliferation as North Korea exports nuclear technology, or 3) a momentous quid pro quo with China that shifts the balance of power in the Pacific to them in exchange for regime change in North Korea. The best outcome for both America and the world is #3, but there is no mainstream American leader willing to even conceive of that bargain, let alone provide the leadership and intelligence necessary to negotiate those waters. Instead we're likely to get #2, which will merely provide more fodder for American chickenhawks to pursue fanciful military expeditions around the world. Nothing is more certain to lead to the swift end of the American era.
rbanffy 9y ago
It's absolutely ridiculous military vessels, that should have excellent awareness of their surroundings, would collide with a very large piece of metal that was not designed to be stealth in any way.
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  You are assuming these collisions occurred because the Navy crews didn't know the other ships were there. My understanding is that the US vessels knew the other ships were there and did not react properly.
  - mabub24 9y ago
    It was probably similar to what happened when the USS Porter collided with another vessel in the Strait of Ormuz. You can hear how confusing the situation was from this audio recording. Apparently, the work environments can be extremely stressful and that can lead them to become toxic. http://gcaptain.com/intense-bridge-conversation-porter/ http://gcaptain.com/intense-bridge-conversation-porter/
  - 21 9y ago
    It's still ridiculous. It reminds me of the old joke "smart-phones are good at everything except at making a phone call".
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    That the crew does not know how to avoid a collision and/or of what their ship can and cannot do is still pretty unbelievable. That they didn't evacuate the compartments that would be crushed indicates that either they didn't know the collision would happen or didn't know where it would impact and how bad it'd be. All this is appalling.
Theodores 9y ago
We had a video posted from a merchant vessel not so recently. They have a 4-8 watch, a 8-12 and a 12-4 watch where juniors learn on the 4 to 8 watch, which happens twice daily. This works pretty well compared to the U.S. Navy. I don't hear a lot about merchant seamen needing more training budget or needing to use pen and paper.
- rtkwe 9y ago
  They also have a much simpler ship to deal with.
  - coldcode 9y ago
    More fancy things but its still a boat in the water with a rudder and propellors that's moving.
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      So is a pontoon boat but that doesn't mean there's much useful comparison to extract between them.
leroy_masochist 9y ago
FWIW, I caught up with a SWO buddy the other day and his take on this was that there are two ultimate culprits for the recent collisions: 1) A "check-the-box-and-cover-your-ass" mentality with regard to the implementation of annual training. The basic gist is that the (very necessary to some extent) training designed to get young sailors to not get DUIs, manage their finances properly, not beat their spouses, etc has gotten more and more onerous every year, with more mission-focused training being sacrificed in order to make hours available. By my friend's telling, there has been something of an arms race in that every fleet-level commander has to do something quantifiable to put as a fitness report accomplishment (eg, "restructured and implemented DUI awareness training; liberty incidents fell 13% during tenure in billet"). 2) The tracking systems that Navy ships have turned on in peacetime started getting turned off 10-15 years ago and the original impetus was the IGRC using this data to antagonize Navy ships (ie get position/speed/bearing of a destroyer over horizon, then send a couple of speedboats to cross its bow 300 meters ahead at 40 kts). This was briefly mentioned in article as something that is getting reinstated following recent collisions. Interestingly he said that the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time (analogous to the concept of learning much more in your first 4 months as a junior engineer than you did during your senior spring semester as a CS student).
- Y_Y 9y ago
  For those wondering like me, SWO is surface warfare officer (someone who manages shipboard systems) and IGRC is the Iranian navy.
- deleted 9y ago
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- pdonis 9y ago
  > the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time My experience when I went through the SWO course (never mind how long ago that was...) was that there were useful experiences in there, but a lot could have been cut. The most useful experience I remember was actually driving YP craft (YP stands for "yard patrol") from Newport up to Massachusetts Bay and back, with us junior officers taking turns manning all of the bridge crew positions, including those that are manned by enlisted sailors on a combat ship. That's something a junior officer won't get to do on a combat ship, and it was quite an eye opener for many of us. It also let us encounter a lot of situations similar to the ones that caused these collisions (we transited the Cape Cod Canal, both ways, which is quite narrow and quite crowded, as are the approaches to it on both sides) under the supervision of experienced sailors and officers.
drawnwren 9y ago
This seems like a UI issue more than anything. How do we even have multi million dollar ships that are capable of violating the rules of the sea? It seems like an ideal situation for a driver assistance type package that is able to be removed during combat operation.
- gaius 9y ago
  How do we even have multi million dollar ships that are capable of violating the rules of the sea? If shipping lanes were like roads that might be possible, but they aren't and it isn't, because COLREGS don't work like that.
  - drawnwren 9y ago
    They arent, however the rules of the sea are very simple. More importantly a calculation of probability of collision between two slow moving giant metal objects would be easy.
    - gaius 9y ago
      Ever been a skipper manoeuvring in confined waters with multiple vessels around you? I have, and it is at least an order of magnitude more complex than anything I've ever encountered on the road.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Still; assuming you can get good, real-time estimates of mass, rough shape, position and velocity vector of each of the ships around you, making a system to compute probable collisions sounds like a small undergrad-level project at best. What are the obvious things I'm missing here?
        gaius 9y ago
        You would need to account for drag and windage. Basically know everyone's hull shape and CFD it! And the seabed under them. At a distance it's easy - but in confined waters it gets very complicated very quickly. I've seen situations where literally the only solution is, who do I collide with. In the case of the USN they have a hell of a lot more manoeuvrability than a freighter but they can't escape the laws o'physics...
deleted 9y ago
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pasbesoin 9y ago
Back when I did accounting for a few years, I routinely found more than one way to solve the problem at hand. And I cross-checked. I remember in particular one instance, where I spent a day tracking back to three garbage "test" orders that a development team was injecting into production (our live accounting systems), assuming no one would even notice in the midst of the normal "slop" in the system due to incorrect coding and habituation to "these systems are outdated/buggy/German/yadayadayada". I find it kind of unfathomable that e.g. a destroyer class ship would not have multiple means of knowing where it is -- founded upon real-world, what you can observe around you and in the sky, situational awareness. And that they would not be cross-checking these as a matter of routine. You're a war ship. Do you think e.g. the enemy is going to tell you before they take out or corrupt your satellite navigation? 'But we're not at war.' Well, you spend billions and billions each year on training exercises. How about some of the simplest, least expensive, and most direct training possible, on a routine basis? I.e. run your bridge and crew with a persistent eye towards ingraining the skills before you need them? Not constant bullsh-t schedules that deplete them and inhibit learning. (How well do you remember the day after pulling an all-nighter?) But skills that will prove critical, and the vigilance to be pro-active in using them. That includes training for stress -- including functioning during sleep deprivation. But not as a lifestyle. Anyway, same for me, in software. Cross-check. Don't assume. But a lot of what I've seen around me, is anything but that. Even and especially in our so-called profession. There are definitely professionals -- I've worked with some. Whether there is a well-defined, high-skilled profession? Yeah, that's a lot less clear. It seems the navy needs to be asking itself what is actually professional, as well.
jk2323 9y ago
This also may have something to do with it: http://www.voltairenet.org/article185860.html http://www.voltairenet.org/article185860.html See also: http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back-navigation-by-the-stars-for-officers http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back...
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
What about requiring military ships to illuminate their ships just like merchant ships? (TBH I think but I don't know for sure that the US ship in the singapore collision was unlit.)
geiseric 9y ago
I was Army and learned the old school way. Compass, Protractor and Map. Refused to completely trust GPS. It will fail you just when you really need it most. Army navigation is much easier than Navy, but same rule applies.

221 points by sus_007 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

spyspy 9y ago

> More sleep and no more 100-hour workweeks for sailors That's the far more important solution.

imglorp 9y ago
There was a similar shakeup in the airline industry after tired pilots made fatal mistakes. Regs were adjusted to improve pilot sleep schedules.
- travmatt 9y ago
  Have we instituted similar reforms for med students, or do they still compete on the basis of how little sleep they get?
  - imglorp 9y ago
    I don't know, but least doctors have a reason for 30 hour shifts: continuity of care improves patient outcome. If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch.
    - imnotlost 9y ago
      How about two or three doctors rotating in shifts? You get continuity of care, and more rested eyes looking at the same issues.
    - tedsanders 9y ago
      Can you share your sources for that? I've heard from medical residents that longer shifts do not result in better patient outcomes. The first paper I Googled agrees - it shows longer shifts for surgeons are not safer (longer shifts had 9.1% rate of complications/death and shorter shifts had 9.0% rate): http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724
      - arkades 9y ago
        What the literature consensus largely shows is that there's a roughly equal swap between more sleep/shorter hours resulting in more mistakes due to hand-offs, and longer shifts resulting in more mistakes due to exhaustion. People in favor of longer shifts (read: docs who are long out of training and hospital admins that rely on residents as some of their most cost-effective man-hours) argue this shows that shorter shifts do not provide patient benefit, so fuck it. Those in favor of shorter shifts (read: pretty much everyone else) argue that if it's all equal for patients, we shouldn't be torturing residents (they're people, too), and that what this really shows is that the hand-off process is shit and needs to be improved upon. More sleep and better hand-offs are the road to better patient outcomes and happier (or at least sane) residents. And it's worth noting that the fight for sane hours has, thus far, only extended to first-year residents. Second+ are still dogmeat. ...and that's the literature position. From first-hand experience, though, I can tell you true horror stories. Mistakes due to hand-offs can be reduced; mistakes because one of my colleagues had a dissociative episode during a way-too-long period without sleep is harder to catch. But no one discloses lapses in sanity during these studies.
        yardie 9y ago
        Thank you! I kept hearing this "doctors need to be on call 30+ ,40+, 50+ hours because of handoff issues." Rarely has anyone mentioned they need to fix the handoff issue instead they prefer to keep the status quo.
        mattkrause 9y ago
        You also have to look at the baseline in these papers. Many of these studies do daft things like compare 24 and 28 hour shifts, neither of which is likely to be anywhere near optimal performance. Hand-off also seems like a thing that could be improved in many different ways, while fatigue is driven by fundamental limits of human physiology.
    - protonfish 9y ago
      I'd like to see data on that. I highly doubt anyone who hasn't slept in 30 hours can think straight.
      - chrisseaton 9y ago
        I think they're on call for 30 hours. I don't think they literally stay up for 30 hours routinely. They have a mess where they can sleep.
        Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        Being on call for 30 hours might as well be the same. All it takes is one patient that has a few emergencies in a short time frame for the sleep to get messed up. We have better regulations for train engineers and conductors - all for safety. My uncles do it, and my brother did for a while. Always on call, but once their shift starts, there is a strict limit on how long their shift is and a strict limit to how long they have free to sleep.
        dnautics 9y ago
        there have definitely been cold, calculating, studies done on the cost/benefit of doctor sleep to shift changeover ratios, and I don't know if it's 30 hours, but i do recall that it does not comport to your 'feel good' notions of how much a doctor should sleep.
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Yeah, and when we had a newborn, we could "sleep when she sleeps". Guess how well we felt, and how capable we were of anything but the most routine tasks?
        kobeya 9y ago
        I would certainly not want my doctor or surgeon to be as “alert” as a new parent..
        9y ago
    - thearn4 9y ago
      I understand the issue with continuity of care, but to be honest that sounds like a communication problem at its core rather something that absolutely can only be addressed with aggressive scheduling.
      - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        It is a communication problem, but it needs a good filter because you can generate so much information through the EMR and other systems feeding into it (even plain-text sentence generation which just string-interpolates data -- naturally this takes time to read and it builds up quickly). Plus, multiple people can contribute to the medical record simultaneously. Unfortunately the definition of a good filter is going to vary as much as workflows from hospital to hospital.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch. Every time my wife or I or my kid have been in the hospital, we've been there for more than 30 hours. So the problem still exists - someone still has to read up on our situation. I'd much rather those notes be written down by someone who isn't on their 26th hour awake.
      - euyyn 9y ago
        > So the problem still exists It's obviously statistical. It exists, yes, but to a lesser extent.
    - amalag 9y ago
      I don't understand how that make sense. What if you have a patient who comes in at the end of a shift. Wouldn't it make more sense to have more overlap in order to transition patients? I think doctors egos wouldn't handle that well.
    - kwhitefoot 9y ago
      > continuity of care improves patient outcome. This is brought up in every such discussion. Is it really true that US and UK hospitals have better outcomes than EU/Scandinavian ones where the EU working time directive is taken at least a bit more seriously?
Caveman_Coder 9y ago
The problem is that increasing manning doesn't really contribute to the military industrial complex...so there isn't a real incentive to make room in the budget for additional personnel. When I was in the Navy we routinely had 100hr+ workweeks while in port and the older guys said it was the same back in the day.
- deleted 9y ago
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- euyyn 9y ago
  Honest question from someone that has no idea: Does training in these shitty conditions help performance in case of war, where those conditions might be necessary?
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    No, they are there to break people and get them to rebond as a temp family. You really get to learn who is what kind of guy/girl doing repeated 100 hr weeks
    - euyyn 9y ago
      Is that an official reason, or speculation?
      - moftz 9y ago
        Probably more along the lines of a ship requires X number of crew working 24 hours a day to run properly and the ship can only hold a crew of less than 3X (8 hours shifts, 7 days a week). It's not going to be a simple 9-5 job for everyone on the ship but there should at least be some scientific justification behind whatever shift scheduling the Navy decides on. Do people work better when doing long shifts with long breaks in between or short shifts with short breaks? Can people doing day shifts work longer than people doing night shifts? Do people work better with regular shifts or with ones in different lengths? It's obviously going to be different for every position, anyone making critical decisions shouldn't be overworked but the guy cleaning toilets isn't going to do too much damage being tired. It all boils down to how much can you work someone until it becomes an issue.
hectorr1 9y ago
It's actually much worse than that. At sea, those with operational responsibilities don't work a normal day or week. Not only are you working over 100 hours, but you destroy your circadian rhythm. While it shows 23 hours of sleep in every 72, that's under optimal conditions when things aren't breaking and operations / drills aren't interrupting everything. This is what my full 72 hour rotation looked like in 5 on / 10 off: DAY 1: 0600: Wake up, shower/shave, breakfast, make rounds to Engineering and Combat to get situational updates, head to bridge for turnover. 0700-1200: Watch 1200-1300: Lunch, maybe some personal time 1300-1700: Work, maybe catch a nap for an hour (1) 1700-1800: Dinner, or skip it for a workout 1800-1900: Intel Brief 1900-2100: Work, personal time, or nap 2100-2200: Coffee, round for watch, get to bridge early to adjust eyes 2200-0200: Watch DAY 2: 0200-0700: Sleep (5) 0700-0800: Breakfast 0800-1100: Work 1100-1200: Lunch and rounds 1200-1700: Watch 1700-1800: Dinner 1800-1900: Intel brief 1900-0100: Sleep (6) DAY 3: 0100-0200: Coffee, rounds, more coffee, turnover 0200-0700: Watch 0700-0800: Breakfast 0800-1200: Work, maybe nap (3) 1200-1300: Lunch 1300-1600: Work 1600-1700: Dinner, turnover 1700-2200: Watch 2200-0600: Sleep (8)
- xapata 9y ago
  Have they stopped dispensing amphetamines? My father's experience was that several crew members became addicted, including one of the ship's doctors.
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- revmoo 9y ago
  I got to get my life together, this is practically my schedule.

bradleyjg 9y ago

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swo... "For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers. But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold. “The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen. After 2003, each young officer was issued a set of 21 CD-ROMs for computer-based training — jokingly called “SWOS in a Box” — to take with them to sea and learn. Young officers were required to complete this instructor-less course in between earning their shipboard qualifications, management of their divisions and collateral duties. ... In recent years, there’s been a push to re-energize SWO training. And on paper, they’ve got a course for every level of SWO — all the way up to the commanding officer level. Young SWOs now get about nine weeks in fleet concentration area classrooms. Generally, these new officers report to their ship first and then get a seat in school within the first couple of months on board. But, Parin said, “only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills. The rest is damage control and other material division officer-specific training.” Another eight weeks of school comes between an officer’s first and second division officer tours. They are taught more advanced skills, but still, the professional mariner instruction isn’t what it should be, Hoffman said. That’s still just a fraction of the original training."

mmanfrin 9y ago
Skipping on training to save money -- with a budget the size of nearly half the world's military expenditure.
- drawnwren 9y ago
  Unfortunately the way that it gets handed to the service components, they can only spend the money on what it's budgeted for. This leads to situations where training budgets are very tight but you have a huge office supply budget. So units buy $1000 chairs but can't afford to send their troops to training

mschuster91 9y ago

> A Government Accountability Office report from May said sailors were on duty up to 108 hours each week. ... and people are wondering why accidents happen. If one sailor on the bridge is overworked, there are his fellow sailors to correct the mistakes that are bound to happen, but when the entire bridge is next to collapse from sleep deprivation, that's next to impossible.

imnotlost 9y ago
We love tax cuts more than operational safety.

yardie 9y ago

As a transoceanic sailor I'm still shocked by how little our Navy knows about seamanship. Complete disregard for colregs, disregard for other vessels in confined spaces, and just general lack of knowledge on navigation. From talking with other sailors our Navy is like the elephant in a china shop. An angry, armed elephant deathly afraid of little mice. USCG on the other hand are pretty great. Ocean rescue gives way to drug enforcement so I know not everyone has a good experience with them. My few interactions with the Coast guard have been courteous and uneventful.

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
The difference there is the level of detail in annual or semi-annual colregs certification exams; In the navy you have a multiple guess exam. I have been told, in the coast guard you answer the question and then write the full rule or applicable paragraph of the rule longhand.
matwood 9y ago
Sounds like I had more instruction on water navigation in my HS drivers ed class than some officers in the Navy are getting. Not a good place to be when piloting large vessels in potentially tight and dangerous conditions.

ranger207 9y ago

Something's going to have to give here. Between budget and scope, one or the other will have to change in order to increase staffing, sleep, training, and maintenance and reduce errors like this. It's only going to get worse in the future, too. China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing. Procurement of the F-35, Columbia SSBNs, FFX frigates, and Ford class carriers (and that's only the Navy!) means that there's going to be less budget to go around too. Something is going to have to give.

vkou 9y ago
> China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing. Maybe it's time to realize that the global imperial ambitions of a country of 350 million people are not sustainable in the 21st century. Oh, who am I kidding, of course that will never happen.
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- wahern 9y ago
  Counter balancing those "threats" wouldn't be a problem if the U.S. was't constantly engaged in warfare in the Middle East. But the fact that 1) conservatives are more interested in shifting attention back to Iran than dealing with North Korea, and that 2) both conservatives and liberals criticized Obama's restraint in Syria, tells you everything you need to know about the ultimate, unfortunate fate of American foreign policy. People criticized Obama for drawing a red line wrt chemical weapons in Syria and then flinching. But IMO his decision to flinch is probably one of the greatest acts of presidential leadership we've seen in generations. Obama's mistake was drawing the red line, but that's something every American president does almost habitually, paving the way to normalizing the bombasticism of Donald Trump. Not only did Obama realize his mistake, he resisted making an even larger mistake just to save face and supposedly preserve our deterrent (as if it wasn't obvious we were already overextended), despite universal advise to do otherwise. In many respects it's on par with Kennedy's decision to cut a deal with Khrushchev, though the optics are less flattering this time around. The atrocities in Syria are morally repugnant. But while most European allies criticized Obama for not getting the U.S. more involved, precisely none has chosen to get more involved themselves. The situation is fundamentally intractable given the politics and level of commitment that could be sustained. Obama stood up, _alone_, to make the hard choice. It took Obama years to develop that kind of spine. It's a shame he had to go because that's something we sorely need when it comes to North Korea. Like Syria, North Korea is a losing proposition every which way, except with greater global consequence. Either 1) there's a major war with hundreds of thousands or even millions dead (including tens of thousands of Americans) within days or weeks, 2) global nuclear proliferation as North Korea exports nuclear technology, or 3) a momentous quid pro quo with China that shifts the balance of power in the Pacific to them in exchange for regime change in North Korea. The best outcome for both America and the world is #3, but there is no mainstream American leader willing to even conceive of that bargain, let alone provide the leadership and intelligence necessary to negotiate those waters. Instead we're likely to get #2, which will merely provide more fodder for American chickenhawks to pursue fanciful military expeditions around the world. Nothing is more certain to lead to the swift end of the American era.

rbanffy 9y ago

It's absolutely ridiculous military vessels, that should have excellent awareness of their surroundings, would collide with a very large piece of metal that was not designed to be stealth in any way.

vonmoltke 9y ago
You are assuming these collisions occurred because the Navy crews didn't know the other ships were there. My understanding is that the US vessels knew the other ships were there and did not react properly.
- mabub24 9y ago
  It was probably similar to what happened when the USS Porter collided with another vessel in the Strait of Ormuz. You can hear how confusing the situation was from this audio recording. Apparently, the work environments can be extremely stressful and that can lead them to become toxic. http://gcaptain.com/intense-bridge-conversation-porter/ http://gcaptain.com/intense-bridge-conversation-porter/
- 21 9y ago
  It's still ridiculous. It reminds me of the old joke "smart-phones are good at everything except at making a phone call".
- rbanffy 9y ago
  That the crew does not know how to avoid a collision and/or of what their ship can and cannot do is still pretty unbelievable. That they didn't evacuate the compartments that would be crushed indicates that either they didn't know the collision would happen or didn't know where it would impact and how bad it'd be. All this is appalling.

Theodores 9y ago

We had a video posted from a merchant vessel not so recently. They have a 4-8 watch, a 8-12 and a 12-4 watch where juniors learn on the 4 to 8 watch, which happens twice daily. This works pretty well compared to the U.S. Navy. I don't hear a lot about merchant seamen needing more training budget or needing to use pen and paper.

rtkwe 9y ago
They also have a much simpler ship to deal with.
- coldcode 9y ago
  More fancy things but its still a boat in the water with a rudder and propellors that's moving.
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    So is a pontoon boat but that doesn't mean there's much useful comparison to extract between them.

leroy_masochist 9y ago

FWIW, I caught up with a SWO buddy the other day and his take on this was that there are two ultimate culprits for the recent collisions: 1) A "check-the-box-and-cover-your-ass" mentality with regard to the implementation of annual training. The basic gist is that the (very necessary to some extent) training designed to get young sailors to not get DUIs, manage their finances properly, not beat their spouses, etc has gotten more and more onerous every year, with more mission-focused training being sacrificed in order to make hours available. By my friend's telling, there has been something of an arms race in that every fleet-level commander has to do something quantifiable to put as a fitness report accomplishment (eg, "restructured and implemented DUI awareness training; liberty incidents fell 13% during tenure in billet"). 2) The tracking systems that Navy ships have turned on in peacetime started getting turned off 10-15 years ago and the original impetus was the IGRC using this data to antagonize Navy ships (ie get position/speed/bearing of a destroyer over horizon, then send a couple of speedboats to cross its bow 300 meters ahead at 40 kts). This was briefly mentioned in article as something that is getting reinstated following recent collisions. Interestingly he said that the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time (analogous to the concept of learning much more in your first 4 months as a junior engineer than you did during your senior spring semester as a CS student).

Y_Y 9y ago
For those wondering like me, SWO is surface warfare officer (someone who manages shipboard systems) and IGRC is the Iranian navy.
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pdonis 9y ago
> the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time My experience when I went through the SWO course (never mind how long ago that was...) was that there were useful experiences in there, but a lot could have been cut. The most useful experience I remember was actually driving YP craft (YP stands for "yard patrol") from Newport up to Massachusetts Bay and back, with us junior officers taking turns manning all of the bridge crew positions, including those that are manned by enlisted sailors on a combat ship. That's something a junior officer won't get to do on a combat ship, and it was quite an eye opener for many of us. It also let us encounter a lot of situations similar to the ones that caused these collisions (we transited the Cape Cod Canal, both ways, which is quite narrow and quite crowded, as are the approaches to it on both sides) under the supervision of experienced sailors and officers.

drawnwren 9y ago

This seems like a UI issue more than anything. How do we even have multi million dollar ships that are capable of violating the rules of the sea? It seems like an ideal situation for a driver assistance type package that is able to be removed during combat operation.

gaius 9y ago
How do we even have multi million dollar ships that are capable of violating the rules of the sea? If shipping lanes were like roads that might be possible, but they aren't and it isn't, because COLREGS don't work like that.
- drawnwren 9y ago
  They arent, however the rules of the sea are very simple. More importantly a calculation of probability of collision between two slow moving giant metal objects would be easy.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Ever been a skipper manoeuvring in confined waters with multiple vessels around you? I have, and it is at least an order of magnitude more complex than anything I've ever encountered on the road.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Still; assuming you can get good, real-time estimates of mass, rough shape, position and velocity vector of each of the ships around you, making a system to compute probable collisions sounds like a small undergrad-level project at best. What are the obvious things I'm missing here?
      - gaius 9y ago
        You would need to account for drag and windage. Basically know everyone's hull shape and CFD it! And the seabed under them. At a distance it's easy - but in confined waters it gets very complicated very quickly. I've seen situations where literally the only solution is, who do I collide with. In the case of the USN they have a hell of a lot more manoeuvrability than a freighter but they can't escape the laws o'physics...

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pasbesoin 9y ago

Back when I did accounting for a few years, I routinely found more than one way to solve the problem at hand. And I cross-checked. I remember in particular one instance, where I spent a day tracking back to three garbage "test" orders that a development team was injecting into production (our live accounting systems), assuming no one would even notice in the midst of the normal "slop" in the system due to incorrect coding and habituation to "these systems are outdated/buggy/German/yadayadayada". I find it kind of unfathomable that e.g. a destroyer class ship would not have multiple means of knowing where it is -- founded upon real-world, what you can observe around you and in the sky, situational awareness. And that they would not be cross-checking these as a matter of routine. You're a war ship. Do you think e.g. the enemy is going to tell you before they take out or corrupt your satellite navigation? 'But we're not at war.' Well, you spend billions and billions each year on training exercises. How about some of the simplest, least expensive, and most direct training possible, on a routine basis? I.e. run your bridge and crew with a persistent eye towards ingraining the skills before you need them? Not constant bullsh-t schedules that deplete them and inhibit learning. (How well do you remember the day after pulling an all-nighter?) But skills that will prove critical, and the vigilance to be pro-active in using them. That includes training for stress -- including functioning during sleep deprivation. But not as a lifestyle. Anyway, same for me, in software. Cross-check. Don't assume. But a lot of what I've seen around me, is anything but that. Even and especially in our so-called profession. There are definitely professionals -- I've worked with some. Whether there is a well-defined, high-skilled profession? Yeah, that's a lot less clear. It seems the navy needs to be asking itself what is actually professional, as well.

jk2323 9y ago

This also may have something to do with it: http://www.voltairenet.org/article185860.html http://www.voltairenet.org/article185860.html See also: http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back-navigation-by-the-stars-for-officers http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back...

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

What about requiring military ships to illuminate their ships just like merchant ships? (TBH I think but I don't know for sure that the US ship in the singapore collision was unlit.)

geiseric 9y ago

I was Army and learned the old school way. Compass, Protractor and Map. Refused to completely trust GPS. It will fail you just when you really need it most. Army navigation is much easier than Navy, but same rule applies.