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I'm curious how much this is about "many small and unlikely failures leading to disaster", versus "they sailed into a big storm and were doomed". The usual narr

I'm curious how much this is about "many small and unlikely failures leading to disaster", versus "they sailed into a big storm and were doomed". The usual narrative with complex engineering disasters is the former. I'm wondering, for example, if everything else was going well with the ship, could they have survived such a close encounter with such a big storm? Or, if the engine was kept online, would that have changed anything? It seems to me that this situation went far beyond survivability, but it's hard to tell from the NTSB report.

BrentOzar 8y ago
The fact that the NTSB made 63 different recommendations tells you that it was a complex situation. Their goal is to increase the odds of survival - and 63 recommendations means there were a lot of things that could have turned this situation around just a little. Completely survivable? Maybe not, we’ll never know - but 63 different recommendations means this was a really bad combination of things the crew couldn’t have overcome on their own. Contrast this with a typical plane crash investigation which produces, at worst, a dozen or two recommendations - that tells you a lot. I would have thought the maritime industry would have been better prepared. So sad what the crew was up against.
rdiddly 8y ago
It seems like both... don't sail into a hurricane and there's no problem, right? But even their sailing into it was an interaction of many factors -- the captain's insistence, predicated on preferring the graphically vivid but outdated weather maps, and on disregarding the opinions of his officers, and on each of them independently failing to be sufficiently assertive (or even convinced of the danger themselves) to change his mind. There's also the broken anemometer, but I'm tempted to discount that, because it was obvious the wind was from port, indicating (in any counter-clockwise-rotating storm, i.e. any cyclone in the northern hemisphere) you are headed right into it. Winds should have been from astern if you were trying to cross in front of it. When you're convinced of something, sometimes you can stare right at contrary evidence and disregard it. But who knows, maybe having an accurate wind reading would've jogged some brain cells. If the engine was kept running as you say, that might have helped them, but only if they had used it to turn and get the hell out of there. If the captain insists on using it to continue driving straight into a hurricane, it just makes things worse. And then of course there's all the water they took on, limiting their getaway speed so to speak. In a certain way it seems like the point of no return was the rupture of the fire water inlet. No telling what the ship could've withstood if they had secured the load better and secured the hatches better. Unfortunately all you get with this kind of hindsight is all the things that went wrong, not necessarily what would've had to go right.

BrentOzar 8y ago

The fact that the NTSB made 63 different recommendations tells you that it was a complex situation. Their goal is to increase the odds of survival - and 63 recommendations means there were a lot of things that could have turned this situation around just a little. Completely survivable? Maybe not, we’ll never know - but 63 different recommendations means this was a really bad combination of things the crew couldn’t have overcome on their own. Contrast this with a typical plane crash investigation which produces, at worst, a dozen or two recommendations - that tells you a lot. I would have thought the maritime industry would have been better prepared. So sad what the crew was up against.

rdiddly 8y ago

It seems like both... don't sail into a hurricane and there's no problem, right? But even their sailing into it was an interaction of many factors -- the captain's insistence, predicated on preferring the graphically vivid but outdated weather maps, and on disregarding the opinions of his officers, and on each of them independently failing to be sufficiently assertive (or even convinced of the danger themselves) to change his mind. There's also the broken anemometer, but I'm tempted to discount that, because it was obvious the wind was from port, indicating (in any counter-clockwise-rotating storm, i.e. any cyclone in the northern hemisphere) you are headed right into it. Winds should have been from astern if you were trying to cross in front of it. When you're convinced of something, sometimes you can stare right at contrary evidence and disregard it. But who knows, maybe having an accurate wind reading would've jogged some brain cells. If the engine was kept running as you say, that might have helped them, but only if they had used it to turn and get the hell out of there. If the captain insists on using it to continue driving straight into a hurricane, it just makes things worse. And then of course there's all the water they took on, limiting their getaway speed so to speak. In a certain way it seems like the point of no return was the rupture of the fire water inlet. No telling what the ship could've withstood if they had secured the load better and secured the hatches better. Unfortunately all you get with this kind of hindsight is all the things that went wrong, not necessarily what would've had to go right.