Well yes either of those. By the way the sleeping quarters is ripped open, it looks like some may have been up against the wall when the two boats seperated ,but with no bed or floor beneath them. Now the bent in metal forms a ramp toward the ocean, so the person or corpse then falls into the ocean. So it seems that they have not counted corpses on board, and have little hope for anyone in the ocean. They are searching the ocean, but opening up the crushed metal may wait for forensics… There may be something unexpected to document …
Even if they were at a high level of EMCON, there is virtually no way that they didn’t have their running lights on.
It’s crowed as hell out there. I’m sure that the destroyer did see the container ship that ship and maybe a hundred others. At night. You turn to avoid on ship and you turn into another. You slow down and someone is coming up on you. I’m not saying that it’s impossible. But it’s harder than it seems from your living room with a cup of coffee.
Ad Astra has it right. Unless something very unusual happened, the OOW of the Fitzgerald is going to be in a world of pain. The damage to the starboard side of the Fitzgerald and the port bow of the Crystal strongly suggests the former was crossing the bow of the latter from the latter’s port side. That means the Fitzgerald should have given way.
However, there is one indication of some fault on the part of the Crystal. From the AIS track, it seems it turned to port about 15° about 3NM before the collision. It seems likely that the Fitzgerald was a crossing vessel at that time and Crystal should therefore have maintained course and speed. By the Colregs, in a crossing situation, the stand-on vessel should avoid turning to port. It may be that the Fitzgerald thought that the Crystal would be passing ahead, but didn’t notice the Crystal’s relatively subtle change of course to port, till it was too late.
There is almost no chance the vessels were unaware of each other.
There are a number of ways collisions occur despite full awareness. Surprisingly enough a common wry observation in the industry is that most collisions wouldn’t have happened if one or both of the vessels refrained from taking the evasive action they took.
A lot of collisions take place when ships do the maritime, ultra-high mass version of the “corridor dance” that people do when walking towards each other and both try to avoid the other by turning towards the same side. The difference being that if large ships do it, they sometimes can’t stop or turn before they hit.
How crowded is crowded? A ship every square mile? And how far should ships be from each other when safely passing in a crowded sea lane?
When 2 ships are overly close, or on paths to become overly close, do they normally attempt to communicate with each other?
It varies tremendously. The Mallaca Strait, the English Channel, the Singapore Strait are notoriously crowded. Other places far less so.
Communications? Sometimes. But in a crowded seaway that can make matters worse if there is no language in common or heavy accents and often there can be confusion about who is calling who.
There were transits that I would have given my left arm to have one ship ever square mile. There were times I bet we had 20 or more sometimes.
Reminds me of the story of the northern Indian reserve. It was isolated, difficult to reach even by ice road. There were exactly two vehicles in the whole reserve, they came in one winter - and they had a head-on collision that summer.
It sounds stupid and inept until you realize… here you have a pair of guys with no driver training. They’ve been driving all over the hard dirt streets and out into the bush, doing pretty good speeds in the open areas. Then suddenly, for the first time, someone is coming toward them with a relative closing speed of over 60mph. It’s like two people walking toward each other down the corridor - both swerve one way, then the other, until they walk collide.
The same here, only substitute slow maneuver response time for speed. Each side sees a disaster an takes evasive action, which takes a minute or so to become apparent, then realize the other has changed course also to make things worse not better. Based on the angle of collision - was the USN ship trying to turn back away from crossing in front, and almost made it to parallel when it was hit? Was the cargo ship meanwhile turning to go behind the crossing navy ship, only to find it U-turning back to reverse the crossing intent?
We shall see…
How fast were these vehicles traveling?
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I agree, no way was a USN vessel traveling in regular shipping lanes without running lights, or even with radio silence as far as using security frequency to contact other ships to avoid collisions. That would only be done, other in than actual war (like general war at sea), perhaps in a carefully controlled exercise area away from shipping lanes, and even then surely the exercise rules would be overridden for safety reasons if a merchant ship nonetheless blundered into the area.
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Indeed but the same token as 1., USN vessels besides not normally being restricted in any way from practicing safe navigation, normally don’t have as strict schedules as merchant ships either. They have more freedom to stay away from traffic where possible without worrying about schedule, and more people to look out and/or monitor sensors than the two people typically on watch on a merchant ship’s bridge if the captain hasn’t gone up and joined the watch because it’s a tricky area.
But a naval officer’s career isn’t mainly made up of safely navigating the ship. That’s something he or she must do when assigned or that career will likely end, and likewise the CO’s career in a case like this is highly likely is over for practical purposes even if he wasn’t directly involved. But there’s a lot more to a naval career than navigating a ship, including leading, coordinating, teaching the much larger team of generally less experience people again doing lots of stuff beside just navigating the ship. The merchant officer’s career is much more focused on day to day hands on operation of a ship. Licensed officers barely outnumber (if at all) unlicensed personnel nowadays.
IOW in cases like this there’s no particular reason to assume the naval vessel was less at fault than the merchant ship, though it could be in a particular case depending on the details.
The other basic and I would say still principal modern aid to avoiding collisions is the Automatic Radar Plotting Aid. The merchant ship surely has it, and the SPS-73 surface search radar on the DDG has this function, it qualifies as an International Maritime Organization ARPA according to the USN.
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=2100&tid=1287&ct=2
The ARPA automatically plots the courses of the ships in radar range, graphically displaying the closest point of approach along the extension of each ship’s current course at its current speed, with a warning if it’s too close.
In fact an issue that has arisen in some recent accidents is ships relying too much on AIS, especially considering ships which may not be transmitting, and neglecting radar watch and ARPA data.
In what way are court martials routine? A court martial will happen only after evidence of criminal wrong doing is uncovered. There are many other levels of inquiry and career ending punishment before you go all the way to court martial. Or do you mean an Article 32 hearing?
Even if the Captain wasn’t on the bridge, he’s responsible for the training and efficiency of the people who were. Either way, it’s probably a career-ending event.
When I took the screenshot, my cursor disappeared, but that tag is right in the middle of the western straightaway, just below the left corner of the tag. You can go to marinetraffic.com and it’ll show tags like that for every point on the track.
Big ships can behave unpredictably when sailing close to each other. My brother was a Radio Officer with P&O on bulk carriers. After a few near misses and a couple of relatively minor scrapes, they were forbidden to pass within five miles of a sister ship in the open ocean.
It’s tempting - two large ships from the same company steaming towards each other somewhere off The Cape. The cox will always be tempted to pass a few hundred metres away just so he can wave to his opposite number. The tendency is for them to be pulled in and with two 100,000 pls tonne ships, it is hard to get away. Also remember that they steer from the rear, so if you turn left, the stern moves right.
It is always a career ending event.
***Especially ***when it is a top of the line billion+ dollar ship that just came out of an upgrade.
There’s a training facility on a lake in France where captains are trained on scale models that mimic the behavior of large ships on smaller distance and time scales; their model ships look to be about 20 feet long, but they weigh many thousands of pounds and are equipped with a motor of just a couple of horsepower. Some good YouTube videos showing what odd things happen in shallow waters and near other ships.
Here’s one:
I had no idea that was a thing, but it’s both nifty and extremely clever. I think the video showing the scaled container ship passing a moored cargo vessel is particularly revealing. (It’s enhanced with an outline of the moored ship; the outline is fixed, so you can see how far the ship gets displaced by the passage.)
From the pictures you can not really tell who hit who. But as the Destroyer was damaged on the Starboard side and the tanker’s damage was on the port side this would indicate that both ships were probably going in the same general direction. I doubt a merchant ship could change speed and direction fast enough to ram a Destroyer. My swag the Destroyer was attempting to over take the container ship, planned to pass him then cut across the containership’s bow to the other side for some reason. I have watch Navy ships race around in restricted waters like a kid driving a hot rod. Who ever had the con of the destroyer probably miss judged the distance, or speed of the container ship. That is my uneducated swag.
I doubt there will be a court martial. There will be a board of inquire, they can recommend a court martial, letter of reprimand, or no blame or which officers to blame.