On August 12 this year the guided missile destroyer USS Porter crashed into a supertanker in the Persian Gulf. An audio of the bridge communications and its partial transcription included in the accompanying news article about it was released today.
I’ve never heard audio from an actual vessel, military or otherwise. The captain isn’t steering. That much I know.
Just as to general layout: who’s steering? Who regulates the speed? Who all on the bridge must things be repeated to? How could they (someone) not know which side of the ship got smashed? What does General Quarters mean?
I can report that internally I transpose the words “right” and “left”. I don’t have any problem knowing which side is which, and I don’t have any problem knowing which word is which. Under pressure, I don’t have the time to check, review, and correct, and those words slip out without re-transpostion.
I wonder if that tape has been compressed as it seems unlikely traffic would be that close together. He should of slowed and allowed the tanker to pass instead of maintaining full speed, I’ve never been on the bridge of a warship but would have expected cooler heads than you hear at the beginning of that tape.
Dunno about that location, but at a Traffic Seperation Scheme, as they have at busy locations, you are encouraged to cross the traffic lane at right angles, and discouraged from heading up the lane the wrong way.
That’s just so that every one knows what is going down.
There may also have been an additional consideration. It is actually dangerous to pass close beside a larger moving ship: it may cause you to roll over and sink. Depending on the seperation, the safety issue may not have been as clear as it would be if you were passing a truck.
A helmsman steers, receiving steering orders from the OOD (Officer of the Deck).
Typically, an enlisted man operates the EOT (Engine Order Telegraph - sends engine commands to the engine room), receiving orders from the OOD.
Steering and engine orders must obviously be given, as above. The audio makes it clear that the Captain is on the bridge (you can hear many exchanges between OOD and him). When he is, the OOD will routinely explain what he’s doing (unless it’s obvious).
That’s a mystery to me. The final orders before the collision make it clear they were turning left (to port) to avoid a ship on their right (to starboard).
“Man your battle stations.” Any emergency - or the threat thereof - on board calls for all men to be sent to their designated action stations, where each has been trained to deal with a wide range of problems that may affect a ship.
Another mystery.
The general tone of the exchanges are puzzling to someone who has spent time on a ship’s bridge (I was an OOD on board a steam-powered US destroyer). There’s much more tension and confusion than would be normal, and the OOD seems generally calmer than the Captain.
He was a fool who either had grossly insufficient knowledge and experience, or who was hot-dogging, for there was no excuse for crossing the bow of the close-by on-coming freighter at night.
What I wonder is why his ship pulled the same stunt with another freighter a few minutes earlier. Was it SOP to manoeuver this way, and if so, what was the captain’s hand in establishing or continuing to follow this SOP?
What suprises me it he was relieved in 3 weeks. I would have thought there would have been a temp relief when the ship docked.
That bridge really sounded confused. Maybe the captian had been therough the Panama canel too many times. Pilots there will move ships like the captian way tryingto do.
The destroyer was inadvertently crossing the bow of the second merchant following the decision to cross the first one. I suspect the CO at the end was attempting to turn left to parallel the merchant in the same direction when it became obvious they weren’t going to make it.
I’ve been OOD on a destroyer during a night SOH transit, and would like to think this wouldn’t have happened to me. I’m sure these guys were thinking the same thing though.
A question came to my mind. It has been over 40 years but, When the destroyer changed couser shouldn’t he have used the horn to signal the tanker of his intensions? I had to learn the rules of the road but I do not remember much of it.
I was also a former OOD (nuclear submarine), and I totally agree.
The CO sounds like he was contributing to the confusion on the bridge, instead of using his experience to calm things down and figure things out properly.
The OOD was making lots of good suggestions, but the CO kept overruling him. The OOD was in a tough spot–there wasn’t time to get into an in-depth discussion with the CO, so he basically acceded to everything the CO said.
They should have, but it was moot. It’s not a common thing to do, because two ships of that size shouldn’t be maneuvering within range of being able to hear it in the first place. And no matter what the destroyer signaled, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the merchant. It’s like a freight train on rails without brakes - it wouldn’t have been able to make any changes in the time available.
I was thinking if they had singled their intenssion maybe the tankers could have given a astern bell and slowed a knott or two. A ship’s horn should carry a few miles, so ships in restricted waters will be close enough to hear each others horns.
I knoe what it takes like to stop a tanker. I was on a T-2 tanker about 20,000 tons 6000 Shp. We ran into a fog bank. The bridge ran up a full astern bell to stop. It was at the end my watch. I went from full ahead to full astern. Turned to my relief and turned the engineroom over to him. I went up on deck to see how bad the fog was. After I was on deck a few minutes I heard the EOT ring up another bell, probably slow ahead. Time was about 10 to 15 minutes to go from 16 knotts to 2 knotts.
That CO is insane. I have never heard of anything like this ever. He is overtaking ships through a straight, let alone the SOH, which is narrow. We don’t have the audio from before the collision, which would be nice, to see if there is still a bit of confusion on the bridge as there was before the collision.
All in all, it doesn’t surprise me. I was in the Navy for eight years and a lot of superiors, both officer and enlisted, could barely do their job. An incredible amount of the day-to-day is handled by people who are extremely junior and really should not be doing it. Not because they don’t know what they are doing, in fact they usually do, but because they were not senior enough within the chain-of-command to make the decisions that they did. Eventually, most of us get out, leaving the Navy to be handled by the generally incompetent.
I am curious about one aspect, however. When the second oncoming ship appears, everyone seems surprised. Why would a ship navigating SOH after dark not have someone glued to the radar? (Or is that part of the Captain’s incompetence that he was either ignoring radar calls or had told them to not notify him?) The M/V Otowasan was inbound, so it should have been riding high, so there should not have been any way for the first ship to have screened it, (even assuming that our radar is so poor that one ship could actually screen a second one that was not hull-to-hull with it)? For that matter, once the ship was sighted, radar would have provided the clearest information that there was an imminent collision–particularly when illegally cutting across the tanker’s bow.
I think it could have been screened, and if the released audio is real-time then there wouldn’t have been enough time to develop a track. This was probably also a moonless night, so “sighted” means seeing a red light. You’re not too sure how far away it is or what its aspect is, and in this case it was probably pretty high above the horizon. Might have been mistaken for a plane ;).
The bridge team was occupied with the previous ship, and it wouldn’t be typical for the OOD to check the bridge radar and destroy his night vision. He’d be relying on the radar operators in CIC, who are typically 19-20 year-olds who are over-worked and exhausted, and likely aren’t thrilled with their decision to enlist. The CIC Watch Officer oversees them, kicking their comfy chairs when they fall asleep.
I can see how it would happen, but it probably wouldn’t have on a tightly-run ship. That’s why the CO is out of a job. I’ll be interested in the final results of the investigation.
