Navy releases partial reports on McCain and Fitzgerald

The Navy has released the executive summary into the accidents involving the USS McCain and Fitzgerald.

USS Fitzgerald

According to the report the crew of the Fitzgerald did basically everything wrong, including crossing the bows of ships in the shipping lane they were in. As the ship crossed the shipping lanes, they failed to put the navigation patterns on the charts, failed to use AIS, failed to try to contact the ACX Crystal, failed to refine their radar displays, and the watch standers were all, literally, looking the other way. At one point, they crossed less than 650 yards in front of another ship, and at no point did the crew attempt to notify the captain, despite standing orders to do so.

As the Fitzgerald sailed into the busy waters near Japan it cut through a channel with specific rules for navigation, known as a a traffic separation scheme. The ship did not have the navigation patterns on its charts and repeatedly drove across the bow of ships exiting the channel.

The Fitzgerald’s commanding officer was in his cabin prior to the collision, which took place at 1:30 a.m.. The report documents numerous mistakes made by the officer of the deck, who is the main officer in charge of safe navigation while on watch.

At one point, the Fitz crossed the bow of an oncoming merchant ship at a range of less than 650 yards — fewer than four ship-lengths — but the officer of the deck never informed the captain, a violation of standing orders that requires the skipper to be summoned to help oversee the hazardous conditions.

USS McCain

The McCain had a similar situation with the crew screwing up by the numbers, but this time the captain was on the bridge the entire time. As they heading into the channel, heading to port, the captain had been in charge for over four hours. He didn't order the sea and anchor detail until 6am, instead of 5am, when he should have, to give the crew extra rest. He later noticed that the helmsman was having trouble keeping the ship on course, so he ordered a second helmsman to help, by taking control of the prop controls. Instead they shifted the helm and speed controls to the lee helm, which caused confusion and created the mistaken impression that they had lost rudder control.

Four minutes prior to collision the crew was troubleshooting a mechanical failure, when there wasn't one. The captain ordered the speed reduced to five knots, but only the port shaft was reduce, leaving the starboard shaft at 20 knots. Steering was ordered shifted to aft steering, which wasn't manned because they weren't at sea and anchor. In the three minutes before collision their steering configuration was changed five times.

It was just before dawn when the McCain headed into the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest waterways in the world. The ship’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, had been on the bridge overseeing navigation in the heavily trafficked area near Singapore for more than four hours when the accident occurred at 5:23 a.m.

The failures on McCain began hours before accident.

Sanchez had decided to give his crew some extra rest and delayed orders putting his crew on what is known as sea and anchor detail, which requires more sailors and puts the ship at a higher state of readiness. That includes a bulked up navigation team, a full suite of lookouts and a master ship driver on the bridge.

www.defensenews.com...

a reply to: Zaphod58

That crunching noise you just heard was the careers of many men and women coming to sudden stop.

I wonder if they'll even get to retire...? Hopefully not.

Many failures on many levels. Very unfortunate but avoidable accident.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks for sharing this Zaphod, it is highly interesting and very......scary (no really).

With such widespread failings, is that a training issue do you think? Or just a complete disinterest in their jobs? Both of which are not good!

I mean they really have failed at every aspect on both ships. Do we think Navy top brass are currently keeping their heads down and looking very glum?!

a reply to: Flavian

It's a lack of training in Seventh Fleet. They've admitted that they push maintenance and training back to keep the ships at sea as required. They see more sea time than any other fleet. Quite a few people have been relieved or told they are being passed over for what should have been their next command.

a reply to: Flavian

Do we think Navy top brass are currently keeping their heads down and looking very glum?!

Hopefully not. Instead, they should be tearing around fixing this before more young sailors get killed through avoidable mishaps like this.

There should be some Admirals fearing for their retirements.

[sarc] But the Ring Knockers association will prevent that catastrophe. [/sarc]

a reply to: Zaphod58

I guess if nothing else it's a serious wake up call for the Seventh Fleet.

I'm also willing to bet that the Army and Air Force top brass are absolutely loving this report given the climate of competition for Defence spending.

Lack of training my ass! They literally did everything opposite of what they are supposed to do, almost as if they didn't have control of the ship. If that was the case, do you think we would ever in a million years be told the truth?

a reply to: jaws1975

And what do you think happens when you don't take time to refresh training, or don't train them properly in the first place?

a reply to: Zaphod58

Occams razor would say they didn't have control of the ship! How does refreshing training help with the most basic of tasks, like using a radio to respond to the ACX Crystal? You are doing a disservice to the men and women of the US Navy by suggesting that they don't know how to do the simplest aspects of their jobs.

a reply to: jaws1975

Yes, because all military members do their job perfectly every single time, and never make mistakes. Occam has nothing to do with actual investigation. Crews that are overworked, such as they see in Seventh Fleet are more likely to make mistakes than crews that aren't. Crews that train constantly, unlike Seventh Fleet, are less likely to make mistakes.

Military crews are still humans, and they still make mistakes. I've seen some incredibly stupid mistakes made by military crews, such as putting your NVG case in front of the control column to hold the elevators up out of the way, and forgetting they were there. Or pulling an ejection handle to close the canopy and blowing it off the aircraft. Or turning too hard and causing a plane to crash. Just because they're US Navy doesn't suddenly make them perfect.

/a reply to: Zaphod58

Yes, because all military members do their job perfectly every single time, and never make mistakes.

Did I say that, you are confusing never making a mistake to a series of mistakes by both officers and sailors.

Is it impossible that a foreign actor has developed the technology to take over a ship electronically?

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: jaws1975

Yes, because all military members do their job perfectly every single time, and never make mistakes. Occam has nothing to do with actual investigation. Crews that are overworked, such as they see in Seventh Fleet are more likely to make mistakes than crews that aren't. Crews that train constantly, unlike Seventh Fleet, are less likely to make mistakes.

Military crews are still humans, and they still make mistakes. I've seen some incredibly stupid mistakes made by military crews, such as putting your NVG case in front of the control column to hold the elevators up out of the way, and forgetting they were there. Or pulling an ejection handle to close the canopy and blowing it off the aircraft. Or turning too hard and causing a plane to crash. Just because they're US Navy doesn't suddenly make them perfect.

What are the odds that everybody on deck doesn't know how to do their job? In this day and age where my freaking car GPS won't shut up about me missing a turn, you expect me to believe a multi-billion dollar destroyer just accidentally runs into other boats.... TWICE?

There is something else going on here besides lack of training.

a reply to: Edumakated

Exactly!

They think we are so stupid that they can come out and say it was a lack of training that caused this, give me a freaking break!

a reply to: jaws1975

So instead of a group of sailors who were, from all accounts, either 1) unable to follow procedure, almost as if they were not trained properly, or 2) criminally negligent which leads directly to the death of their fellow sailors.

Some foreign power though, apparently, has the power to hack all the systems of the ship(s), including apparently, the brains of the watch standers, and make the ship(s) crash. You do know, do you not, that the ships can be steered manually? So, too, can the engines... Why didn't they, in essence, just unplug themselves from the "hacked" electronic brains, and use their own?? Which means looking out the damned window and seeing with their own little eye-balls, the world around them.

Ill-trained, certainly ill-supervised, crews are almost certainly to blame, not some super-secret "enemy" computer hacker. Are there folks out there with the wherewithal to do something like hack a warships systems--oh, yes, I suppose there are, but there are also folks within the military, rather smart ones, too, who's sole job is to prevent such occurrences.

Bad training, and worse leadership, came together to create a situation on two ships that that same bad training was unable to handle.

Or super-hacker.

Bad training in an emergency will lead people to doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the right moment guaranteed to make the problem worse. Ever watch people drive on ice or snow? Car starts slipping/sliding, what does the driver, almost invariably, do? Locks the brakes up. Doing exactly the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. What happens then? Collision with another car, moving or parked, or off the road--seldom anything good.

That is, exactly, the scenario that played out on those ships.

Lack of work ethic. Short cuts and lack of attention to details makes the job easier, for a while.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: jaws1975

So instead of a group of sailors who were, from all accounts, either 1) unable to follow procedure, almost as if they were not trained properly, or 2) criminally negligent which leads directly to the death of their fellow sailors.

Some foreign power though, apparently, has the power to hack all the systems of the ship(s), including apparently, the brains of the watch standers, and make the ship(s) crash. You do know, do you not, that the ships can be steered manually? So, too, can the engines... Why didn't they, in essence, just unplug themselves from the "hacked" electronic brains, and use their own?? Which means looking out the damned window and seeing with their own little eye-balls, the world around them.

Ill-trained, certainly ill-supervised, crews are almost certainly to blame, not some super-secret "enemy" computer hacker. Are there folks out there with the wherewithal to do something like hack a warships systems--oh, yes, I suppose there are, but there are also folks within the military, rather smart ones, too, who's sole job is to prevent such occurrences.

Bad training, and worse leadership, came together to create a situation on two ships that that same bad training was unable to handle.

Or super-hacker.

Bad training in an emergency will lead people to doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the right moment guaranteed to make the problem worse. Ever watch people drive on ice or snow? Car starts slipping/sliding, what does the driver, almost invariably, do? Locks the brakes up. Doing exactly the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. What happens then? Collision with another car, moving or parked, or off the road--seldom anything good.

That is, exactly, the scenario that played out on those ships.

The reason I don't buy the training is that we aren't just talking about one person not doing their job. We are basically talking about all of the people not doing a job properly. You have multiple people and redundancies on the bridge and not one mofo up there knew how to avoid another massive ship? A multi billion dollar destroyer is being driven by a Uber driver now manually? No GPS? No collision warning? No communication? Even if we buy all the tech was turned off, we still have to believe that none of the dozen or so people on the bridge knew how to avoid the collision and all of them just happened to be incompetent at the same time. Then we have to believe this exact scenario plays out TWICE.

Nah bro... gtfoh which that nonsense.

Sorry, my spidey sense is not buying the "official story". I'm not saying the ship was hacked or anything, but that I don't buy this was just some accident as a result of bad training.

a reply to: seagull

Why didn't they, in essence, just unplug themselves from the "hacked" electronic brains, and use their own?? Which means looking out the damned window and seeing with their own little eye-balls, the world around them.

Why, because of poor training, lol

No member of the bridge watch team, including the commander and executive officer, had the proper training to operate the ship’s control console in event of a steering failure.

link

a reply to: Edumakated

You couldn't even begin to imagine how many times I watched, first hand, people that were well trained and experienced, or were even fresh out of tech school and should have known better, completely ignore their training and do something so incredibly stupidb it wasn't funny. Usually with really bad results.

You are under the impression that it takes the whole crew to screw up like this when the reality is that four or five people is all it takes. One person not reporting something, or thinking that something like AIS is active, when it's not, and they're in trouble.

a reply to: jaws1975

And exactly how do you think they get experienced in those situations? In know you seem to think they don't need to constantly train, but if you don't train for an emergency until it's muscle memory, when you get into an actual emergency, you screw up.