US Navy ship collides with oil tanker in Strait of Hormuz

reply to post by buddha

or are you telling us the US navy are total dorks?

I love how everyone assumes the tanker was staffed by faultless individuals.

No sane ship captain would allow his ship to collide with another ship.

I do not know if the status of DDG 78 prior to the collision was a fault of the crew, captain, or anyone in particular. But I do know that the tanker did not have much in the way of excuses for why she failed to notice the destroyer, as I am led to believe radio and visual signals were given.

Why the tanker failed to heed these, and why the destroyer was in the predicament she was to begin with - are questions that I'd be trying to answer if I was leading the investigation.

I do know that it is not uncommon for many ships to operate without functional equipment that is required to do business with most nations. The paperwork is fudged, the inspectors beguiled, or the equipment neglected following an inspection. You usually find this with ships from Third World operators, not usually as much from the more developed operators out of Japan - but it does happen.

all the EX sailors blaming the tanker.

It's pretty difficult to explain how you ran into the side of a 600-foot long ship with a sideways skyscraper. Tankers aren't the most maneuverable things in the world - but even a few degrees course correction mere minutes from the projected impact would have been more than enough to avoid this.

Its the tanker Fault for buying Oil there.

Not sure where you gather this from.

dont do it again or we may sink you next time...

Wouldn't be done even if a tanker captain went bonkers and spent a whole day and a half trying to ram a Destroyer. Said Destroyer would simply move out of the way - unless it was dead in the water, or something.

If such a scenario were to play out - we'd simply send in a boarding party to relieve the captain of his command over the oil tanker.

If push came to shove - the destroyer captain would rather be run down than to sink an oil tanker. You'll be in the headlines for a few days - and maybe a week or two later after the investigation concludes how it was you managed to get hit by a mobile sky-scraper on the ocean if you let it hit you. Sink it - and you'll start a month long international media frenzy as news outlets painstakingly cover the attempt to contain the spill, do photo-ops with oil-covered wildlife, and get shots of raving international protests.

There are very few scenarios in which I could see a tanker being sunk.