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USS FITZGERALD/ACX CRYSTAL collision (merged threads)

42K views 300 replies 61 participants last post by  kewl dude 
#1 ·
#280 ·
I was thinking navigational margins rather than financial, Barrie. Differential GPS, of course, does tempt the young and foolish to shave a little more sea off a voyage than Mrs. Varley would have allowed for her little boy. Whether the differential has yet been applied to the penalty in a court of law is more in your court than mine.
 
#282 ·
That's a pilot for you, Barrie! My take is that if a VLCC can transit the Channel then not much else should have a problem if adequately run. I had not thought of trying to berth her in Ramsgate. I don't think Grey funnel line has anything approaching that target aspect.

Might an unsatisfactory Brexit not alleviate that - If we assume larger vessels will have longer voyages and therefore longer delivery times these might be direct to large ports of entry where the customs formalities may be processed in a less frenetic fashion than ro-ro ports where the short sea traders are more likely to be and require matching clearance vehicle by vehicle.
 
#285 ·
McCann & Fitzgerald collisions

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

Looks like Touch Screen Controls were partially to blame for these collisions and the US Navy are going to try to fit Wheels and Telegraphs.

Imagine somebody on the Bridge shouts Hard a Port or Full Astern in a panic situation and there you are with this computer screen , " Is it Ctlr B for backwards, or pick from a multi layer drop down menu, then the screen freezes. And you have to get out of the pacman screen first.(Jester)
You cannot beat analogue manumatic and a mark one eyeball.

With all these 'dirty diesels' if the greens have their way we will be going back to windjammers, but you cannot make them out of wood, think of the Brazilian Rain Forests.
 
#286 · (Edited)
This is the balm of Gilead, music to the ears and commonsense writ large.

I struggle to understand how an electronic screen can ever be more helpful than the mark one eyeball - subject, of course, to the proviso that the mark one eyeball can actually see.

Nobody can deny the conveniences created by the electronics, but, hell's teeth, there are limits.

As a young Third Mate I have a vivid recollection of Captain Jack Berry of British & Continental Steamship Company's mv Egret, telling me, " The quickest way to get me on the bridge is for you to ring that telegraph. Use it."
 
#289 ·
Yes, but you would need to find some iron men to sail them, they have enough trouble finding wooden men now that know what they are doing.

In a recent email from an old colluege, it showed a young Mother running to her husband saying that baby has just started to speak as he had sent her a voicemail.
In another case a Mother tells her children that dinner was ready, they should go and wash their thumbs.
 
#291 · (Edited)
You will notice reading the quote that the USN desk jockeys sort of passed the blame to the shipyard for fitting these digital bridges as if they had no input on the design.
Do not the USN come up with a spec for a vessel , put it out to tender, review the proposals and follow the design and approve drawings before they even cut a piece of steel?

I was working at a shipyard in Tampa that converted 2 Matson container ships into craneships to add to their equivalent of the RFA . It was very similar to a commercial contract.
Later they got the contract to finish outfitting some TAO's , well the paperwork and copies of drawings that had to be sent daily to a myriad of alaphabet soup departments in Washington was enough to sink the ships. All these departments would have civilian contractors or subcontractors below them with everybody rubber stamping the previous persons rubber stamp . So the person at the lowest point actually doing the work decided it.
I once sat in a meeting of this mixed tribe of contractors and naval types and couldn't understand half of what they were talking about as every 3rd word was an acronym. As I had rewritten some technical manuals for the crane ships they gave me all the manuals for the TAO's to mind . I did get to
re-write a commercial manual for a small transfer pump into the format of the Navy system, it was a case of cut and paste (with scissors and glue stick ) and plagiarising, then the secretary typed it up . Nobody knew what they were looking at and it was the format they recognised, so got passed or was it past.
Needless to say the shipyard went bust trying to complete these two ships and was the 2nd one to as Bath Iron Works went bust constructing them previously. So with 3 shipyards being involved I just wonder how many teething troubles they had.
 
#293 · (Edited)
US Navy and Boeing both now 'in the same boat'!!!! Too smart by half.
To many clever dicks and geeks and too few who 'have 'been there and done that', perhaps.
It's the way of the world these days. Instead of designing and specifying equipment one just says 'I would like a widget' and Joe the Goose cobbles together what he perceives to be a widget and if it's cheap enough we buy it. At least that's the way of so many things here in Oz anyway.
KISS = keep it simple, stupid.
Barry sums it up beautifully (above).
(Cloud).
 
#295 ·
The specification is king however by the time the working spec is produced the contract spec., based on an outline from which little detail can be determined, has already been set in concrete - with real extras or real deletions each being warded an extra cost (just a lower extra cost when it is otherwise to the yard's benefit. I exaggerate I know). If the detail is important to the end user the place for that detail is in the Outline. It is the outline upon which the yards bid and therefore it is where their pencils are sharper. Extra's will be at the market rate and credits will be in full they never are once the contract is signed.

As for the GUI MM interface I have some sympathy with both camps. When criticising a cargo handling simulator that was entirely computer based (whereas ours was included a full CCR console mock up that was driven by the computer) it was pointed out that cargo handling was already controlled from the GUI and keyboard. That was then not very true (we were in competition) but it is now. How will the candidate who has been brought up on GUI and mouse interact with a console and 'proper' knobs and switches?

The processor (often without the redundancy inherent with, say an Autronica KM series discrete system or even Sunderland Forge, do it yourself alarm system), the simple VDU and then the full monty (GUI, Mice rollerballs etc.) were all introduced because it was cheaper (not to the owner who might well have thought he was buying into to tomorrow's better world) but to the builder. Innovation stopped there (for instance when graphics were introduced we had screen showing 'systems' but when a parameter was common to several 'systems', for instance Sea water temperature/pressure, that might be on a different seawater system screen). I am sure we have moved on and better after several years of the developers having input from knowledgeable users (do they?).

A console and mimic provided all the parameters and annunciators in one large 'package'. The information was there if not always immediately dragged to then operator attention.

The computer would have allowed us to present an alarm along with all the parameters implicated in a precise 'focus' on the event. We did not, perhaps we do now. Even more into the proceduralised age why is there not a screen available/inescapable presenting the operational procedures/CE's instructions also linked to the annunciation?
 
#296 · (Edited)
You are all being too hard on technology. It is not the technology but the inadequate application of it We cannot do DP with DPOs a combinator controls. WE cannot control a super low speed engine without electronic governors (so I am told). We do confuse sophistication with complication.

We have motor controls now which 'usually' will not automatically start the standby if the running pump has been deliberately stopped. We have emergency generators that will start and connect automatically (simply achieved) but which will revert to MSB supply when that supply is restored. Both these introduce a level of complication that is usually now requires a processor based solution. I would say both are undesirable, "Oops I pressed the wrong button". A generator runs up and shuts down without the necessity of being locally inspected? What if the main supply has been lost for some as yet recurring problem and its restoration is temporary. There must be many such examples where new 'failure' modes have been introduced both unfamiliar to the established operator and unnecessary.

Barrie's 292 sums it up very well but how about:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate

(My own, I hope I do not plagiarise, is "simple can be sophisticated". I remember the exercises in Boolean algebra we started with were to bring the logical circuit to it's minimum number of operating gates - The NEBB Startomat did not get this spot on. If a tacho running signal was 'seen' and the engine was not running it acted as if it had received a start signal - I spent a lot of time before finding the tacho circuit earth that was causing one of the generators on Norvegia Team to start itself up!)
 
#299 ·
You are all being too hard on technology. It is not the technology but the inadequate application of it...
Entirely agreed (Well – second bit anyway). Even someone like me, who prefers being at the trailing edge of technology, can recognise benefits of some of the up to the minute applications, and the efficiency improvements they can bring.

But as you say, inadequacy of application, particularly wrt resilience appears a major shortfall in many sectors, not just our own. Reliability one thing, but surely cyber security of much greater concern. Whether in shipping, aviation, other transport, national infrastructure etc.

And sure we need digital technology to deliver improved efficiency, particularly in generation & distribution of power supplies. But we all know the lights go out now and then – usually due to a fault, but sometimes due to a bit of finger trouble.

Surely most worrying today, is that fingers can be on the controls from a very long way away. (And those fingers unauthorised fingers).
 
#300 ·
I won't say I trail however I am in the guard's van ready to apply the brakes. I certainly view connection of the ship with less regulated 'stations' ashore with equal concern. Remote control must mean an office as rigidly controlled as on the bridge and engine room of its ships, perhaps that will steer towards a hybrid or full autonomous solution.

The "don't do unless necessary" rule can be applied partially. Only allow communication between systems where that is necessary, do not have essential systems sharing a common bus with anything they need not be and extend that to communications.

Whether malice or error all electronic data whether received from a local source or a remote one may cause an undesirable system response. That even applies to the written word - Don Sixto on Conoco Europe was fond of recalling that there had been a galley fire and the office (London Brits) had asked for a report on the health of the staff (All Spanish). The ship resorted to the dictionary, "staff" being unrecognised, and translated this to lengths of wood as in stave. Clearly the staves above the galley deckhead were burned to a crisp and this is what was reported back.

Erroneous but not malicious GPS data controlling an AIS shore station caused Sperry's Visionmaster displays to crash when accepting AIS data, a systems failure which testing and FMEA had not discovered (an impossible date, leap year associated if I remember fully). Updating ECDIS on a Korean build LNG Newbuild caused the vessel to abruptly change course - incorrect procedure or perhaps an as yet undeveloped procedure).

I remain skeptical that these big solutions have corresponding big problems they are to solve. What is certain is that the do bring problems of their own. On the LNG vessel (mentioned above) on trials I was given a tutorial on Kongsberg's IAS and a long chat with their consultant. One of my bugbears with the way this sort of kit is applied to merchant ships is that, unlike the nuclear or public transport industries, it is applied without the same quality control - especially do***entation. To me this is vital for a vessel expected to last 15 years as I contend that one may be faced with renewing any single failure prone silicon system at around 10 years. The silicon will be cheap enough but the engineering involved to marry the new to the ten year old will not be especially if the do***entation of each and every one of its interfaces is not accurately detailed and recorded. I have opined here that the cost at this juncture might well mark the end of the economic life of the asset (not so much fatigue life as silicon-fatigue life). The consultant grinned and agreed "At ten years old this will not only be expensive to support, it will be fabulously expensive to support" - no prospect of him being out of work then!
 
#301 ·
USS Fitzgerald Leaves Ingalls Shipbuilding for New Homeport In San Diego, 3 Years After Fatal Collision

https://news.usni.org/2020/06/13/us...rt-in-san-diego-3-years-after-fatal-collision

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