The only modern vessel I’ve visited the bridge aboard is Incat 050 (HSV X-1 Joint Venture at the time, now Mannanan). Her manual steering is a little bitty wheel set into the armrest of the Captain’s chair, 4/5 turn lock to lock. She has a separate station at the after end of the bridge for joystick control. When engaged, the jets rotate to point through the vessel’s center of lateral resistance, and she’ll slide in whatever direction you move the joystick. I think there must have been a knob to change heading in that mode.
She was meant to run with three on the bridge and a roving fire watch; but the Navy found it required 35 crew to keep her at sea continuously.
My younger brother was her skipper when the Navy had her. He kept a very quiet bridge with low voices and no distractions.
Sure. Four on watch. Four rotations: 16 watch standers.
Communications: Two on watch; four rotations: 8 communications personnel
Engineers to maintain equipment?
Personnel for damage control?
Cooks?
The ship was evaluated by the Navy for countermine warfare or ASW ops. Those requires specialized personnel.
The Army used it for hauling cargo. Loadmasters?
The issue in both collisions was the bridge team did not have situational awareness. How could a message from CIC that ship was in a zero CPA situation in x minutes make the situation worse?
It’s no difference than having a poor lookout and a good one. A poor lookout is just going to report each contact with no understanding. By contrast a good lookout is going to notice in the case the mate has overlooked something.
Agree. They started with thirty and had to add five. And in fact cooking was a difficulty as in the intended use they were alongside a pier every night with the engines being worked on and the crew ashore. There were no proper cooking facilities on board and they had to be improvised.
One point that I do not believe has been noticed in this forum yet is that the officers responsible for these fiascoes have all been fired.
This may seem to be entirely logical, but the responsible officers from the two ships have had a lesson far better than anything they could have in a training environment. I am pretty damn sure they will NEVER, EVER make the same mistakes again.
The taxpayers have to pick up the tab for these very expensive mistakes but the navy does not benefit from having a number of officers who would be virtually immune to having a similar accident in future.
A look at some of the flag officers of the British Royal Navy would reveal that several of them have had serious accidents during their careers but it has not actually hindered their rise to the top.
Or is the firing of the officers on these two ships political expediency?
True, because they won’t ever be in a position to make a similar mistake.
Seriously now, I agree that most of the officers fired were not particularly negligent it anything and so really should have been allowed to learn from the mistake. I expect that any junior officers with sense will also learn from this instead of drinking the Navy Kool-Aid.
Did those accidents include loss of life? Accountability is not something that should be diluted in any profession in my opinion, certainly not the military. In the private sector, If I was involved in a major accident as Master with no loss of life, I’d expect to be packing my bags and looking for a new job. God forbid people were killed on my watch, I’d expect to be tried in court.
That group should have been way down a long list of admirals and other “managers” who failed miserably in recognizing a fatal deterioration in competence and leadership.
The list of those fired without benefits should have been long enough and shocking enough to have made it through at least 2 days worth of network TV news.
I wholeheatedly agree with those who are arguing for adequate sleep cycle and rest for military deck officers.
People make mistakes without adequate training, rest, and resources. It appears that the hours and the quality of training has taken a hard hit over the past number of years, while workload continues to escalate, and people work in a cultural environment where asking for help or seeking downtime (R&R) is seen as a sign of weakness.
It is a recipe for disaster and, sadly, I don’t believe the disasters have ended yet
@Kennebec_Captain. I couldn’t agree more. If an OOD is feeling overwhelmed and/or irked by the info being passed up from a CIC, then perhaps it’s time to limit the type or timing of the information being delivered. I’ve heard of this called ‘amending your control order’ to the CIC. It takes a team to maintain safety - but that team needs to communicate clearly and effectively the information they each need to hear.
As MM masters or watch standers we sail the very same waters as the USN and more so at that. How long do any of you allow a CBDR collision situation to exist prior to taking action to change the scenario? Do you need the AB on watch to come in the door and inform you? Do we need to galley to call up and recommend a course or speed change? Do we wait for other input ? From numerous sources ? Granted if you may chew over your decision with who else is on the bridge just so they know what is going to happen and be ready for an aspect change.
The report says that CIC failed to provide the OOD with input and information.
The remainder of the watch team on the bridge failed to provide situational awareness and
input to the Officer of the Deck regarding the situation.
Additional teams in the Combat Information Center (CIC), an area on where tactical information is fused to provide maximum situational awareness, also failed to provide the Officer of the Deck input and information.
This is just an anti-BRM argument, that fight should have been ended long ago but it’s still going on even in the Navy.
Bridge resource management (BRM) is the maritime equivalent of crew resource management (CRM), and has been used in the civilian maritime industry for over a decade. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the U.S. Navy’s BRM training was carried out by assessing the attitudes toward, and knowledge of, the human factors that contribute to accidents in high-risk organizations. A comparison was made between surface warfare officers (SWOs) who had and had not attended BRM training. The responses of the SWOs were also compared to CRM-trained U.S. Naval aviators. It was found that BRM training did not have a significant effect on the attitudes and knowledge of SWOs. Further, naval aviators were significantly more knowledgeable, and generally held attitudes toward the human factors that are causal to accidents in high-risk organizations than did SWOs. It was concluded that the Navy’s BRM training is not having the impact on knowledge and attitudes that is typical of the CRM training reported in the literature. It is proposed that the main reason for the lack of effectiveness of the BRM program is that the content of the training was not based on a needs assessment carried out within the surface warfare community.
Sorry, I wasn’t referencing this specific incident but general complaints about the Navy system others have relayed. Supposedly, the CIC calling the bridge to report things that either the bridge already knows or doesn’t need to know gets distracting.
