Milano Bridge allides with gantry crane in Busan today

Why type when a video shows what happened.

Edit- they apparently made contact with a Seaspan vessel ahead of them but there was minimal to zero damage.

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I hope no one was in that crane…dang, that is a mess.

In the video above it looks like the fatal error was made at 12 seconds when they went hard right.

a couple of different angles

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control failure? you can see prop wash entire video, with wash to stbd nearly entire time? I believe most containerships use fixed pitch propellers

To me looks like she just came in too fast. She’s backing full the whole time and the stern is walking to port.

In the second video it’s easier to see how fast the ship is going. At speed over roughly over three kts the prop wash will continue to fall aft. (similar to the rule of thumb of the wash reaching half the length when stopped).

At full astern likely doesn’t matter where the wheel is.

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I agree they should not have been in the situation in the first place.

They may have been able to avoid the collision by giving slight right rudder and going ahead. The hard part is having the restraint to not go hard over. Similar to how if a pilot of an aircraft was headed towards trees they could get themselves into a worse situation by over reacting and stalling the plane. This video is an example of what I am saying.

Alternatively they could accept that they will crash and attempt to “crash flat and slow” so as to spread the impact over as much of the hull and dock as possible to minimize damage. If they took some chunks out of the dock with an exceptionally hard landing and scratched the paint we likely would not be reading about this.

They were faced with the decision of maintaining directional control or slowing down. They tried to take both in an either or situation.

Ultimately they are really lucky the crane operator only suffered a broken ankle.

I don’t think adding energy to the system at that point would have been a good idea.

How on earth did they end up approaching that fast? How grossly can you overestimate your ability to slow down, and isn’t that kinda thing supposed to be part of the master/pilot exchange? Or was the guy shooting for a suicide burn all casual like, and misjudged it by half a boat length?

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In the video in #1, after second 16, it seems the line to the stern tug disappeared…

Concur, once the swing started increasing the astern movement just accelerated it.

its hard to see but it’s there, you can see it at 32 seconds, i think it just doesnt get picked up in all of the back and forth action

I cannot see it, you must have a better graphic card…

Yeah, the first video is a little confusing because it’s hard to tell how fast the ship is going. In the second one the angle is better, the direction is perpendicular to the view. Plus the wash off the bow thruster can be seen trailing aft.

The wheeling effect with engine ahead is hardly noticeable, but on astern the influence is significant. Looks like a right handed fixed propellor. Also bank suction is probably a factor. I suppose giving full port rudder with a burst of full power ahead could have steered the aft ship clear.

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There’s a ship moored up ahead. It would have been tight and the thought of hitting it while turning max rpm would have given me pause.

In front of the Milano Bridge was a docked ship, the Hyundai Mars.

I think side swiping the Hyundai Mars poses less risk to life than hitting the crane

There was bad luck hitting the crane, and not the dock between cranes.
Difficult to estimate…

It’s hard to tell from the video but in the beginning it looks like the engine is going ahead with right rudder, like they were attempting to abort the docking and avoid the ship ahead, but then the churning wash at the prop increases moments before it hits the crane, as if they changed to plan C and ordered full astern. The wash from the assist tug looks like they were using most of their power just to keep their angle. Even after the crane topples and there is little headway, there is still a lot of prop wash astern of the ship. Could be the engine was stuck ahead and then it was too late. Usually those ships have a lot of torque, which when used with a bow thruster can land a ship nicely, however in this case the bow thruster is going off the dock, which makes me think they wanted to abort. Very hard or even impossible to say from just a video. In extremis could have been the Capt doing one thing and a pilot doing another. Very bad day on the water.

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I know but with a short controlled burst ahead the bow will not move too much. You would expect that the ship had thrusters which should be switched on full power to push the bow to starboard, same with the thruster aft.

This one starts earlier/

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