USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

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Pigeon
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USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Pigeon » Wed Aug 23, 2017 12:28 am

Track of the Alnic MC track from VesselFinder


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Royal
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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Royal » Wed Aug 23, 2017 11:40 am

Collision Theory
It wouldn't be difficult to cause a collision if the GPS, speed data can be hacked.Other recon would involve common places of course corrections to avoid a collision.In the case of the hack, the hacker maintains the location and speed to appear no course correction is needed.Kind of like changing runway lights without actively notifying incoming pilots.

Unspecified Engine Failures
The photos are odd as they appear the same. Before the Fitzgerald, I remember seeing news articles regarding ships being stranded or having engine/power failures. I wonder if there is a weapon being used to disable the ships and the collisions are fake news? This makes more sense to suspend a fleet.

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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Pigeon » Wed Aug 23, 2017 7:52 pm

The GPS for the other ships was OK.

The ship did lose steering which might have let it in a poor situation. No word from either ship so far.

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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Pigeon » Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:09 pm

Navy reports on some details of the two recent collisions

Poor operations

https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-ne ... ions-find/

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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Pigeon » Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:10 pm

The complete breakdown in Navy norms on Fitzgerald stands in sharp relief to the accident on McCain, where the commanding officer presided over the whole incident.

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.

Sanchez ordered the crew to set sea and anchor detail at 6 a.m. instead of an hour prior, when the ship entered the shipping lane heading into the Strait of Malacca. The ship’s operations officer, executive office and navigator had all recommended the ship set sea and anchor at 5 a.m. for safety reasons.

The critical failure came when the current was pushing the ship left and Sanchez noticed the helmsman — usually a junior sailor charged controlling the ship’s steering and speed when ordered by the officer of the deck or conning officer — was having trouble keeping the ship on course.

The master helmsman who would perform these tasks during a sea and anchor detail was still in the chow line at the time.

At 5:20 a.m., Sanchez ordered a second watch-stander to help run the controls to steer the ship, letting the helmsman keep control of the rudder while giving the second watch-stander control of the speed and position of the ship’s two propellers — a position known as the lee helm.

Putting two sailors at the separate positions required changing the ship’s steering configuration and shifting control of engine propeller speed to another part of control console.

But changing the control mechanisms immediately led to confusion because they mistakenly shifted all of the controls — both rudder and engine speed — to the second console.

As a result, the helmsman could no longer control the steering. He initially believed he had lost steering due to a mechanical failure, when in fact, he was just confused about the configuration of the equipment.

Four minutes before the collision, confusion began to run wild on the bridge while watch-standers attempted to fix a nonexistent loss of steering.

Complicating the situation further, changing in steering configurations forced the rudder to revert to a center line position, releasing the previous position that was set to the right between one and four degrees to fight the current that was pushing the ship left.

With the rudder unintentionally set to center line, the current continued to push the ship left of track.

During the confusion, when the bridge thought they had lost control of steering, the commanding officer ordered the engine to slow the ship’s speed from 20 knots to five. But the sailor at the console controlling the speed of the two propellers only slowed the port shaft to five knots, while the starboard shaft was still turning at 20 knots, abruptly pushing the ship sharply to the left and into the track of the Alnic MC for more than a minute.

An officer on the bridge ordered the steering controls to be shifted to a space near the rear of the ship that can also control steering, known as aft steering. But that was not yet manned due to Sanchez’s decision to man sea and anchor at 6 instead of 5 a.m.

The McCain’s steering configuration was changed five times in the roughly three minutes before the collision, according to the Navy report.

By the time the aft steering was manned and the sailor on the bridge fixed the speed issue that was forcing McCain left of track, it was too late.


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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Pigeon » Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:13 pm

Fitzgerald

The probes into Fitzgerald and McCain discovered two very different sets of conditions with a common outcome.

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 hazardous conditions.

The CO, Cmdr. Bryce Benson, did not know the ship was headed for a collision until the bow of the ACX Crystal punched into his stateroom. He was ultimately rescued by crew-members as he clung to the outside of the ship. He had been in command for less than a month.

Also, at no point prior to the collision did the officer of the deck attempt to make contact with the Crystal on bridge-to-bridge radio, nor did the OOD try to maneuver to avoid Crystal until only a minute before the collision.

Meanwhile, down in the Fitzgerald’s combat information center, which displays inputs from the ship’s weapons systems and radars, the watch standers there failed to “tune and adjust their radars to maintain an accurate picture of other ships in the area,” the report found. That means CIC failed to track the multiple ships exiting the channel.

The Fitzgerald’s watch-standers also failed to use the Automated Identification System, a publicly accessible computer program that provides real-time updates on the location and speed of merchant ships in the area.

Fitzgerald’s lookouts failed as well, with the investigation indicating the sailor or sailors assigned to look out for hazards were literally looking the other way the whole time.

“Watch-standers performing lookout duties did so only on Fitzgerald’s port side, not on the starboard side where the three ships were present with the risk of collision,” the report reads.

The report also found that crew fatigue was likely a factor because the ship had a full day of inspections and qualifications prior to the accident.

With no warning, sailors below deck at the time of the collision had between 30 and 60 seconds to evacuate the rapidly flooding berthing. Some were jarred awake by seawater flooding their bunks.

Seven sailors died on Fitzgerald, all of them in and around the flooded berthing compartments.


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Re: USS John McCain collision with Alnic MC

Post by Royal » Thu Nov 02, 2017 5:51 am

"configuration was changed five times in the roughly three minutes before the collision"

Does the story account for all five?

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