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Wayne.B

On Sun, 18 Jun 2017 12:40:33 -0400, wrote:

On Sun, 18 Jun 2017 11:45:52 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 6/18/2017 10:37 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 18 Jun 2017 08:20:45 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

. I
would have thought a modern warship would be able to sustain a heavy hit
like it took without being so seriously damaged.

The days of the armor clad dreadnought are gone. Ships are light and
fast. Like Richard says, this was a sports car getting hit by a semi.
It is amazing it did not sustain more damage.
There was still something strange going on here to have this kind of
crash. The plot I saw showed some unusual maneuvers but it was unclear
if that was before or after the accident.

I still think there was a junior officer who had the conn on the bridge
and he/she screwed up. The Navy has already acknowledged "human error".

Yup I agree. The OD was probably on the bridge and the rumor is the
captain was in his quarters, right where the topside damage occurred.
I doubt most people understand how seldom the captain actually has the
"con". In the CG the quartermaster and a couple guys on the deck
watch were actually driving the ship. The OD was somewhere nearby and
the captain was wandering around or in his quarters most of the time.
In the North Atlantic we could go weeks without ever seeing another
ship so this kind of thing was not in the offing. When we were
maneuvering around Norfolk, everyone was wide awake and the captain
was on the bridge.

===

One of the scarriest things I've ever done was to come in off the
ocean to Norfolk harbor in the middle of the night. The amount of big
ship traffic is incredible, and the shore lights are bright enough to
obscure most of the nav lights on both ships and nav aids. It was
mostly flying blind on radar and the GPS plotter all the way.

It boggles my mind how that destroyer could have let the container
ship get that close. We have good radar on our trawler but it is
nothing compared to what the navy has. We would typically pick up a
boat that size 15 miles away and start tracking the point of closest
approach (CPA). Any CPA less than a mile gets my undivided attention
until resolved.