The Navy’s navigation crisis

Sam Smith

Having been the navigator aboard a Coast Guard cutter a half century ago I have been grimly fascinated with the two recent Navy ship collisions. For a long time I assumed I couldn’t really understand what happened because I had no familiarity with modern bridge equipment and procedures. But today I had an odd thought perhaps worth passing along: what if the accidents were due not to faulty equipment but to putting too much faith in it and not enough on the simplest of information? What if the quartermasters weren’t checking things on the wings of the bridge and what if the magnificent array of equipment diminished the importance of that old but essential item: the radar?

I recalled the time we were on a search & rescue mission in dense fog near George’s Bank, about 60 miles east of Cape Cod. I was officer of the deck and spotted on the radar a big blip that kept closing on our stern. I called the captain and by the time he had come to the bridge a large Russian fishing and surveillance vessel had broken through the shroud a hundred yards away. . The captain went below to wire Washington.

I am reminded how important that little radar was to our lives and how little competition it had on the bridge.  And because we were stationed in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay,  with some 30 islands and lots of Navy and commercial ships, it was almost like your sunglasses.

Bryan McGrath commanded  the USS Bulkeley (DDG 84), “a ship very much like the Fitzgerald, and during the rest of my 21-year Navy career I spent a good bit of time at sea…  During my career, on the rare occasions in which Navy ships were involved in collisions, voluminous lessons learned were promulgated. We studied these incidents and incorporated them into our training. In virtually every instance, decisions made by fallible human beings were contributing factors.”

Writing on the website, War on the Rock, McGrath noted:

When I was in command, I had a monitor installed next to my bed that replicated one of the main command-and-control pictures available to my watch-standers. This monitor was a “God’s-eye view” straight down on my ship out to 8 nautical miles. My ship was in the center, and other ships in the area were represented by ship avatars which indicated both their direction of movement and their speed. When the bridge watch called and woke me up to report a nearby ship that would pass close enough to be of interest, I swiveled this monitor away from the wall and matched what they were telling me with what the “radar” picture was telling me. Virtually all the time, the stories matched. Now and then, I saw something in the radar picture that was not reflected in the narrative from the bridge and asked for clarification. On occasion, I was concerned with a conflict and shuffled up to the bridge to have a look for myself.

McGrath details some of the complexities of handling a vessel like this and towards the end notes:

Because ships at sea are required to have embarked humans in the decision loop … human factors will continue to dominate as the cause of collisions.
Were the watch-standers on each ship well-qualified? Were they distracted? Were they properly rested? Did they understand the rules of the road? Was the proper maintenance performed on installed electronic navigation systems? Were those systems ignored or devalued?

These questions and more will be posed by the various organizations — Navy and   factors will be eliminated as a contributing cause of this incident. It is quite likely that they will be cited as the primary causes.

And one of the lessons we may take away from these tragic incidents is that no matter what technology and other equipment one has, who is there doing what can be the thing that really matters.