NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: USS Fitzgerald collision with container ship
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2017 Jun 25, 16:16 +0000
From: Geoffrey Kolbe <NoReply_GeoffreyKolbe@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 12:00 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: USS Fitzgerald collision with container ship
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2017 Jun 25, 16:16 +0000
I'm going to assume that the speculation that no one was on the bridge of the container ship is correct since we know that this is a fairly common occurrence so my question, what were all the Navy guys doing at the time, playing video games on their radar displays? In the olden days one used either the "maneuvering board" or the "radar plotting" sheet" to maintain a hand plot for this kind of situation. A "relative plot" is about as basic as it gets. When the Stockholm T-Boned the Andea Doria the explanation given was the the radar was set on close range but the navigator plotted it believing that the radar was set on long range. Newer radars do this automatically so were all those guys asleep? I expect many heads are going to roll.
gl
From: Geoffrey Kolbe <NoReply_GeoffreyKolbe@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 12:00 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: USS Fitzgerald collision with container ship
Frank Reed wrote:
" This is an extraordinary and awful mystery, and it is difficult to imagine any excuse for it. Something went terribly wrong, and it likely involved a major --and profoundly tragic-- lapse in judgement aboard USS Fitzgerald. "
Quite so. And Frank's most informative link to the Wikipedia article about the Melbourne - Evans collision shows that we cannot necessarily rely on an official board of enquiry coming up with the truth regarding the cause of the incident.
Geoffrey Kolbe
