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  • Aratere Grounding -- Combination Of Errors

    From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Thu Oct 31 05:25:26 2024
    As happens all too often, it wasn’t a single mistake that led to the grounding of the Aratere ferry, it was at least two mistakes.

    One: A missed waypoint in the preprogrammed navigation route caused the autopilot to steer right before it had cleared the end of the bay, so it
    turned straight towards the shore.

    Two: None of the crew knew how to turn off the autopilot. Or they thought
    they did: press the override button. They tried repeatedly. But it didn’t work. Because none of them knew they had to hold it down for 5 seconds.
    This was a feature of the new steering system that had recently been
    installed, but somehow that little detail was left out of the crew
    training.

    Finally they were able to turn off the autopilot, but that was too late to
    stop the actual grounding; all they could do was try to minimize the
    damage. That part they were trained for, and they knew how to do.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to All on Fri Nov 29 02:43:49 2024
    Interesting that the sinking of the Navy’s Manawanui survey/dive
    vessel was also caused by a misunderstanding of autopilot settings,
    according to <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/hmnzs-manawanui-sinking-inquiry-defence-minister-judith-collins-navy-chief-reveal-initial-findings/WWJLDAKUS5ENPJKFCJASBPAX7M/>.
    The crew on duty were supposed to have been trained on the proper
    procedure, which included checking that the vessel was under manual
    control, not on autopilot. For some reason they didn’t do that, so
    they thought the ship had suffered a thruster failure. Even then, they
    should still have checked. So this was a matter of downright
    negligence.

    By the way:

    [Minister Collins] said she had seen a video of diesel, not oil,
    leaking from the ship, and it was a “big thing” from her point of
    view to get the diesel out as quickly as possible.

    Fun fact: diesel is a form of oil, as is anything with alkanes in it.
    But it’s lighter than “fuel oil”, which is a very viscous form of oil used for fuelling ships.

    How thick is fuel oil? Anything much thicker than that, and you get to
    the bitumen used for surfacing roads.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)