Howza ’bout that collision between the container ship and the USN destroyer in Japan? How could that happen? Simple. Incompetence. The captain was prolly asleep in his sea cabin but he’s ultimately responsible so his career is over. Depending on how far the shit rolled down hill the XO might be done. Certainly the OOD (Officer of the Deck) is finished.

I don’t know how things work today but 50 years ago when I was in the Navy the following would have happened.

1. The tube jockey in CIC would have spotted the contact and put a mark on top of it with a grease pencil.
2. Two minutes later, he would have put another mark on top of it.
3. Two minutes after that he would have put a third mark on it and drawn a line through the three marks past the center of the screen. That would have given him the range and bearing of the CPA (closest point of approach.)
4. Meanwhile he would have given the range and bearing of each mark to one of his buddies who would have put them on a maneuvering board (or if he was by himself like we were on the Iredell County he would have put marks on the maneuvering board himself). It would only take another minute to figger out the course and speed using simple geometry, a parallel rule, and a pair of dividers.
5. Then the tube jockey would say over his sound powered phones, “Conn Combat. Contact designated (designation) bearing (the bearing) distance (the distance) CPA (number of yards and bearing to CPA) Course (the course) speed (the speed).”
6. This info would be passed to the OOD who would now take appropriate action. There was also a radar repeater on the Conn so the OOD could easily figger out CPA all by himself. Even officers can do it.

All of this should take no more than eight minutes if your radar dudes have anything on the ball. Hell, I was an ET and I could do this shit in eight minutes easy.

What prolly happened was there was an ensign on his first deployment standing OOD and he figgered he wasn’t gonna turn aside for any ship. This is the US Navy. I know the type.

Back in 1967 we were traveling from Long Beach back to San Diego. I happened to be in CIC when a whole crap load of contacts appeared on the radar repeater. We had a snot nosed ensign who wanted course, speed, and CPA of every single contact. There were over 40 of them. It was a freakin’ sailboat race. We told him that and said he might want to consider not driving through the middle of a sailboat race and sail had right of way over power. Didn’t do a bit of good. He chugged right through the race at twelve knots. How we managed not to hit any of the sailboats was a stroke of luck. We did get a lot of fingers from the sailors. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when the Captain chewed his ass out. I’m sure the Navy heard from the sailing association.

I figger sumpin’ like that happened in Japan. How can a destroyer not avoid a container ship? Especially with all of the warnings unless the dudes in CIC were asleep and the OOD was totally incompetent.

Any squids wanna check in?