U.S.S Fitzgerald collision
- Thread starter Ragman
- Start date
Yep..... I don't get how this happens....it's not like they can't see each other.
It happened early morning (about 2am) so that may have contributed to lack of visual.
Probably just human error. Boats don't have air traffic controllers like airplanes do. There are rules of the road, so to speak, to let boats know what to do in various situations, but mistakes get made every day. The guided missile destroyer definitely has collision avoidance electronics. The container ship may or may not have, but even standard marine radar systems usually have software that calculates trajectories and alerts operators when they're on a collision course.
These are big ships that can't really turn on a dime. People maneuver past and along side each other in crowded hallways and on sidewalks all the time, but every now and then mistakes get made. You're walking toward someone on the sidewalk where you both move left, then both move right, then you bump into each other. When ships do it, it's in very slow motion, and with a louder crunch when they bump together. That's probably what happened.
Boats run into each other all the time. Minor incidents happen somewhere out on the ocean probably once a day, with the more serious collisions like this one happening a few times a year.
These are big ships that can't really turn on a dime. People maneuver past and along side each other in crowded hallways and on sidewalks all the time, but every now and then mistakes get made. You're walking toward someone on the sidewalk where you both move left, then both move right, then you bump into each other. When ships do it, it's in very slow motion, and with a louder crunch when they bump together. That's probably what happened.
Boats run into each other all the time. Minor incidents happen somewhere out on the ocean probably once a day, with the more serious collisions like this one happening a few times a year.
I haven't bothered to go and look, but there is a Web site where you can look at the GPS trails of large ships at sea, and apparently that container ship was making some wild navigational maneuvers instead of taking a straight and true path. More than likely it was basically zig-zagging, circling and doing figure eights to kill time in order to time the arrival at port. Ships on a schedule to arrive really early, ahead of schedule, in port will do that. When you're sailing straight and true at a constant speed, you essentially have the predictability of an island, or a shoreline - something easy to avoid. When you're doing unpredictable maneuvers, it's hard to predict where you'll be in an hour or two, and thus adjust course accordingly.
