121–130 of 369 posts
The real cause of the collision was poor seamanship and failure to follow the COLREGS on the part of the bridge crew of the destroyer. Most specifically they were seriously in violation of Rule 6: the Safe Speed Rule http://navruleshandbook.com/Rule6.html Every vessel shall at all times proceed at a safe speed so that she can take proper and effective action to avoid collision and be stopped within a distance appropr…
It's not just boats that have safety-critical UI design problems. The avionics in airplanes are becoming so complicated that managing the avionics is almost more difficult than flying the plane. I'm a private pilot who has been flying a Cirrus SR22 for twelve years. In that time it has gone through two major glass cockpit avionics revisions. In the first revision, called the Avidyne, the autopilot was either on or of…
Is there a purpose to the display being so colorful? If AP were the only green thing and the others were monochrome it would stand out more.
(In case it's not obvious, I've got a few hundred hours behind the G1000. AMA.)
You're telling me a million dollar guided missle destroyer can't do this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would mean wasting fuel, no?
What's that got to do with anything? The comment was about the ability to vary power at all, not doing it efficiently. Are you going to choose to crash into something because it's wasting fuel to vent part of the steam?
The ship command structure was a form of information hiding, whereby the commander only worried about the speed, whilst the engineer worried about how to efficiently deliver the requested speed.
A key occurrence during this mishap: 0127 The Officer of the Deck ordered course to the right to course 240T, but rescinded the order within a minute. Instead, the Officer of the Deck ordered an increase to full speed and a rapid turn to the left (port). These orders were not carried out. 0129 The Bosun Mate of the Watch, a more senior supervisor on the bridge, took over the helm and executed the orders. I've witness…
Yep, but that freeze is limited with more training, and mixed watches when teh newbs have to be rotated in for the real thing so the "hold my beer" guys aren't outnumbered 10 to 1 by the frozen folks.
I don't think the senior watch team had their st either, or the orders to prepare to take manual control of the steering and propulsion system aft would have immediately been out.
Also it makes little sense that lookouts who calculated cpa at collision weren't raising the alarm. These guys who I had to do their job for them: I got them removed, and tried to get them off our boat. They were fine people but they were a danger to us.
Nope; No, just not at all: UI Confusion is never "ultimately" the cause for accidentally killing people through poor operation of a $2 billion piece of military equipment. A UI may suck, many do, in or out of the military. So, training. and then more training. I don't have a high stakes job, but if I allowed code-completion to drop tables, commit the change, delete the backups, and then burn down the building... well…
- http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-effective-leaders-m...
There was a ferry accident involving a similar transfer of control problem in New York harbor.[1] Ferries have a lot of maneuvering modes and directional thrusters, because they do so many dockings, and so they have a more complex control problem. The pilot put the system into a backup dumb mode while in cruise, then changed stations to where he could best see the dock while still in the wrong mode. Rammed the dock a…
In the steam days, it was a major operation to adjust the output of an engine. Valve linkages had immediate effect on the output, but you also had to adjust the boiler heat input to keep the temperature within limits. Far enough back, there were men shoveling coal into the boilers who had to be told to slow down or speed up. Do you think it's mainly bureaucratic inertia that keeps it separate? Or is there something m…
On a modern diesel or gas turbine ship, no there's not. Obviously there are limits to what the engine can do still.
There was a ferry accident involving a similar transfer of control problem in New York harbor.[1] Ferries have a lot of maneuvering modes and directional thrusters, because they do so many dockings, and so they have a more complex control problem. The pilot put the system into a backup dumb mode while in cruise, then changed stations to where he could best see the dock while still in the wrong mode. Rammed the dock a…
User interfaces have gone backwards decades in quality. Look at your car radio in a 90's car. You didn't need to look at it to figure out how to push the radio button, turn the volume, anything. You could even adjust the bass on the fly with a bass knob instead of navigating to your "eq" menu to do it. Now, you've got to look away from the road, realize what "mode" your in, you can move the menu around to the "audio"…
There was a ferry accident involving a similar transfer of control problem in New York harbor.[1] Ferries have a lot of maneuvering modes and directional thrusters, because they do so many dockings, and so they have a more complex control problem. The pilot put the system into a backup dumb mode while in cruise, then changed stations to where he could best see the dock while still in the wrong mode. Rammed the dock a…
As a devil's…inquisitor, I guess— I'm curious what the reasoning has been behind the Navy's (and WWII RAF's) preference for split/seniority control and in what situations that balances out, if any. Are those situations where some known, serious risk of error is mitigated by sharing responsibility? Is betting on experience over skill actually wrong, or is their implementation misguided? Or just not applicable to those…
I do think the Navy has difficulty delegating and tends to try and focus power on a few positions.