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The article mentions that there are major merchant vessels sinking every two/three days! That seems huge. How many deaths per year does that amount to? We're lucky to be in tech I guess.
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One of my takeaways from the article is that the captain's confidence and willingness to do the right thing had been shaken after he'd been burned the last time he'd refused unsafe orders. I'm wondering if the 1st officer similarly faced bad consequences for doing the right thing and taking command -- mutiny charges are still a thing, aren't they?
That seemed like irresponsible speculation on Vanity Fair's part to me. The root cause was a captain who mistakenly reacted off of 12 hour old data and ignored another source of data that contradicted it. Pretty surprising given the lengths the article goes through to impress upon the reader how "safety conscious" he was.
The article probably emphasises the captain's safety consciousnes to prevent people from "blaming the operator", which is an instinctual and often wrong conclusion to jump to.
The NTSB report says: Performance. The chief mate's performance evaluations were consistently positive. His evaluation from June 2015 stated that he was “passionate” about his work and “an excellent instructor for the inexperienced.”
1. FYI the article is new but the disaster described happened on October 1, 2015. 2. I was astonished at this: > "It has been reported that a major merchant ship goes down somewhere in the world every two or three days; most are ships sailing under flags of convenience, with underpaid crews and poor safety records."
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It still boggles my mind how three different GPS position formats can be used. And then not used correctly by search crews, which then missed location by 23nm. https://i.imgur.com/nbwkCPY.png
23 nanometers off, dang. If they'd only had a slightly wider field of view, they could have found those poor people. :(
Wonder why shippers don't have a 24/7 Operations Center employing meteorologists and tracking weather systems and ships and in close contact with ship's crew. It struck me that there was a lot of friction for the crew to just plot up-to-date weather/forecasts and the ship's course. Crew was constantly fighting for current data and good/correct visualization.
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There’s an interesting ethics question here: If your ship’s location places you near a hurricane, should they just quietly upgrade you for free tenporarily so that you don’t sink?
They should at least place a large warning stating that the data is not safe to use for navigational purposes.
There's no easy fixes here.
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Those formats are simply insane. It's well known that some people use decimal fractions of degrees, so why would anyone even consider using a decimal point to separate degrees and minutes?
Was this a big problem before computers? I doubt it. Back in the analog days two people would engage in a dialogue and ensure the units were agreed upon. Now people just blindly type data into a screen, or two computers blindly exchange packets without proper metadata. It's ironic that we have 1000x better navigational accuracy than a 19th century tallship captain but we're much more careless with the data than he wo…
Today, we work with atomic clocks, and our instruments fabricate an angle between the z-axis and a 100th order spherical harmonic series that models the shape of the ocean surface. Every few years, we update the model to keep up with plate tectonics. (Not exactly, but you get the idea.) There are a lot more things to go wrong, and not everyone programs in sanity checks to prevent small corrections from causing large errors.
People should trust that instinct. Takes a lot of effort to pull away from the brink, but you should do it. 100% of the time.
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FWIW, this scenario is what many people jump towards in missing-persons cases, and it so far has not been true even once in my experience. It does happen, but it's much rarer than a straightforward combination of bad circumstances and bad decisions. Hell, at this point I've seen more murders and probable murders than people disappearing on purpose.
Likelihood is irrelevant -- what matters is if it was covered. For example, if he bought "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found" on Amazon, was doing Google Searches for it, etc. -- seems not only worth further investigation. Research shows that if for example during an interview his wife said it was possibly a suicide, that the odds are good it was: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-40199-…