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For anyone interested in stories like these, I highly recommend "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow - there's an entire chapter on maritime accidents.
Bridge transcript, addenda and errata: Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=447547... Errata to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=455021... Addendum to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=455022... Attachment 1 to Addendum to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=4…
My big takeaway from all of this is that, given the choice between driving your boat into a hurricane and doing something else, something else should be the default.
Another conclusion was that a tiered subscription model that withholds life-saving information is a business I never want to be in. El Faro subscribed to the Bon Voyage System for weather updates, but they didn't subscribe to the routing guidance and always received six hour-old information. The stale data is a critical part of this story. http://www.stormgeo.com/solutions/shipping/on-board-services...
What they needed was hourly updates, which they had from the other service they subscribed to, which was ignored by the captain. Despite the staff being fully aware.
And the captain and staff should always be reading weather data from two sources anyway, for redundancy and accuracy.
These guys had plenty of information but over-relied on one which was 6-12hrs out-of-date at the worst time, which no indication it was old data.
These are solvable problems that have little to do with tiered pricing or a cheapness on part of the company. Both by the above redundancy and the weather company dating their data, and fixing software bugs for such critical software.
Bridge transcript, addenda and errata: Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=447547... Errata to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=455021... Addendum to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=455022... Attachment 1 to Addendum to Voyage Data Recorder https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=4…
Is the audio available from the deck?
Oh man. That transcript was the single worst thing I ever read in my whole life.
My big takeaway from all of this is that, given the choice between driving your boat into a hurricane and doing something else, something else should be the default.
That's a pretty bad take away - no one wanted to drive trough the hurricane. The captain thought he was further away from the storm than he was, perhaps because of his use of an outdated weather feed. A better take away might be, for important decisions, you should deeply understand the data(and importantly, it's limitations) you are using to make the decision.
Very apt also for the Air France 447 crash this author wrote about.