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USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#201

Post by Buge »

jordanb wrote: post #17

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…

The article says they fairly quickly tried to reduce speed once they noticed something was wrong. But due to a (UI?) mistake they only reduced speed for 1 engine. It wasn't until 3 minutes later they finally fixed that mistake but by then it was too late.

So they were unable to understand their own speed controls.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#202

Post by tga »

diggernet wrote: post #164
Bromskloss wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the question regarding having one guy doing direction, and another guy doing speed? Is that called for?

Absolutely. Maintaining a ship's heading is a full time job. If you get distracted, you get off course pretty quickly. Speed isn't even really handled on the bridge. The engine order (ahead full, back half, emergency stop, etc) goes to the engine room where multiple people do the work. Note: This is in the context of oil and nuclear steam-powered ships. Gas turbine ships may well have an actual throttle on the bridge…

Especially if it's so easy to get off course, and since the responsibility lies with another officer anyway, steering sounds like a job better suited for a computer, rather than a person. As far as I know, airline pilots already dial in most navigational course changes to the autopilot, I would have imagined ships to work similarly.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#203

Post by thomasz »

scott_karana wrote: post #151
lisper wrote: post #106

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…

Air France 477 was caused by UI stupidity, too. Linked controls (nobody realized the junior copilot was making opposing inputs, which were then averaged with the pilot's) plus poor autopilot UI that they were accustomed to ignoring, made it stall and crash after a single wind speed sensor iced up. If nobody had touched the controls, autopilot would have flown safely through the storm. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

That's a very simplistic interpretation. The article is really worth a read.

The whole accident is a prime example for a very minor problem (loosing air speed indicators) spinning completely out of control, with the crew being making every possible mistake all the way down, all three people in the cockpit completely ignoring 47 stall warnings.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#204

Post by d_k_f »

ju-st wrote: post #49
Jtsummers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, in mobile the code block's width is only 200 pixels.

Does anyone know a HN web interface (like hckrnews.com) that prettifies such quirks on the comment page for mobile phones?

https://app.hackerwebapp.com is rather nice, although read-only. Tapping a link if you want to comment is acceptable to me, though I'd love to have voting on there.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#205

Post by yannick »

Animats wrote: post #73

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…

thanks for this comment!

A great reminder that "the way things are" often are just accepted, never questioned, even ritually enforced; all while drifting further and further from better ways.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#206

Post by avar »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #53
NoPiece wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd call it an interpretation, not a theory. But clearly the conflicting inputs was a UI problem, and while there may be tradeoffs, a better UI could have prevented the AF 447 crash.

Basic airmanship could've prevented the crash too. The pilot-in-command got a stall warning and pulled back on the stick, climbing to 38,000 feet. That's not a UI issue, it's a forgetting one of the most fundamental rules of flying issue. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1418/what-happe...

You normally can't stall an Airbus aircraft, except in cases where the flight mode changes as it did in this situation. This was a huge part of the problem, an emergency occurred and the pilots were effectively flying an aircraft they hadn't flown before.

Fully pulling back the stick is what you'd normally do in an Airbus to gain altitude. It's guaranteed not to stall the plane.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#207

Post by jabl »

diggernet wrote: post #164
Bromskloss wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the question regarding having one guy doing direction, and another guy doing speed? Is that called for?

Absolutely. Maintaining a ship's heading is a full time job. If you get distracted, you get off course pretty quickly. Speed isn't even really handled on the bridge. The engine order (ahead full, back half, emergency stop, etc) goes to the engine room where multiple people do the work. Note: This is in the context of oil and nuclear steam-powered ships. Gas turbine ships may well have an actual throttle on the bridge…

As an outsider (well, I have plenty of experience with pleasure boats/yachts, but none with large ships) it seems really extraordinary that just maintaining a heading would be a full time job.

Somehow in airplanes a single pilot manages to control not only the rudder, but throttles, ailerons, elevators, flaps and whatnot while also yakking on the radio. And airplanes zip along at 500 knots rather than 20 like a ship.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#208

Post by jpindar »

katastic wrote: post #119
Animats wrote: post #73

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"…

>So you may start the car and have 5-10 seconds of blasting radio that you can do nothing about.

What some people do is make an audio file consisting of several seconds of silence, and do whatever is needed (call it "AAA.mp3", or put it first in a default playlist) to have it play while the player boots.

But yeah, it's really messed up that that should be considered acceptable.

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#209

Post by avar »

foldr wrote: post #51
dredmorbius wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read it. Several times.

Great, the pages and sections are numbered, so it's easy to refer to the parts of it that support your theory. Or alternatively, you can direct us to whatever conflicting sources of information you believe are more reliable than the official accident report.

This theory isn't citing the report itself, but independent analysis that's been done on the same data. The Wikipedia article on the topic has a whole section for these [1], and a section about this theory in particular [2].

Furthermore. The official accident report for crashes is not always considered the authoritative source for what happened. One good example is EgyptAir Flight 990 which the official report claims is a mechanical failure [3], but which is widely considered to have been pilot suicide. In that case the Egyptian investigative body was thought to be politically motivated.

Similarly, it's not at all implausible that the French BEA would be reluctant to make conclusions that could result in the grounding of the entire worldwide Airbus fleet while they're retrofitted with Boeing-style controls while France is the main Airbus manufacturing partner country.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Independ...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Sidestic...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

Re: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion

#210

Post by PeterisP »

diggernet wrote: post #154
okabat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their point is that when changing engine output is labor-intensive, it made perfect sense to have an officer giving orders and somebody else implementing them. Why the command structure hasn't shifted to accommodate modern technology is an interesting question

It's not labor-intensive, it's attention-intensive. You want the person managing the speed to be focused on that. You want the person managing the heading to be focused on that. And you definitely don't want the officer to be distracted by maintaining course and speed when they need to be keeping track of what's going on around the ship.

You want the person managing the speed to be focused on that if managing speed is still inherently and unavoidably attention-intensive - if modern control technology is able to automagically maintain speed at x knots, adjusting all the various engine control parameters to implement that, then an extra person in the loop only means an extra chance for mistakes or delays.
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