A New Zealand naval ship that sank after smashing into a coral reef in the South Pacific was left on autopilot, an inquiry has found.
An interim report into the incident said human error was to blame for the sinking of HMNZS Manawanui, the first ship that New Zealand has lost since the Second World War.
Yvonne Gray, the vessel’s British-born captain, is originally from Harrogate, Yorkshire, and previously served in the Royal Navy before moving to New Zealand with her wife.
She became the target of online trolling in the wake of the £48-million ship’s sinking on Oct 5, prompting New Zealand’s defence minister to criticise “armchair admirals” and stress that Commander Gray’s gender was not to blame.
However, the report has revealed that the crew failed to realise the vessel was on autopilot. They wrongly believed that its failure to respond to direction changes was because the thruster control had failed.
Sigh.
It may come as a surprise to some, but the Captain of a ship doesn’t spend 24 hours a day on the bridge of the ship “driving” it. For a more thoughtful analysis of what happened, and details of the ship, I suggest looking at “What’s Going on with Shipping” website.
Commander Gray’s gender was not to blame.
OK, but commander Grey was to blame. The captain might not drive the ship but she or he is in charge of it and therefore responsible.
KevinS the captain of a warship is expected to be on the bridge instanter if needed. She he or it is never off duty.
Don’t believe it
In my experience if you are on autopilot any change of engine power, manual input (or use of a bow thruster) disengages it
Unless they are talking about a dynamic positioning system
“ may come as a surprise to some, but the Captain of a ship doesn’t spend 24 hours a day on the bridge of the ship “driving” it”
Doesn’t matter, that’s where the buck stops. As soon as they realised they had a problem they should have called her and if they didn’t thats also the Captains fault for not training them properly.
I do have to agree that it was careless of ‘someone’ not to tell the person to whom they handed over guidance of the ship that it was on autopilot.
Or didn’t they delegate the duty of keeping an eye on things to anyone when they knocked off??
But which of the many possible genders is it that isn’t to blame? The picture does little to narrow the possibilities suggested by “her wife.”
@Starfish Yes, any sufficiently big input on any of the controls *should* have disengaged autopilot.
That it didn’t tells you something about the design of the ship’s internal plumbing. Or lack thereof…
Mind… still comes down to the Captain…
It’s one of those things you check, or have checked by a relevant officer, regularly.
Mate of mine is chief engineer at one of them fancy cruise ships, and they check all the manual overrides at least once per week. Because they have a firm faith in the Power of Murphy..
Don’t believe it
I agree. It’s beyond belief that a gross control input didn’t disable the autopilot. This is either a fundamental design fault, which is in itself beyond belief in a modern vessel, or a failure of both maintenance and crew training, responsibility for which both rest with the Captain.
All of this looks like a desperate attempt to distract from what is probably a Jacinda Adern-era diversity hire failure. You can imagine the Progressive whoops of joy when a lesbian was appointed Captain. They’ll have been as loud as the whoops when the Gold Commander who melted down in the control room when the Brazilian electrician was shot was promoted to Met Commissioner, for the same tokenist reason.
The meltdown? I have a pal who provides psychotherapy to the Police. One of his clients was an officer on duty in the control room who witnessed the entire thing. Dick completely lost it and ended up as a puddle on the floor. Blokes had to take over. The Right Stuff, not.
Maybe she wasn’t talking to me the navigator. (She knows why)
One of the laziest assumptions people make is that women are better communicators. There’s no actual evidence for this, and if anything women are as bad or worse than men at communicating when they feel flustered or angry. Because they feel emotions much more intensely than we do, which is an important and useful trait, but not when you’re trying to run a professional military.
An aircraft autopilot disengages (noisily) for any but the most trivia and transient of manual input affecting a control surface or engine.
But not naval warships.
As with the recent collisions of US naval vessels, I suspect that the issue has been grossly simplified for the benefit of the media.
There isn’t a single big grey box on the bridge marked ‘Autopilot’ with a big red light marked ‘On’. Rather, there are mutiple control modes which assign power and direction authorities in various ways and combinations under both manual and automatic control. Of course, the bridge watch all have to understand how these control modes work and how to use them. That’s why there is training, and practice drills, and checklists, and multiple levels of verification.
Sounds as if none of that worked here, and that the ship’s systems worked exactly as designed and built, but the crew simply didn’t understand how they worked and what they were doing. That’s exactly what happened with two separate US naval vessels – the crew were trying to control speed and direction without grasping that their control inputs were not active, and immediately assumed equipment failure.
For sure there’s a case to be made for better system design – it ought to be blindingly-obvious at-a-glance which knobs and levers will have effect, and which will not. But the immediate issue must be crew training. No doubt a full court of inquiry will cover all that in great detail.
llater,
llamas
Sounds as if none of that worked here, and that the ship’s systems worked exactly as designed and built, but the crew simply didn’t understand how they worked and what they were doing. That’s exactly what happened with two separate US naval vessels
This is what’s happening across the Western world.
Complex systems (and systems of systems) undone by the competency crisis. The Bell Curve was a warning.
“But the immediate issue must be crew training. No doubt a full court of inquiry will cover all that in great detail.”
It may do, but it won’t be made public if it casts a shadow over any of the diversity hires…..
The woke portion of the RN are stuck on “you’re a sexist homophobe”, but the fact is DIE/Intersectionalism defines a lack of favoured minorities as institutional racism/homophobia, so you by definition cannot select by competence is you want to meet your DEI targets 🙁
At least she didn’t try to reverse it.
>KevinS
November 30, 2024 at 8:41 am
It may come as a surprise to some, but the Captain of a ship doesn’t spend 24 hours a day on the bridge of the ship “driving” it. For a more thoughtful analysis of what happened, and details of the ship, I suggest looking at “What’s Going on with Shipping” website.
Having been a sailor in the US military, I can tell you that there was a massive fuckup *starting with the CO* if the bridge crew didn’t know the autopilot was activated.
These are not just ‘flip a switch’ things.
There was a massive failure of training from the CO to the OOD to the Conn to the enlisted Helm watchstanders.
Also, if the ship was close enough to land to run aground in a few minutes – the CO was in the pilothouse.
>Boganboy
November 30, 2024 at 9:50 am
I do have to agree that it was careless of ‘someone’ not to tell the person to whom they handed over guidance of the ship that it was on autopilot.
In the USN, when these three watches are turned over – OOD, Conn, and Helm, the full status of the equipment is supposed to be turned over. The Helm literally has to repeat the status to the Conn before the Conn will give permission to turn over the watch. Every order is manually logged – turning on the autopilot would have been written down in the ship’s log (which the OOD and Conn would have reviewed the last watch’s entries before turnover).
And there’s at least one alternative steering control and thrust control center (where the hydraulics for the rudders actually are) which could have been ordered to be manned and taken manual control w/in fewer than 5 minutes.
Engineering could have taken control and cut thrust in about 2 minutes.
All the reports I have seen are not very specific
Was it an autopilot, or a dynamic positioning system or some sort of surveying system connected to an autopilot for accurate surveying?
I guess the latter
In which case everyone on the bridge must have known the autopilot was engaged because they were surveying
If they went aground that quickly they were effectively in pilotage waters and I am surprised they were in any form of auto steering
Reports so far have been rather uninformative
Captain to blame.
Female lezza Captain…….DEI hire until proven otherwise.
In 2-5 years time people who know will come forward and confirm she was always known to be useless.
If there`s no one on the wheel it`s probably on auto. At least it was in my day.
In reading the reports of the collisions of the US vessels McCain and Fitzgerald, one of the things that stood out (although unstated) was that being a skilled and competent deck officer was not considered a good choice for promotion and advancement in a naval career. It seemed that most of the junior watchkeeping officers were merely punching their tickets in these workaday roles, leaving much of the dreary routine of running the ship to the senior enlisted while they went looking for specialty assignments that were more-likely to be career-enhancing. Learning to handle a ship really well seemed to be seen as a bit of a dead-end choice, career-wise. I wonder whether in this case, with so few opportunities for command and advancement, some of the same pressures applied. For certain, the captain had already taken a specialty career direction in the Royal Navy and had not distinguished herself as a ship handler, which would seem to me to be an absolute prerequisite for the commander of a survey vessel. But when there’s only 7 commands to be had, and aspirations to higher rank mean that a command ticket needs to be punched . . .
As another has noted, once the dust has settled and the mistakes that were made have been suitably obscured by the passage of time and the language of official inquiries, the real reasons for this monumental cock-up will trickle out, as it did with the two US vessels. Exculpation of the guilty, punishment of the innocent, praise and honours for the uninvolved. At least no sailors died in this one.
llater,
llamas
It seems to be the fashion for N Z ships to bump into things while on autopilot, as a Cook Strait ferry nudged the bottom of the North Island not so long ago.
I once had occasion to take passage on a James Fisher ship through the Scottish Isles and round Cape Wrath. As supernumerary crew ,my colleague and I were instructed before we sailed in how to disengage the autopilot and raise the alarm if it was necessary. We rounded the cape in a Force 8 gale at 0300 hrs and as we were in close proximity to land the Captain spent most of his time wedged in a corner of the bridge in case he was needed. I thought at the time that whatever he was paid was not enough. I also discovered that I don’t get seasick.
I was a shipmaster (Captain) between 2000 and 2016 and agree that “the buck stops here” etc, but it’s physically impossible for the Captain to be on the bridge all day/every day. The vessel in question was originally a commercial survey ship bought by the NZ navy, with very sophisticated equipment including twin azipods (no rudder) and several thrusters. I suggest again taking a look at “What’s Going On With Shipping”. Sam Mercagliano runs a Youtube channel under that name and has done an video on this subject and many other maritime accidents.
From my experience of watching Star Trek, when there are change-overs of bridge crew and somebody other than The Captain is captaining, these New Zealand non-gender-specific jonnies seemed to have thrown away all proper procedure. Commander Troi would never have let something like this happen, nor would Captain Uhura.
Pendantry alert: it’s an auto helm not an auto pilot.
A pilot on a ship is someone who helps them navigate through difficult water such as the channel or Kiel Canal or in and out of harbours.
BiND,
Of all the many ships on which I sailed in 49 years, all of them had “auto-pilots”. None, zilch, nada had an auto-helm. That includes ships built in the UK, Russia, Estonia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Holland and Germany. I’m happy to be shown an example of one.
Kevin,
I’ll bow to your professional experience every day of the week. I was going by what I had on my small boat and that every time someone mentioned auto pilot in the sailing forum I used they were picked up.