Last I heard, the US Navy is sticking with the collision time around 2:25am local.
Until the Navy presents their info showing differently, I'll keep believing the Navy's version.
Too many different people on the Fitzgerald would have had to be dead asleep to just cruise into a huge cargo vessel. There are two officers and 8-10 enlisted on the bridge; 8-10 enlisted in CIC, four visual lookouts on a clear night. At least three of the lookouts (fore, aft, and starboard) would have been screaming bloody murder through their sound-powered phones as that mountainous cargo ship bore down on the destroyer. The OOD would have had a mutiny on the bridge if he had ignored all the input.
I understand you, but the evidence (to me) indicates that the cargo vessel was not bearing down on the Fitzgerald as if it were coming broadside, particularly if the two vessels are traveling in much the same direction in the dark.
Rather than the seemingly far-fetched (to me) scenario of a 30,000 ton cargo ship chasing down and steering an intercept course to deliberately ram a vessel a third of its size and far more agile and speedy, it is far more likely to me that even if the watches on the Fitzgerald had been aware of the vessel, the interpretation of the relative courses in the dark may not have seemed threatening until it became threatening.
I have been told, and I believe it, that overtaking another vessel traveling in the same direction at night in close proximity is not a slam dunk deal.
Also, nothing against the Navy, but they have far more to lose by admitting they weren’t able to transmit a message for close to an hour, and had to resort to satellite phones to do it. With the Captain injured or incapacitated, and the ship taking on water and listing, I believe there was pandemonium on the bridge of the Fitzgerald, and trying to find a working sat phone may not have been their primary concern off the bat.
There are a large number of people who seem to WANT this to be some kind of act of terrorism, and until all the evidence is in, I won’t rule it out, but in the many cases of ship and aircraft mishaps, it is the fallibility of humans (sometimes compounded by an equipment malfunction of some kind) that is the culprit.
not really. Read about the Belknap v. JFK. The bridge and CIC lost track of an 80,000 ton aircraft carrier only 5K yards away.