Instead of going Starboard and topside or Port and below, everyone has to jump out of their rack and assume this posture!
Posted on 06/10/2016 7:57:50 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
I think she’s junk too. We have had plenty of accidents and fatalities on our ships over the years, but we run them a lot harder and a lot more efficiently.
I just don’t think I would want to sail around on a refurbished Russian warship like that one if had a say in it. I suspect what had to be done to make her seaworthy and operational enough to sell is akin to watching someone make the sausage.
No insult intended, but that ship is not exactly a great design, and sitting idle for years, all the cost overruns, etc...I just don’t have any warm and fuzzy feelings about her.
H2S?
Probably there was hydrogen sulfide involved, too. Very bad situation. Prayers to the fallen and their families.
Some of those countries, including India, don’t need aircraft carriers of any kind. Just wasting their taxpayers money.
Instead of going Starboard and topside or Port and below, everyone has to jump out of their rack and assume this posture!
“All hands Set Condition Vindaloo!”
Its amazing only two people died. Sad, but amazing it was so low.
I see you were thinking about H2S also. I drilled oilwells with high concentrations of the gas in Forsan, Texas for Exxon many years ago. The gas has a combination of properties making it very dangerous (as I’m sure you know). It’s claimed many, many lives.
Things can go south on a ship pretty quickly. I was deployed on the Kennedy just after she had a collision with the USS Belknap in 1975. It was night operations, and she was off the port beam, and swung around in an arc the took her bow on into the angled deck of the port side of the Kennedy.
My first night aboard ship as she was tied up at Pier 12 in Norfolk, I was sitting on the flight deck with the plane captain who was responsible for training me, Delgado, who had taken me under his wing. We sat on the deck on the starboard side just forward of the island, looking out over the waist catapult.
As we sat looking out, he said we were sitting in the exact spot he had been the night the Belknap collision occurred, and he had been idly looking in the dark that night in the same direction. He said he saw a red light, and thought “Huh. What the hell is that?” Had no clue it was one of the mast lights of the Belknap as she hit, and plowed under the overhanging flight deck, shearing off her superstructure.
He said one second it was pitch black and silent, the next second the ship shuddered, he heard screeching metal, and a huge yellow ball of flame shot into the sky.
They manned fire hoses up on the flight deck. He said that he watched the aluminum superstructure of the Belknap melt in the conflagration and run in a molten river down the side of the hull, hissing into the ocean.
According to him, he said they didn’t think anyone could have survived on that ship with the entire ship seeming to be aflame. That only seven sailors on the Belknap were killed and one on the Kennedy is unbelievable to him. I only heard it second hand that the guy on the Kennedy suffocated in a head on the port side (right up the hall from the compartment I slept in for the next three years we were deployed), but another guy in the same head saved himself from asphyxiating by sticking his head in a toilet and repeatedly flushing it. Apparently each time it was flushed it introduced air into the toilet, and he lived.
Rough rule of thumb 4 aircraft/5000 fullload tons
34 for 45000 is right on the money
Oddly enough, the USS Bordelon assisted the Belknap that night in rescue and firefighting, and then when we were up on a cruise in the North Atlantic about 10 months later, she collided with the Kennedy on the starboard side while refueling at night.
Funny thing was, I was working the night shift, and my plane was parked right along the starboard side just forward of the island. We green, rookie plane captains were the ones who got to ride brakes, so you had to sit in the damn plane all night, trying to catch some sleep, and my squadron (VA-46) coming from Florida, I wasn’t used to the cold, so it was uncomfortable, but I managed to get some sleep. At some point, I awoke to a banging sound, and I nearly crapped my pants, it startled me that badly. I turned, and outside the canopy of my plane, one of the Crash Crew guys who wears the silver fire suit had climbed up on the ladder and was banging the nozzle of a CO2 extinguisher against the canopy to wake me up.
I opened the canopy, and the yelled “We’re at General Quarters, we hit a ship! You better get below and check in!” I think it all happened pretty close to me, and I slept right through it, the GQ alarm and everything!
That too.
Wow, that would have startled me too!
India lives in a very bad neighborhood.
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