Keeping your ship from running aground is the easiest part of the sailing process. All you need to do is know where you are (GPS Helps with that) know how deep the water is (Maps Tell you the Depth of the Water) and read your depth meter.
This guy must have been asleep at the helm.
Charts/Maps can be wrong. Also, under the water where you can’t see, features can change (e.g. sandbars). If you are the captain of a littoral combat ship, in today’s navy, would you be aggressive towards the enemy (whomever it it may be), or career-preserving and risk averse.
I’m not a fan or defender of running aground but I could see it happening say, running down pirates off the coast of Somalia, bad charts or new sandbars out to ruin your day.
C.W.
You think that the skipper was alone on the bridge?
My guess is that there is more to this than we know. Charts are frequently wrong, and depth sounders do have anomalies. As for GPS, I have gigabytes of raw data containing uncountable anomalies. You need to use all the data you have, all of the time if the mission is critical. Realtime GPS has never been approved to be used as a sole means of positioning. Post processing can fix all the bad data, but you can't post process a voyage.