Posted on 06/19/2017 6:42:45 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
The ramming of the USS Fitzgerald – still being misreported as a “collision” – is shrouded in puzzling behavior. This is an accident (if indeed it was unintentional) that should not have been possible. Now comes news of something very suspicious. The Associated Press has just filed a non-bylined story, “Japan investigates delay in reporting US Navy ship collision,” that reveals:
Japan's coast guard is investigating why it took nearly an hour for a deadly collision between a U.S. Navy destroyer and a container ship to be reported.What was going on that prevented prompt report?A coast guard official said Monday they are trying to find out what the crew of the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal was doing before reporting the collision to authorities 50 minutes later.
The coast guard initially said the collision occurred at 2:20 a.m. on Saturday because the Philippine ship had reported it at 2:25 a.m. and said it just happened. After interviewing Filipino crewmembers, the coast guard has changed the collision time to 1:30 a.m.
Nanami Meguro, a spokeswoman for NYK Line, the ship's operator, agreed with the revised timing of the collision.Meguro said the ship was "operating as usual" until the collision at 1:30 a.m., as shown on a ship tracking service that the company uses. She said the ship reported to the coast guard at 2:25 a.m., but she could not provide details about what the ship was doing for nearly an hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Here is my parital theory:
The merchant ship was operating on auto-pilot, with all humans sound asleep. The collision happened at the sharp right-hand turn at the beginning of the “odd manuvering” not the end. The humans woke up and spent a few minutes wandering what the hell happened while the auto-pilot is speeding up and turning back toward their course.
The humans then disengage the autopilot, slow down, make the U-turn and after they confirm what happened they call in the collision. They stay a while to render aid (the meandering part after the U-turn), then resume their course to Japan.
This theory explains the odd track, the delay in reporting the collision, and why we have almost no information about the collision itself. It does not explain why no one on the destroyer were able to see/react to the cargo ship.
The ACX Crystal collided with the USS Fitzgerald off Japan’s coast, killing seven of the destroyer’s crew of nearly 300. The ships collided early Saturday morning, when the Navy said most of the 300 sailors on board would have been sleeping. Authorities have declined to speculate on a cause while the crash remains under investigation.
A track of the much-larger container ship’s route by MarineTraffic, a vessel-tracking service, shows it made a sudden turn as if trying to avoid something at about 1:30 a.m., before continuing eastward. It then made a U-turn and returned around 2:30 a.m. to the area near the collision.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/uss-fitzgerald-collision-wasnt-reported-hour-japan/
“””The Japanese Coast Guard and U.S. Navy initially said the collision happened at 2:20 a.m. because the ACX Crystal did not report it until 2:25 a.m.”””
And why didn’t the US Navy report the collision to the Japanese Coast Guard? Is the USN exempt?
“The damage doesn’t seem consistent with a medium or high speed impact.”
The collision occured at 5knots or less, at an oblique angle. Otherwise that DDG would have been sunk.
For those who wonder: This US ship is the most advanced ship in the world and capable of 40 knots...and turning 180 deg in a mile or less.
That they were hit by a 39,000 ton cargo vessel at any speed shows gross dereliction of duty and abject incompetence.
The Cole was tied up alongside a pier.
“....I don’t understand how a collision like this could occur...”
What if the cargo ship wanted to hit The Fitzgerald?
Could the cargo ship “drive” so that they could ram our ship?
Was our ship trying to get out of the way, and the cargo ship kept coming at us?
>> but I just don’t see how this could happen.
You mean how this could happen “unintentionally.” It could easily happen if the freighter was in attack mode.
Sure. Anything is possible during a collision like that. It doesn't answer the question, "how did the two ships collide in the first place?"
It would be like trying to run down a Jack Russell Terrier with a train.
Sure, you could do it, but the Jack has to not be paying attention for it to happen.
If the propulsion plant of the destroyer is off-line, how long would it take to spin up the engines to get underway? Is there any condition where the propulsion plant would be off-line while the ship is not lashed to a pier?
““Most likely reason was, it was attempting to burn off speed, which a uturn would do.””
A container ship isn’t the space shuttle gliding through the atmosphere.
Backing up for another shot?
The Captain, from stories already reported, was not on the bridge. He was actually in his quarters, and suffered head injuries during the collision.
I agree with you about all your other assumptions. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the Combat Information Center would've also been watching all surface activity, and would've been in communication with the bridge about the proximity of this vessel.
To me, a "ramming" of the destroyer seems unlikely--it seems as though the destroyer may have misjudged a maneuver in order to cross in front of the container ship, but failed to pass soon enough. If such a move occurred, it demonstrated poor judgment by whomever was driving the destroyer at the time.
I wasn’t attempting to answer that question, but thought it might help to explain time discrepancies.
That would never occur; i.e., all humans asleep. Certainly not in a busy sea lane around Japan. An auto-pilot on a ship maintains course and speed; it doesn't avoid obstacles.
This destroyer has two screws (propellers), meaning there are two main engine rooms. (Looking it up, each shaft has two gas-turbine engines.) There are multiple backups, as you would expect, redundancy is built into the design.
Assuming you didn't suffer some kind of engineering casualty to both engines, it's possible you might take one shaft offline for maintenance. You would never do it in a situation where you might endanger the ship by not having her fully operational. This might be in a hostile situation, or in a navigational situation such as a transit through a channel. Navigating a busy sea lane off the coast of Japan might also be considered "dangerous" from this standpoint.
I would think that any planned maintenance would've had to be authorized by the Captain, prior to going to sleep. This would be in his nighttime standing orders. Any un-planned maintenance that was required to repair a power plant would've resulted in someone waking the Captain to inform him of the situation.
Its a "relatively" narrow shipping lane, as compared with out in the open sea. That area sees 400-500 ships per day going through it, and has "restricted navigation" rules meaning ships are supposed to stay on a prescribed course, stay in their lanes, etc. Its like being on busy freeway.
Perhaps the freighter had a change in scheduling and was told by their dispatcher to change course and head to a different port and was maneuvering around to set their new course when this happened... hard to say without hearing their story.
In any event, both the destroyer and the freighter should have had both radar and people on watch to try and avoid this sort of thing... perhaps human error on both sides of the equation.
I would bet there there are lots of avoided collisions where there's human error on one of two ships involved, and they're avoided in all cases except when there's human error on two involved ships concurrently.
This comparison is in displacement, not length or height above water.
“Ramming”? By a CONTAINER SHIP? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
*Ahem* Now to get serious.
The collision occured in one of THE busiest ship lanes in Japan. Both ships were probably on autopilot. Which, OBTW is only as “foolproof” as the fools who program it. Night watchmen? Didn’t help the Titanic much.
2:00 AM on a moonless (probably) night. Stupid? Yes. Preventable? Definitely. Human error on one or both sides? Most Definitely. Accident? Without a doubt.
You said it. Desk duty for this ship’s captain for the rest of his career. Doesn’t matter that he was asleep.
” .... In a ship an armored citadel is an armored box enclosing the machinery and magazine spaces. It was formed by the armored deck, the waterline belt and the transverse bulkheads.
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