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Comment by cocoablazing | Hacker News Reader

A key occurrence during this mishap:

0127 The Officer of the Deck ordered course to the right to course 240T, but rescinded the order within a minute. Instead, the Officer of the Deck ordered an increase to full speed and a rapid turn to the left (port). These orders were not carried out.

0129 The Bosun Mate of the Watch, a more senior supervisor on the bridge, took over the helm and executed the orders.

I've witnessed multiple similar situations on a warship (imminent loss of extremely critical systems), and had to forcibly push the watchstanders out of the way to do their job for them. Many people are going to freeze when the SHTF, and there may be no prior indication.

Major attaboy to the BMOW who saved many of his shipmates. Given the incident angle of collision, many more would have died from a perpendicular collision.

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Yep, but that freeze is limited with more training, and mixed watches when teh newbs have to be rotated in for the real thing so the "hold my beer" guys aren't outnumbered 10 to 1 by the frozen folks.

I can't believe these watchstanders had the LOK they should have had on the steering system, or every one involved in ship control would have been able to immediately identify the problem and realign the steering system, other than bmow.

I don't think the senior watch team had their st either, or the orders to prepare to take manual control of the steering and propulsion system aft would have immediately been out.

Also it makes little sense that lookouts who calculated cpa at collision weren't raising the alarm. These guys who I had to do their job for them: I got them removed, and tried to get them off our boat. They were fine people but they were a danger to us.

Yeah, it's boggling how it went down. That's why I can't credit "UI" a cause, not at all. I'm no seaman, but I have some close contacts. UI might cover a BM taking a second before he realized the controls weren't ganged. Maybe.

UI doesn't cover mass confusion -> panic over critical loss of control that had NOT been lost. They heard hoofbeats and decided it was zebras, not horses.

There's a lot of acronyms in there.

LOK = Level of knowledge?

BMOW = Boatswain's Mate Of the Watch

ST = ? Not "Subject to" or "Such that" as I've seen.

CPA = Collision Prevention Assist in automotive systems, but maybe not here?

ST = shit together

CPA = closest point of approach.

CPA is calculated for anything close ahead of time, but only if both you and another ship are moving in a straight line. Which the McCain wasn't.

I don't know which one is more bizzare here - the story itself, or the barrage of "this is due to bad UX" comments in this thread.

So I guess if this warship fired all its rockets away, "due to bad UX", and destroyed a small nation, I guess the comments would also be about a bad UX. Oh crumbs, the "check status" button was so close to the "start armageddon" button. Perhaps we should submit a meek complaint to Microsoft or something.

"Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, "noticed the Helmsman (the watchstander steering the ship) having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control.""

So... we gave the control of a warship to some guy that... has some difficulty navigating through the straits that like 1M of ships go through every day, without problems. Mind you, this is the navy that is supposed to be highly trained to deal with real-world issues such as naval blockades, pirates, and even wars.

It does not make sense at all. Allegedly there were some cuts to funding for navy. Maybe someone is trying to make a point. I do not know, this is just unexplainable. Certainly nothing to do with just "bad UX"

The problem is that you can't "fix" humans. They'll make mistakes. Aviation is as safe as it is precisely because it moved past the "pilot error! that guy just made a mistake, how can one be so stupid" attitude evinced in your comment.

You have to look at the entire accident chain, and at the entire system, including training, supervision, redundancy, and, indeed, UX.

Good UI makes the effort of doing the 'right thing' very little, and the effort of doing the 'bad thing' as costly as possible.

Design (in my opinion) is planning out what good and bad things are for a given tool and determining how to express that through the UI.

> Design (in my opinion) is planning out what good and bad things are for a given tool and determining how to express that through the UI.

I disagree with the premise you have that the designer deciding what is good and bad is the whole or even the right story. I think I might agree with the implication that a system should make doing cognitively difficult/safety critical things easy but there is no possible way to plan for all eventualities, that's why we have 'intelligent' controllers in ultimate charge.

One day we might have artificial intelligence in charge but we're not there yet.

So instead of the goal of good UX being the designer planning out what is good and bad, it is much better to design a system that reduces cognitive load but presents information about the current state of the system in the most obvious and intuitive way possible. It should do everything it can to make sure the operator understands the current state of the system.

In terms of operating complex physical systems like ships and aircraft the ultimate goal of designing control systems is to simultaneously take as much of the burden off the operator as possible but present all information needed in order to bring the system back to an _understood_ state as rapidly as possible following deviation from that state. This is the only way to maintain _control_.

It's reasonable to try and make it difficult to get to a state that is 'uncontrolled'. But it's imperative that more credence is given to getting a system back to an understood state once the controller finds them self in one that's not understood. It may get to this state in a way the designer didn't plan for, so getting out of it has to be incredibly quick and easy.

Personally, I put more stock in getting the system in an understood state than a controlled one as from there it's easier to return to control. Without understanding the state of the system it's easy to make further mistakes.

I think that's the real point. The ship in question is by far not the largest and should be more agile than most ships that go through these waters. How can ferries and tankers easily master this every day and the Navy is not? If they cannot figure out how to solve a situation like this within 2 minutes, how would they react to enemy fire or being attacked by another ship?

Seamanship in the USN has been on a downward slope for over a decade due to changes in training methodology. Qualification standards have slipped, and I'm sure that officers have slipped through the cracks who in previous generations would have had to recycle through the training programs. The 7th Fleet has huge issues right now.

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