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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

> and that many were fatigued, with an average of 4.9 hours of sleep between the 14 crew members present.

I suspect this played more of a role than any of the controls or procedures did. I had a friend in the Navy and he once explained the shifts he did to me and how utterly insane they were.

I suspect leadership doesn't want to (or cant) fix the root cause (fatigue) and is happy to spend tax dollars to replace the steering and divert attention from the problem for now. Gotta do something! Anything! Even if it's not the right thing.

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I'm not going to argue that the navy should be allow insane schedule, if it's due to budget or poor planing, but in case of a real war maybe you can't expect the grew to get a full 8 hour sleep.

A warship need to be able to operate under the worst of circumstances. In that case every move you make needs to be reflex, and I can imagine that touchscreens aren't ideal for quick precise motions, done by reflex, after only 4 hours of sleep.

This would totally be understandable and every expected if this lack of sleep were part of stress weeks meant to mentality prepare you for real world operation conditions, but I take it from the parent comment that it seems it's part of normal operating procedure, which is detrimental.

> but in case of a real war maybe you can't expect the grew to get a full 8 hour sleep.

True, but even Navy Seals don't run sleep deprived continuously. In between those training times when they are sleep deprived, they are expected to have normal sleep cycles.

This is less than 5 hours of sleep in peacetime, though. How much sleep do you think they'd actually get with a war on?

Their daily task list will change. They might cancel some kinds of training and some kinds of cleaning during wartime.

We have an example of how navy shifts work on HN by 'genkimind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19101464

And training. When this and the Fitzgerald broke around the same time, there was a big dustup about the officer training school having been cut for budget, in favor of "on the job" training. You'd think something like this needs classroom and simulator time with grading and certification for exactly this reason.

Can confirm. I was a nuke in the Navy and four hours was probably the most amount of sleep I ever got underway. You work 12-14 days underway and stand 8 and 8 watches then have to wait an hour in line to get chow and then they run drills that the whole ship has to participate in. If you can do get any sleep it's because you hide in the bilge and sleep on pipe or in a ac room.

In many safety critical industries you have strictly enforced fatigue management regulations. It seems shocking to me that a long distance truck driver is more strictly regulated then a person piloting a warship.

Military equipment has a tendency to be used under stressful conditions by people of average intelligence. Even conditions where operators suffer under cognitive and physical impairment.

One might want to take this into account when designing user interfaces.

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