Hacker News Reader

Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean this was effectively captain error? Like in response to a power outage the decision was made to try to reverse and rather than arrest forward momentum it just pushed their forward vector into the piling?

View on HN

I would tend to think so. The pilot should have anticipated prop walk and known that the ship had no chance of stopping before the bridge.

I’m trying to find a color coded current map. Wind too. I wouldn’t expect wind or current to cause the pronounced heading change that is visible. The drift seems possible.

Note: I’m an experienced dinghy/keelboat sailor, but lack virtually any experience driving boats under power, much less commercial vessels

yeah, noted. But it does seem like the heading change was so dramatic and the smoke pouring out after power recovery that something happened with the prop. And while it may have been currents, the lack of heading change before the smoke seems to suggest there was an intervention that caused heading change.

Ship travel, much like orbital mechanics, are so often non-intuitive if you're not familiar with how much effort it takes to make significant speed changes vs. heading changes. And speed changes often affect the heading as well if you're not careful.

It seems the excellent windy.com has wind and current data from the incident still available. Looks like current was <0.2 kts and wind was 6 kts south-east. So both should be completely negligible.

Checks out.

.2knots/hour = 405 yards/hour

It was 4 minutes from power loss to impact.

405 yards/15 = 27 yards. And that's if the ship instantly accelerated to a 0.2 kt drift, which it wouldn't. Wind acceleration on the vessel than current.

For some reason, I thought that large vessels hired a local pilot to navigate their way through places like this.

Captain, or pilot? In Baltimore, as in most harbors, a local pilot comes on board to guide the ship. Is this their responsibility?

I too, have read about Baltimore pilots for the first time today. If you’d read a bit further, the Pilots use either intercoms and sometimes radios to send instructions to the captain while they’re elsewhere on the ship. If they were using intercoms, and there was no power, that would do it

> In Baltimore, as in most harbors, a local pilot comes on board to guide the ship. Is this their responsibility?

I would doubt the pilot would have ordered the power to the ship to be cut and for everything to go dark right before hitting the bridge. Pretty sure they were probably telling them to navigate away from the pylon.

Yes, they have the responsibility, not the captain, as evidenced by the specific insurance they carry.

Of course, lawyers will try to spread the blame around (who chose the pilot, did captain's actions or orders somehow get in the way of the pilot; did captain not ensure engines were working properly...). But the base responsibility lies with the pilot.

It probably helps the captain that this was a ship owned and operated by a very big vertically integrated company (Maersk). Most ships are owned by smaller companies with a few (10-150) hulls and then chartered out. And while in this case the ship was chartered (along with crew) I bet Maersk's systems are stronger than your average charterer's.

I thought the pilot only offered “guidance” to avoid responsibility. I learned that from a documentary on the Panama Canal.

Is that just a Panama Canal thing? Or should I find better documentaries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_pilot

Panama is the exception

> Legally, the master has full responsibility for the safe navigation of their vessel, even when a pilot is on board. If they have clear grounds that the pilot may jeopardize the safety of navigation, they can relieve the pilot from their duties and ask for another pilot, or, if not required to have a pilot on board, navigate the vessel without one. In every case, during the time passed aboard for operation, the pilot will remain under the master's authority, and always out of the "ship's command chain." The pilot remains aboard as an important and indispensable part of the bridge team. Only in transit of the Panama Canal does the pilot have full responsibility for the navigation of the vessel.

You might have misunderstood the difference between controlling the ship and commanding it. The Panama Canal Authority pilot controls navigation and maneuvering to get through the canal but the captain is still in command of the vessel and ultimately responsible for it.

Canal accidents cost so much that they're each individually investigated and insurance companies fight over who is liable. Sometimes it's the pilot's fault and ACP's insurance pays out, sometimes it's the shipping company's insurance, and sometimes they split the cost.

This news report [1] confirms there were two pilots at the time of the accident. Baltimore Port runs a dock pilot from the Key Bridge to the port itself, and after the Key Bridge, a harbor pilot who takes the ship (I believe the rule is any vessel > 100 tons, and all non-domestic ships of any tonnage must by Maryland state law be piloted in this manner) out to the mouth of the bay.

The after-accident report and insurer and re-insurer wranglings will be a fascinating read, I'm sure. It will be a miracle if the taxpayers escape unscathed for the rebuilding of the transit spanning the harbor, and it falls entirely upon the insurers and re-insurers.

As dramatic as this accident was though, and the many parallels I can draw from its lessons to software engineering, IT operations, cybersecurity and so on, I'm not as sanguine believing it will really drive home to organization leaderships the evergreen advice to pay down your tech debt, maintenance matters, organizational culture/esprit de corps counts, the operational teams are just as important as the engineering teams, etc.

[1] https://fox59.com/news/national-world/cargo-ship-hits-baltim...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com