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Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

>We create rules enforcing mandatory sleep requirements stupidly believing that we can eliminate the potential for a user of the system to be drowsy while at the controls.

>stupidly believing

Dick move by author to reveal his level of ignorance of USN operation tempo around McCain collision until the last few paragraphs. There were lol 4 fucking surface ship collisions and a grounding in westpac in 2017 because sailors were ran ragged, leading to operation pause. UX wasn't the primary problem. Sailors weren't "drowsy", they were sleep deprived, hopped up on stimulants etc due to manning shortages and long deployments, and likely lax training (due to shortages), which caused USS Connecticut accident a few years later. I'm sure you can improve UI for audience subsisting on 3-5 hours of sleep, but maybe the more pressing thing to try is to get them more sleep. IIRC there was study on navy sleep hyigene and like 100% of sailors in bottom quartile experienced bewilderment/confusion.

https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-par...

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Having spent 10 years as a Navy Nuclear Propulsion Operator on two different submarines operating the reactor plant, I can tell you I am not surprised by incidents like these. In order of importance: 1) Lack of sleep (it wasn't unusual to operate on no sleep over a 36-48 hour period) 2) Poor or insufficient training. Just because you are "trained or qualified" doesn't mean you know how to operate. 3) Poor or missing procedures (let's call it UI/UX for today's lingo). Many procedures were vague, and drawings were hard to understand. The Navy has a feedback system for this, but it often takes months/years to resolve.

Having said all that, the issues pointed out in the comments and the article, including my comments, have existed for decades in the Navy. At some point, it comes down to the command's leadership and superiors to ensure these issues don't happen. A poorly designed checkbox is the last thing that caused this issue.

> Many procedures were vague, and drawings were hard to understand. The Navy has a feedback system for this, but it often takes months/years to resolve.

When I worked for a DoD contractor I worked on a system that was designed to tighten one such feedback loop. The publicly-available copy regarding this unclassified effort [1] says that it was

> [a] framework for an end-to-end Change Request (CR) workflow system that will improve turn-around time and speed to the fleet. We are leading the innovation of a paperless cockpit through the design and development of an eFC mobile application that will provide responsive, reliable information for our aircrews on mobile devices at the touch of a button.

I thought that it was a pretty novel idea - it was certainly the most technically-progressive project I worked on when in defense contracting by a country mile. When I attended a program picnic at the Captain's house, however, I found no shortage of people who were skeptical of what we were building. When I pressed them for reasons why it basically amounted to "I learned what we have years ago and I don't want to change". Institutional rot is very real.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240821032432/https://webdev.am...

That said, there's something to be said about being resistant to change; "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I don't know what "eFC" means, but "mobile application" implies they would need a new device with everything that entails.

As a career military aviator (about half and half flying and non-flying air ops jobs), there are definitely a surprising amount of Luddites in green flight suits. But there are also legit security concerns bringing modern mobile devices into a cockpit for the same reasons as the concerns around bringing one into a SCIF.

Having spent ~10 years each active and reserve in Naval Aviation, it still boggles my mind that the rest of the Fleet hasn't understood the concept of crew rest yet, or is at least only now beginning to understand it 60-70 years later.

We adopted it in the mid-20th century post-WWII because we were literally killing people for dumb reasons. I don't know if it's the well-known aviator hate among a significant minority of blackshoes that's the roadblock, or what.

It's good to see all the Navy nukes comments on this article. MM1/SS, one tour on an SSN, and one on an SSBN!

There were also issues surround group dynamics and trust. A constant parade of ragged junior officers arriving and leaving leads directly to breakdowns in communication. Teams (driving a ship is a team effort) require stability.

In your opinion, did any of those accidents occur in operations of some importance, small or large? What if the military simply ran fewer missions?

So what if there were Chinese naval operations in a place where American operations occurred?

The military doesn't really have the autonomy to reduce their own mission set. The major missions in terms of maintaining certain capabilities or protecting against certain adversaries are assigned by Congress and the President. The military then has to figure out how to execute within a budget that, while enormous in absolute terms, is still inadequate for everything they're tasked to do. There is no political will to fix this problem.

> A poorly designed checkbox is the last thing that caused this issue.

Indeed. The checkbox, the lack of sleep, the insufficient training and the cryptic instructions are all symptoms.

Lack of sleep is one thing I would think about deliberately employing to get a notion of what is the safe margins of individual crew members. For instance, I work very well under stress, but fail early on sleep deprivation.

E: since many are quoting authors preface about not knowing much, but doing their own research

My beef is, given disclaimer, I read piece to end thinking author made good faith effort at research, only to see author characterize, near conclusion, sailor/operator severe lack of sleep hygiene as "drowsiness" which can be designed around. That expecting enforcement of better operational conditions is "stupid", which may feel true in military context. But 7th fleet went from 4 accidents in one year to none after brief operational pause for a month, I dont think the result is because USN bureaucracy figured out a way to improve UXUI on Arleigh Burkes software. Also note the other 6 fleets with... more relaxed tasking relative to west pac weren't suffering from same level of dysfunction. UXUI is important yes, but sometimes operations are ran so badly that you should prioritize improving the way it's run instead of pretending it can be bandaid over with a better checkbox.

Yeah a better steering wheel will not help address people who fall asleep at the wheel or are drowsy and mix up the gas and brake.

But if the wheel hides whether it has been turned and which way then chances of remediation of a situation are much lower.

Design matters.

I'm surprised that in the description of the incident there is no mention of a checklist like pilots use?

The Navy has the stupidest possible ideas of sleep hygiene, boiling down to "it sucked for me so it should suck for the next guy, too". I had friends in departments who worked 6 hours on, 6 hours off, 6 hours on, 6 hours off repeatedly. In that pattern you never get a solid 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, ever. Yeah, it's possible that emergencies will arise where you have to work 24-48-more hours straight without relief because the ship is under attack, or on fire, or barely afloat. That's not a reason to try to kill sailors with sleep deprivation the rest of the time.

> The Navy has the stupidest possible ideas of sleep hygiene, boiling down to "it sucked for me so it should suck for the next guy, too".

See also: medicine.

Definitely. Modern residency was literally shaped by a coke addict.

Six and six is fine, if you actually do it. In reality, junior officers do six on watch, six on a computer doing paperwork, six back on watch, a couple hours eating/bathing/cleaning, then perhaps get five of actual sleep each day.

It’s not. You can’t ever have a full night’s rest. That’s not sustainable.

A sleep cycle is roughly 90 minutes. Is there evidence that ~5 continuous cycles is any better/worse than 5 non-continuous ones?

Navies have been doing some version of six and six for centuries. It isn't total bunk.

Doing something stupid for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.

Nor is doing 8-8-8 or 12-12 shifts. There are only so many people on a boat and they all need to be working about 50% of the time, plus all-hands stuff where nobody sleeps.

The risk of that logic is that 1-1 shifts would have 50% of the ship working at a time, although most of them would die after a week or so.

1-1 is clearly absurd. So is 2-2. And 3-3. I'm convinced 6-6 is also biologically unsustainable for most people, although 6 hours is long enough that 1) some people are perfectly fine with it, and 2) most other people can hack it for at least a while before incipient mental breakdown.

A full night's rest isn't 8 hours, and the sleep doesn't have to be accumulated in one block. This is a myth that persisted after the invention of street lighting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

For some people. Sleep monitors confirm that I consistently sleep from 7 to 8 hours straight through per night unless something external disturbs me. That's my own natural sleep pattern. I cannot function on fewer contiguous hours long-term. I know. I've been through it several times in life and it was universally horrible.

Some people function best with several shorter sleep periods. Other people function best with 1 longer one. The former can work just fine with a 12-12 schedule. The latter cannot maintain performance with a 6-6 schedule.

As a former aviator JO . . . you're drinking the Kool-Aid. You didn't need to do that, you just did it.

It's my understanding that our ideas of eight hours of continuous sleep window may be an artifact of the industrial revolution and electrification. Meaning it may not be ideal for us, but just the assumption that we've become accustom to in modern times. There are lots of old writing (Ben Franklin etc.) that refer to their "second sleep" ie, they sleep for a few hours, get up and do some work, and then go back to sleep for a few hours more. If anyone has more concrete information on this, I'd be interested.

That's a valid sleep mode for some people. My wife wakes up in the middle of the night, reads for a bit, then goes back to sleep. That works for her. I absolutely cannot do this. When I fall asleep, I stay asleep for 7-8 hours and only then wake up. In the times where I've been unable to get that uninterrupted sleep.

In the case of the Navy, I can guarantee that 6+6 shifts didn't come about because of advanced sleep research, but because "it was good enough for me and now it's good enough for them".

I don't know it's origination, but I suspect the 6+6 was probably a result of having the ability to split operations of a 24 hour day into even crews (not much different than the civilian 8 hour allowing factory work to be split into 3 shifts). How they rationalize it after the fact is a different story.

They need to be well-rested in case those emergency situations occur; to me that 6 hour schedule feels like it's intended to keep people in a constant state of being stressed / tired. Weird sadism in the military. That said, that schedule looks like they only have the people (or the facilities) to run two shifts, instead of three (8 hours on, 16 hours off) or more shifts.

My department did basically 12+12. The work day was long (with meal breaks), but then you had a few hours to hang out, write letters, read, and sleep for 8 hours. I’d infinitely rather do 12+12 than 6+6.

It's not military "weird sadism," it's meatheadedness in some areas of the military.

The aviation communities had this suitcased 40+ years ago with mandatory crew rest requirements that can only be broken in legitimate combat.

> Dick move by author to reveal his level of ignorance of USN operation tempo around McCain collision until the last few paragraphs. There were lol 4 fucking surface ship collisions and a grounding in westpac in 2017 because sailors were ran ragged

I read it as "mandatory sleep requirements don't actually mean people don't show up to a shift without enough sleep".

Basically acknowledging the difference between how the world is on paper and how the world is in reality. Even if there's rules about people getting enough sleep, designing a system that assumes everyone who works it will get enough will get people killed.

I didn't read it necessarily like that. It can also mean that even with fully rested sailors, the same confusion can still happen again, because the interface is inherently confusing.

In a sudden life-and-death situation combined with information overload, a bad interface can be what tips the scale into disaster.

Ignorance is not a “dick move”, it’s having something to learn.

The extreme sleep deprivation doesn’t really conflict with the author’s point that better UI could have avoided this. Better sleep could have too.

Certainly true but I think he is saying that the author should have indicated his limited knowledge of the context of the collision early on in the article.

Yes, I'm being overly uncharitable, but it takes very inept research to study Mccain accident and not be exposed to the other 3 accidents, or be generally aware of the state of 7th fleet / condition of sailors from any of the reports. 4 major accidents do not happen in that specific fleet (out of 7) because of UXUI, when the other 6 fleets operate the same ships. Extra side eye of commentary/conclusion reducing cripplingly bad culture around sleep to "drowsiness" because elevating UXUI / blaming checkbox works less well when operators are mentally not there. You don't UXUI truckers so they can drive safely on a few hours of sleep, you regulate how long they can drive to make sure they get enough sleep.

> UXUI truckers so they can drive safely on a few hours of sleep

I think truckers have significant UXUI AND regulation on how long they can drive.

The Author does a good job oh highlighting the issues around UXUI that have not been analysed enough anywhere else and also raises the other issues which have been reported on.

> "first and only public source of real design criticism"

> "Add inexperience, insufficient training, and lack of sleep to the situation and you have a recipe for disaster"

In the 3rd paragraph (of which the preceding 2 were very short) ...

"Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet."

Having read some great articles on the spate of pacific fleet collisions contemporaneous with the McCain incident, this is when I stopped reading this pointless article.

And I came to that comment page to say: "I really want to memorize all that hilarious design problems" - like eg. physical steering wheel not working and then suddenly turns itself into a exactly wrong direction... You know for https://xkcd.com/742/ purposes.

But then I read few comments on navy systemic sleep depravation...

And how air force solved this 60-70 years ago.

And how some peoples says UX problem is not a problem becouse sleep is a problem (and there are contemposomething evidences of other problems) and obviously two or more of them can't compound simultaneously ! /s

Just want to add: if there is so basic problem with working conditions then there obviously are much more human (and not only) problems in that navy force. Seems quite identical to what Russia is demonstrating in last years and in case of conflict results will be identical - a lot of lost american lives for stupid reasons. Just pointing obviousness.

The author isn't an expert on anything Naval. He's clearly a design guy, and his analysis ok in that respect.

7th Fleet's issues are well known, but not necessarily outside the community of those of us who lived them.

I ran the nuclear power plant on the USS La Jolla (SSN-701) for five years. Per the Engineering Department Organization Manual, you're not allowed to do any operations in the power plant if you haven't gotten a certain number of hours of sleep in the past however many hours. This is the most laughably ignored rule on the ship. It's very normal to have people operating the power plant after being awake for 40 hours straight. (I still remember getting yelled at for falling asleep during training because I'd been awake for >24 hours, and the training was about the importance of being well rested and how the Department of Transportation developed its sleep requirements by studying railroad operations. Maximum irony.) Naval Reactors, the organization that supervises the whole navy nuclear program, knows this is the norm and helps hide it. I remember, during the briefing prior to every reactor startup, the engineering officer would say loud and proud "If you don't think you can perform your duties for whatever reason, any reason at all, if you're too tired, raise your hand." One time I had been awake for more than a day straight and I was suicidal, I had been scheduled for 12 hours on watch, 6 hours off watch for several days, so I said fuck it, and I raised my hand. "Per the EDOM, I am not allowed to stand watch because I've been awake for far too long." The engineer recommended me for Non-Judicial Punishment for 1) not being ready to stand watch and 2) having stood watch previously already too sleep deprived to stand watch. I wasn't actually punished because I threatened to call the DoD Inspector General. The whole system is rotten as fuck.

While I obvious can't vouch for you, I absolutely can vouch that this is 100% believable and plausible.

Agree. Should not ever happen, but we all know it does.

> I ran the nuclear power plant on the USS La Jolla (SSN-701) for five years. Per the Engineering Department Organization Manual, you're not allowed to do any operations in the power plant if you haven't gotten a certain number of hours of sleep in the past however many hours. This is the most laughably ignored rule on the ship. It's very normal to have people operating the power plant after being awake for 40 hours straight.

And this is why aviators mock nukes. Because we actually understand what gets people killed and avoid it.

This is also very important for lorry drivers, to the extent that there's all sorts of tracking and enforcement for how long they're driving. But in this case it sounds like poor staff management: this isn't a convenience store running on zero-hour contracts, they should have a shift plan in place that provides adequate cover before even leaving port.

Bingo. Problem is USnavy has large + increasing at sea staff/billet shortages, but at the same time has to (or insist on) on doing more missions with less sailors. You can build a better checkbox, but can you build a good enough checkbox to allow a lorry driver to drive 20 hours a day?

Of course you can. Just take a cue from the standard physical throttle design: https://i.imgur.com/mK0vYth.png

Now there's no such concept as a ganged/unganged state. You move the middle (which has the larger area, since it's the most common tool) to move them together, and the side sliders if you want to control thrust individually.

The shift (watch) plan is set by the ship's officers but they have to work with the personnel that they're assigned. There is a constant shortage, especially for experienced sailors on surface vessels. But they have to put to sea anyway to accomplish the mission, which causes personnel burnout due to overwork thus worsening the shortage in a vicious cycle.

The only real solutions would be for Congress to either significantly increase personnel funding, or trim back the mission set to make it sustainable at current personnel levels. There is no political support for either solution and so the problem will persist.

If they are putting people on shift who are too tired to competently do their job, I assume many of those jobs aren't actually important. Some of the jobs are important (and when done wrong lead to these kinds of incidents), but given how widespread sleep deprivation is from people's comments here, clearly a lot of the jobs can be done very poorly without affecting operations.

That sounds like a management issue. Congress doesn't manage how ships run. The Navy makes all those choices itself.

Unfortunately what are you supposed to do when you 80% of the Sailors you're supposed to have, and that number was already 20% less than what you needed to actually fill a watch bill?

at some point you are short handed enough that you’re combat-ineffective whether you pretend or not.

Yes.

On the other hand, in a time of war, it's likely the exact same conditions of sleep depravation and poor training could exist. UX is the element that could be fixed permanently. The Navy absolutely should fix all of the issues in the NTSB report, and all the UX issues discussed in this blog post.

Something similar came up when Ukraine sunk the Moskva. Some speculated that the Russian radar systems would require an operator to focus on a screen for hours at a time, while most western systems would notify the operator when something unexpected happened. This pretty much ensured that a soldier would fail during wartime.

It's not that the US navy should operate by forcing sailors to forgo sleep, but their systems should be able to be operated by someone who has had very little sleep during actual combat. Touch screens seems counter to that. Two physical throttles, which can be moved either individually or together would be a much clearer indication of the current mode. Humans can feel extremely small misalignments, but trying to line up two lines on a monitor and we need to hold up a piece a paper to check if they are 100% aligned.

Yes I’ve heard from multiple sources that the Navy’s training is not what it once was. For officers, much of their training is done on the ship via self study in their spare time instead of in a classroom.

I think that in this case probably the UI could have been better, but it was functional, and with a well trained helmsman, it shouldn’t have presented a safety issue.

> For officers, much of their training is done on the ship via self study in their spare time instead of in a classroom

The problem here isn't "instead of in a classroom", it's "self study in their spare time" instead of "learning by doing the job under the supervision of more experienced people". The way I learned to drive ships was by driving ships under the supervision of more experienced ship drivers. Sure, there was some classroom preparation before that, but the biggest value add was the supervised hands-on time.

The thing that bothers me most about the navy sleep deficit is that this is a peacetime sleep deficit. If sailors are at the ragged edge of capacity in peacetime, how are we possibly setting them up to function in a real war, when things will be 3x more chaotic and stressful?

The Navy operational region in question isn't exactly in peacetime. It's not in full-scale war, either, but it's definitely not peace.

USN Ships are crowded, and unworkable.

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

Note: Japanese ships do not get into collisions. Why? Their trains run on time.

You have 4 control surfaces? And a steering command? Why not have all 5 people looking at each other and communicating. Add two people who are Looking each direction to know where the ship is GOING?

When you fix the organizational attitude, that its supposed to be hard...

You are again, talking about a massive organization that ran an aircraft into a sand bar, using Windows.

"In 1983, just such a moment was jarringly interrupted when the USS Enterprise ran aground a mere 1,000 yards out from the shoreline. In a photograph released by the Naval Institute, the massive carrier tilts slightly to its side, with its crew positioned on the deck."

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/uss-enterprise-navy-n...

There is a Chapter in “Turn the Ship Around”[1] where the author mentions a case of a navy officer (I think) that practically abandoned post because of all the unorganized ways and routines made him actually have sleep deprivation.

There are other tidbits of information in the book, of course from one point of view, that are mentioned in other comments here that are still happening and it’s baffling to me, not because I believe 100% of the book, but because you’d think at some point they would get fixed or partially mitigated with a migration plan.

I hate it such malpractices are still acceptable and even encouraged by an institution as important as the Navy.

--------

[1]: https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/

The normalization of deviance around lack of sleep and experience if definitely the number 1 issue, but come on. That design to maneuver the ship was fucked up at too many levels.

> Thrust transfer during which different people can operate on each propeller.

> Thrust transfer that automatically disable gang.

> The steering rudder that gets reset when transferred.

> The steering taking the current state of the steering wheel when transferred.

> The manual mode that became the default mode, allowing the transfer of controls to empty stations.

The problem with touchscreens is not the touchscreen, it's the abstraction that makes possibles things that would make no sense with real controls. Why would, at any point, the current position of controls be different depending on the station you're looking at?

A factor to note: Proportion of humans who know how to use touch UI but not the other UI.

---

I wonder if there exist systems that measure response times, error presses etc. consistently over time for different mediums. There is huge amout of underlying behaviour to model from fact that one mistake may cause more risk in different types of ship-environment-task scenarios to the fact that probably certain variables need mapping to others, which complicates analysis little bit.

---

Empirical data from use is actually not sufficient for testing. For the designs, one essentially wants to subject then to high voltages, acid, sea water, high pressures, coffee et cetera in extreme amount systematically in a lab.

For complex systems like ships, it may be reasonable to even simulate what'd happen if your good component was in a ship and someone put a shit replacement part there.

---

Extreme non-seen-in-field testing includes extrems of the human condition. Labeling buttons with icons instead of text makes things more understandable to those who don't speak English, but what if your crew spends one and half year underwater waiting for nuclear launch command, staring at those icons? One should design interfaces such that even extreme delusions, depressive tendencies, anxiety will not reduce the crew members ability to do their job. Or if someone loses a hand, they will still be able to work.

You're putting a lot of weight on the distinction between drowsy and sleep deprived in a casual comment at the end. How many people really know the distinction and use the correct word in the correct situation? He's clearly looking at it from a UI design perspective and other issues like you mentioned aren't the point of the article.

Accidents have multiple causes. Somebody else might blame sleep deprivation and stimulants then a smart-ass would complain that they just waved away "confusing controls" without understanding how they worked.

I mean the real thrust here is that the controls were extremely confusing even when you weren't sleep deprived so sleep hygene is never going to be a fix for something that is frankly bewildering even when fully rested.

I mean it only takes five sentences for the author to make it clear he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about:

> > Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet.

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