Navy Missile Cruiser Runs Aground Near Honolulu

[CAMike]

Another Non-Career Enhancing Incident

I"M NOT BLAMING the Conning Officer, OOD U/W. When in charge of a ship UW (even when the CO isn't present) Always ask Combat and the QM's to confirm your actual position to PIM...frequently. If your DIVO or XO tells you you're overdoing it- send them the link below.

Now if this was the result of a main propulsion engineering casualty- then I kind of stand corrected.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,489590,00.html

MOD NOTE: Repost and reminder that pasting of Copyrighted text used without permission will be deleted IAW AW and Fox Policy/Terms of Use

 

[2ndGen]

That is one shitty day. When stuff like this happens, do the officers typically lose their cammands?

 

[MasterBates]

Normally boat aground = new CO coming to a boat near you.

Not always, but the zero defect Navy has made it the more common way.

 

[2ndGen]

Normally boat aground = new CO coming to a boat near you.

Not always, but the zero defect Navy has made it the more common way.

Fair enough I guess.

 

[BigRed389]

I"M NOT BLAMING the Conning Officer, OOD U/W. When in charge of a ship UW (even when the CO isn't present) Always ask Combat and the QM's to confirm your actual position to PIM...frequently. If your DIVO or XO tells you you're overdoing it- send them the link below.

Now if this was the result of a main propulsion engineering casualty- then I kind of stand corrected.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,489590,00.html

MOD NOTE: Repost and reminder that pasting of Copyrighted text used without permission will be deleted IAW AW and Fox Policy/Terms of Use

Some questions:

1)How is the OOD U/W not reponsible?
2)How is the CONN not responsible?
3)What does the "DIVO" have to do with S&A?
4)What's a MP issue have to do with running aground during boat ops?
5)How often did you have QMs and Combat correlate position to PIM when you were on watch?

Just trying to get a feel for how different commands view things policy wise.

 

[SkywardET]

That is very unfortunate, but I am somewhat eager to learn the details of it. Although I will no longer have anything to do with that sort of thing, navigation systems were among the equipment I was responsible for on my DDG.

 

[navy09]

Normally boat aground = new CO coming to a boat near you.

Definitely true. But I was on a ship last summer that had run aground fairly recently (most of the officers involved were still onboard). It happened in a foreign port on uncharted shoal water during sea and anchor. I believe they got free on their own and suffered no major damage (dome and screws were fine at least).

Anyway, they came on and did a full investigation and no one was relieved. The Captain (who had been on the bridge) stayed in command and the OOD, Conn, and Nav were all cleared.

Like MB said, it happens once in a blue moon- but it does happen.

 

[FlyinSpy]

There was a great set of articles last month in Proceedings that detailed the woeful state of SWO training, and the relative lack of shiphandling skills in the US Navy. The best was an article by a SWO JO who had done an exchange tour with the Brits on one of their destroyers - when he showed up, he thought he was one of the better ship-drivers at his level in our Navy. He found that compared to the Brits, he was ridiculously under-qual'd. He said he had to bust his ass just to make their minimum standards. Makes me wonder if any of the post-mortems on this incident will relate to training and basic ship-handling skills.

It was also amusing to see in the same series of articles one by another SWO talking about "how great all the training was that we gave to SWOs in ship-handling". The usual Pinocchio-up-the-ass, "aren't our senior leaders wise and benevolent" school of ass-kissing. Bet he felt a little silly after reading the following two articles.

As a side note, if you folks aren't USNI members, I highly recommend joining - if you want to witness a lot of good discussion and debate concerning where we've been and where we're going as a Navy, this is the place.

 

[FrankTheTank]

Don't ships have GPS and moving maps nowadays??? I know my Garmin works like a champ on my boat!

It has been nearly 20 years since I was on a smaller ship and when I was on cruise I can honestly say the only ship's company spaces I went in was Strike Ops and CATCC and plenty of Prifly... So it is an honest question not a sarcastic comment!

 

[BigRed389]

There was a great set of articles last month in Proceedings that detailed the woeful state of SWO training, and the relative lack of shiphandling skills in the US Navy. The best was an article by a SWO JO who had done an exchange tour with the Brits on one of their destroyers - when he showed up, he thought he was one of the better ship-drivers at his level in our Navy. He found that compared to the Brits, he was ridiculously under-qual'd. He said he had to bust his ass just to make their minimum standards. Makes me wonder if any of the post-mortems on this incident will relate to training and basic ship-handling skills.

It was also amusing to see in the same series of articles one by another SWO talking about "how great all the training was that we gave to SWOs in ship-handling". The usual Pinocchio-up-the-ass, "aren't our senior leaders wise and benevolent" school of ass-kissing. Bet he felt a little silly after reading the following two articles.

As a side note, if you folks aren't USNI members, I highly recommend joining - if you want to witness a lot of good discussion and debate concerning where we've been and where we're going as a Navy, this is the place.

If you read the message report on the PEARL HARBOR aground (JUL 08), it's pretty much a slam on the ship's training/ship handling training program.

As far as ship handling training time...most U/W watch time consists of driving in straight lines or trying to stay inside an imaginary box. It's REALLY bad if your captain is very micromanaging...I had one that used his CONNs as parrots throughout the entire evolution. For him it was all about making himself look good to the harbor pilots...he might as well have taken the conn himself. You can imagine how useful that was as a training opportunity.

 

[BigRed389]

Don't ships have GPS and moving maps nowadays??? I know my Garmin works like a champ on my boat!

It has been nearly 20 years since I was on a smaller ship and when I was on cruise I can honestly say the only ship's company spaces I went in was Strike Ops and CATCC and plenty of Prifly... So it is an honest question not a sarcastic comment!

Yes, every ship has a GPS receiver.
However, DDGs and CGs, etc have deep drafts compared to your boat (I would assume anyway). So it's pretty important that they stay in "good water."

The NAV team should be taking GPS fixes at very, very close intervals.
However, for nautical charts, the big deal is whether or not the GPS encryption matches up to the chart in use. I'm not familiar with the technical details, but basically, if the encryption in use doesn't match the chart coordinate frame, you just screwed yourself.
See below for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System

This is usually more a concern when on deployment and you go to many different ports. I can't recall the name of the ship, but this is basically what caused a ship to run aground in South America.

That said, that's why the ship should either use visual NAVAIDs for visual fixes and radar fixes. If the ship was transiting in a channel, they should've been able to use the buoy system to figure out how they were doing.

 

[lmnop]

This is usually more a concern when on deployment and you go to many different ports. I can't recall the name of the ship, but this is basically what caused a ship to run aground in South America.

USS La Moure County ran in to Chile and became a salvage project in 2000.

 

[FrankTheTank]

BigRed: I understand that but is there no moving map which would upload/download those charts to overlay your position.. Much like my Garmin does? Or even the car GPS which is dependent on the accuracy of the database... I understand it depends on charted waters, etc... But do you understand my question? Either the water they were in was uncharted, or they were not where they thought they were, or they were AFU... Is there a moving map with the charts to show the ship's position?

 

[navy09]

BigRed: I understand that but is there no moving map which would upload/download those charts to overlay your position.. Much like my Garmin does? Or even the car GPS which is dependent on the accuracy of the database... I understand it depends on charted waters, etc... But do you understand my question? Either the water they were in was uncharted, or they were not where they thought they were, or they were AFU... Is there a moving map with the charts to show the ship's position?

I believe there's some platform out there (ECDIS-N, maybe) that does just that. Never seen it though, BigRed correct me if I'm totally wrong.

BigRed's point is that GPS and RADAR still fail, and you have to know what to do when you don't have those tools. You also have to be careful not to rely too much on them. In the case of USS LA MOURE COUNTY, IIRC they were relying entirely on GPS and when they ran aground they turned out to be ~50 miles from where GPS said they were.

 

[HeyJoe]

Salvage by gunfire

USS La Moure County ran in to Chile and became a salvage project in 2000.

As I recall, she ultimately was towed to open sea and becaome a target for a UNITAS SINKEX in summer of 2001. I remember images floating around the Internet shortly thereafter. Much fun for SWOs was had by all.