Welp, it seems that three top leaders of the USS Fitzgerald have been relieved of command for the ship's collision with a commercial container ship, and more disciplinary action to be taken on others. Not good.
Here's the thing. I was in the Navy in the late 1960s, and the first technical training I had after boot camp was a four-month stint in radar school on Treasure Island. One of the first truisms we learned was that when you're out at sea, if a surface contact was decreasing in range with no change in bearing, you were definitely on a collision course.
Now we're not talking super speeds here. It takes quite a while for two ships to actually collide. I worked in the Combat Information Center aboard the USS El Dorado for a period of time, and one of our jobs was to make damn sure that we didn't ram into other ships. There were times that we were on potential "collision courses" with other ships, but we just came up with a course correction and recommended to the bridge what course to take to avoid collision. Easy peasy.
I can't for the life of me figure out how the ships collided. We had plot boards that kept track of all the contacts around us, and believe me, a collision course on a plot board is a straight line to your position. It was very hard to miss the straight line down the pipe, five by five. And that was almost 50 years ago. I would think that in this technological age, computers would have warning systems of collision courses, thus taking away human error. Then again, maybe not.
The only thing I can see that happened was a sudden course change by one or both of the ships at the last second. Other than that, I'm at a loss.
I will be very interested in the final results of the investigation.
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