Navy Faults Navigational Procedures in Crash of Sub

TheDay.com ^ | 4/9/2005 | ROBERT A. HAMILTON

[GATOR NAVY]

Your last link points to the real cause of this accident. Although the possibility of a seamount had been noted years earlier from satellite photos, no one had ever taken a survey vessel there and investigated it.

[jocko12]

This sounds like a Navy CYA drill.

[Light Speed]

LOL...wonder if China's sub drivers are paying attention.
recently....A Chinese sub was detected by the U.S. and Japanese.
They had Bejings underwater man running helter skelter in numerous directions.....it verged on comedy.

U.S./Japanese sonar man: "Are they banging pots and pans over there.....or did they just wreck into something"?

[cherokee1]

It's still INCREDIBLE! If the ship was where they say it was ie 400 miles south of Guam it is virtually impossible to avoid hitting something. By definition the bottom should have been shoaling since there is an island chain directly ahead of them. The gaps between those islands are best not shot at flank speed---that's been known since the days of Mush Morton and Ed Beach. Damage to the ship looks more like they had orders to burrow under the closest island. It seems like the Navy is determined to whop up a "bad Navigation" cause for the incident but that doesn't explain the extremely light punishments. The rapid captain's mast tells me that many levels of management have their butts hanging out in which case the whole bunch belong in a well-padded cell.

[SmithL]

Concur

[Squantos]

Not being a bubblehead myself but have been cargo on the Polk once.....can't these subs pop up to periscope depth and get a GPS lock as to exact location when such a conflict in nav aids and sensors exists ?

Just a question.....as I don't know their SOP.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

I am going from memory. As an ex-oceanographer I have a lot of shipboard experience and I have been on the bridge a lot but not as an OOD.

The ship's navigator is responsible for navigating the ship. This is getting it from point A to point B. In my time, he also got up around 0400 and shot the stars and worked up the ship's position. Around 0800 he would present this info to the Captain as plots on a large scale Mercator chart (a little bit of ocean on a large chart). The CO would then select the ships position and the new courses for the day would be laid off from the corrected position. We generally had the course laid out at least 24 hours in advance. The course for the entire cruise were laid out on a small scale chart ( a lot of ocean on the same size chart).

The Officer of the Deck, who stands a 4 hour watch, is responsible for getting the ship from point A to point B as laid out on the charts by the ship's navigator and quartermasters. A dirty little secret about OODs is that the best OOD is put on the mid-watch (0000-0400) so the CO can get some sleep and the worst (or least experienced) OOD is generally on the 0800-1200 watch when the CO is up and about). Since the crew was setting down to eat you can draw your own conclusions.

I don't quite know how to say this except to go ahead and say it. Naval charts aren't too good with respect to sub-surface features. The way that a chart is made is for the fathometer readings to be plotted on a chart. This was done by the Hydrographic Office in my time, I don't know who does it now. The point is that updated charts were released about every 5 years or so. In remote regions such as the Arctic, Antarctic, the North Pacific, and so on there aren't many depth on the charts. In some areas of the North Pacific there is only one surface observation of temperature it a 60 X 60 mile area and no subsurface info. The ocean is big and not many ships go off of great circle routes. In the North Atlantic there are 10s of thousands observations because there are thousands of ships there. In the Pacific the number decreases dramatically except on certain routes.

Having said that no one really got excited when the uncorrected fathometer depths did not match the charted depths. Sometimes there would be a conference to say what we thought was going on. In all cases we would report observations to the Hydrographic Office either by radio in exceptional cases or by a meeting after the cruise. Occasionally, there would be some excitement when a large feature was found.

With respect to this specific instance. It appears that the difference in charted and measured depths didn't alarm anyone. I don't think that it would have alarmed us. I think that we might have searched through the Notice to Mariners to see if anything had been reported. I have to say that it is hard to pull info out of them as a general rule. The OOD and the quartermaster on watch on the other hand should have been routinely looking at the fathometer. As I recall we notated the chart half-hourly with time (Z) and a rough position. If they were doing this they should have noticed. The next question is did the Captain encourage OODs to call him to the bridge if something looked odd? Did the CO insist that everyone stand a taunt watch or did he allow sloppy watchstanding. I always sleep better when I knew that an OOD was standing a professional watch. These questions will probably never be answered without reading the fitness reports. However the final responsibility lies with the CO irrespective of anything else. One should always remember that the Ocean is trying to kill you and it has no mercy.

[Graymatter]

>>This sounds like a Navy CYA drill.

Here's the grandpappy of all Navy cya drills:
http://www.hondashipwrecks.org/

Seven destroyers were wrecked at Point Honda, California, within an area of about 500 yards. Explain THAT!

[Pan_Yans Wife]

ping

[Doohickey]

Ping!

And here you have it, folks.

[Doohickey]

The ultimate answer to your question is: Humans make mistakes.

[Doohickey]

I don't read the statements as contradictory. The QMOW hoped the soundings were inaccurate, when in fact they were. The prudent thing to do would have been to slow the ship to be sure.

[Doohickey]

The author means the transit SUBNOTE was delivered to the ship just prior to underway.

[Doohickey]

It's a BQN-17. Does that help?

[Bernard]

The whole thing sounds like, "Driving too fast for conditions." The basic concept is, unless you KNOW where you are and the charts match readings, slow down.

[Doohickey]

My understanding is that they had just come down from PD, which if true means they had a fix.

[ProudVet77]

You're memory is pretty good. It sounds like you were not on a Naval vessel though. At the minimum the QMOW used to take positions using LORAN then we got SATNAV, which was the precursor to GPS. We also had CIC (where I worked) as a secondary bridge, to help keep the bridge out of trouble. Also our officers stood something like 5 section watches as they had division/departmental duties during the day, so it would workout the same guy didn't get stuck with the mid-watch all the time in either CIC or the bridge.
I know someone who served under this skipper when he was an engineering officer on another sub. They guy has nothing but good things to say about him. While it is tradition to blame the skipper in all cases, he was an excellent officer, and I question all the money and time spent developing his skillset being wasted. At the minimum this guy should get a staff position. Anyone in this job is obviously very bright, and it's a shame to waste him and keep some butt kisser.
As an oceonographer, I'm interested on your opinion about this "muddy" area they mentioned. My experience with fathometers, from sailing today and being on the sea and anchor detail of our ship, is that the accuracy of the fathometer is effected by the material it's reflecting from. Mud is a fairly ambiguous substance, I would image that one fathometer might read one deapth another might get another reading. I suspect the material can be determined by someone like a sonar tech who can read the returns better than me.

[El Gran Salseron]

Wow! I had forgotten all about Mush Morton. Thanks for the reminder. Quite a man he was!

STS2 ( SS )

[El Gran Salseron]

"One should always remember that the Ocean is trying to kill you and it has no mercy."

You can say, type or copy/paste that again if you'd like.

[Pan_Yan]

A fast attack submarine is a pressure cooker. You are always 20 projects behind and it never stops.

The best submarines spend the most time out at sea. The longer you spend out at sea the more things you need to fix when you pull in. So when you pull in you get less time at the house and more time on the boat fixing stuff. It it a self escalating problem. Missile submarines have two crews to prevent this exact situation.

You get updates to maps, tech manuals and such by the truckload and there is always some poor slob somewhere onboard with all twelve copies of a certain book in front of him putting in revisions. Every revision and update is reviewed and signed for by several people, up to the department head. Somebody signs for installing the update. Reports are filed. Reviews are done. It takes time. I was a nuke, but the quartermasters go through the same thing.

I agree the system needs to be modernized, but these things take time. The USSR came out with a new class of submarine every time they came up with a new idea. The result was they didn't have parts for anything and none of their boats could stay operational for long. The U.S. builds lots of the same type of each submarine and upgrades them as a group. They make absolutely sure that the change is good for everyone, they upgrade one ship, test the crap out of it, and if it works they upgrade all the others. When I got to the USS Albany in 1990 reports were hand written and there were only one or two computers on board. We used cabinets full of microfiche. When the USS Greeneville was built in 1994 it had workstations throughout the boat and a bank of CD drives with all drawings etc accessable from anywhere. As older boats went into refit they got upgraded to computers. It takes years, but the Navy doesn't rush anything until it is completely vetted. Heck, I toured a WWII submarine and it used the exact same oil purifiers as the newest boats in the fleet.

As for the crew, they get lectured about complaceny all the time. There is a reason. When you have so many things to keep track of its easy to let some of the mundane stuff slide. Thats what always burn you. The maps should have been updated. The quartermaster should have warned the OOD, and if ignored he should have gotten his LPO out of bed. There were half a dozen people in Control who could have / should have seen a problem and asked questions. But it becomes routine.

Fast Attack Submariners don't do very well with routine. They have so much to do that the most basic things sometimes seem to get in the way of trying to catch up on other work. But when the fit hit the shan they knew what to do. They saved the ship and their fellow crew members and returned to port under their own power. Mistakes were made and, correctly, many people will pay for them. There is no room in that world for second chances.

I've said it for years and it still true:
A fast attack submarine is the best place to work in wartime, and the worst place to work in peace.