I don’t know about you but for me that was among the best moments of my navy career. An ensign with less than a year onboard elevated to OOD with weapons release authority. There were LTs on that ship that never qualified as OOD.
I left that ship for a San Diego based DD and the skipper there was on his 2nd or 3rd command. Left there for department head school and headed for a ship where the CO had PT command and acting squadron command right after Vietnam. Great guy. All the rest were on their first command tour and total control freaks.

Concur re. the training – even with flat screens, ECDIS and the like, we still trained the old way and emphasized the fundamentals. From the CO down the attitude was train like you’ll fight – which meant multi-hour battle problems in full MOP gear (it sucked); drill, drill, drill and then some more (every watch team knew the procedures for shifting steering to aft steering by heart and religiously practiced it for time on every single watch underway). You should have heard my QM’s when I said my first week onboard that they’d better be up to snuff on celestial because I expected a full day’s work from every single one.
Oh the humanity
Even challenged the QMC to a nightly celestial “shoot-off” and he kicked my tail, for a while. Wasn’t long before my plots were looking like his. Long story short – the Airlant eval team came onboard, took the GPS away right off the bat and no one batted an eye. Two days later, they gave up and let us have it back. We had the highest score ever of any CV on the waterfront for the Rules of the Road test and on a graded real-world, “get underway and return to anchorage with the duty section” evolution when we dropped the anchor back in the same spot we’d left from over an hour earlier – at night. Went from utter despair on arrival in the shipyard to real pride in my QMs and OODs when I left a couple of years later.

and Grampa Bluewater — amen and a-men. Still have my personal copies of Dutton’s and Bowditch on my bookshelf in arm’s reach even 11 years after my last at sea…
- SJS

Capt. SJS, your aviator’s perspective is significant here. This shift to electronic navigation on the bridge is as significant a change as that of the early “blind flying” days of Apollo Soucek and his peers. I’ve heard Brownshoes claim -with some merit- this experience gives them a leg up in their relatively late start in shipdriving.

But as you know, even now, the death toll of those attempting VFR into IFR not up to the requisite proficiency standard still lingers.

Indeed, even in airline operations, proficiency in assimilating electronic navigation methods in aircraft, requires careful and continual vigilance.

At the same time, the FMS is a complex system that requires extended experience for pilots to gain proficiency it. Researchers [33], have noted that it often takes pilots as long as a year of regularly flying a glass cockpit airplane before feeling proficient in use of the FMS. Pilots are generally trained to be able to use almost all of the capabilities of the FMS, from programming simple courses, to “building” a course or holding pattern with navaids that are not part of a “canned” or FMS-stored flight plan in order to obtain the skills needed to pass a flight check. However, pilots are not given much information about the logic underlying much of the performance of the FMS, or shown many of the numerous options available to achieve identical goals in the FMS. This accident demonstrates that proficiency in the use of the FMS, without knowledge of the logic underlying such critical features as the design and programmed priorities of its navigation data base, can lead to its misuse.

The MAIB notes the alarming spike of ship accidents caused by a lack of understanding in using electronic navigation systems. Like early on FMS training, I suspect that most VMS/ECDIS training is heavy on the routine “buttonology”, with little -or no- emphasis on the practical application of the system in a real world setting.

Moving forward will require a change in the way folks are getting trained….And some quick and spiffy CBT modules will not be the answer. They will be tantamount to putting more trees in front of the flock lost in the forest. Keeping yet more ships off reefs and shoals will require some fundamental, deep, cultural changes.

If you’ve turned your expensive VMS into a digital dr plot on the electronic chart by selecting the wrong switch line up, and you run around for a few watches without computing set and drift (set and drift are very easily done on a paper chart/plotting sheet with accurate on demand electronic fixes (of course you have to teach some folks a bit of vector addition and subtraction)), the current will degrade the DR position (which is not a fix) accuracy without you knowing it.

It’s also easy – given proficiency – (on a paper chart/plotting sheet) to use set and drift vectors to compute course to steer to regain track at the next DR position for the chosen fix interval, and then course to steer to correct for observed/computed current to remain on track…until set and drift changes.

While the Captain owns inescapable total responsibility,there is someone else not much mentioned in this discussion…

“In every…vessel, there must still be…The Navigator…who seeks and uses every scrap of information to check his work, and who scrupulously avoids making an assumption unsupported by facts.
Anything less than the utmost devotion to duty by the Navigator means his vessel will be unsafe and her mission may be left undone.” (Adm T. H. Moorer, USN, CNO – in the forward to the 1969 edition of Dutton’s)

Homer’s Sirens are alive and well. Nowadays, they have taken the form of LCD screens….

From the Honda Point Grounding Court of Inquiry…True then. True now:

The traditions of the sea are strong, the ideals high, and the rules which seafaring men set for themselves are rigid and hard. Only by living up to the most rigid of standards may the lives of women and children entrusted to the care of seafaring men be safeguarded as far as human effort may make them safe. If a Captain loses his ship, he loses his command even when attending circumstances point almost entirely to his complete exoneration from blame. The Navy can do no less. Each Captain that loses his ship must bear a responsibility due to that loss.

And, it seems that VMS/ECDIS issues are not the sole province of the USN…

Granted it’s been awhile for me but there used to be a requirement to set the navigation detail and plot fixes anytime the ship was that close to land. I doubt that this requirement has been lifted in the “zero defect, hands on supervision, cover your six” culture of today’s Navy.

curtis,

The difference between the old Navy and today’s Navy could be found in the backgrounds of and priorities set by the folks in command. On my first ship (early 70s) all of my COs and XOs had at least one prior command and had been schooled in the fundamentals of shiphandling and navigation while coming up. Some were better than others but all three COs spent a good deal of time on the bridge teaching the JOs (note I don’t use the term “mentoring”) and evaluating their performance. When the Evaluator Watch wasn’t set the Dept Heads took their turn in the OOD rotation and were never off the watch bill. No such things as “qual boards” back then. I got my OOD qual when the Senior Watch Officer called me into CIC and told me “We’re going back to the gunline tonight and the CO is pulling LTjg X’s ‘ticket’. You’ve got the midwatch”. Was I (an Ensign with less than a year aboard) ready? Probably not, but I knew that the CO had my back and I returned the favor.

sid,

As I remember it a contributing factor in BELKNAP/KENNEDY was that the CO was in the wardroom watching a movie while the ship was planeguarding instead of being up on the bridge where he belonged.

On the ships I was on, any time we conducted ops this close to the beach. CIC would be manned up with what amounted to a full nav team (or actually more like the nav part of the NGFS team at least), and kept a constant, independent nav picture.

Is this no longer a routine thing?

obviously radar fixes would not be affected by any bearing issues (as they rely on range only).

Actually, a gyro error or no gyro input at all makes taking radar fixes extremely difficult. Especially if the ships is maneuvering and the cluttered picture rotates on the PPI. You would have to have a very savvy operator to do it well.

And something tells me, thats an acquired skill that Grampa would say has been relegated to the Library at Alexandria.

Not being a Luddite here. Just sayin’ that when you think the basics no longer apply because you are somehow different now that you are “modern”…beware of that Siren call….