It has been two years since the McCain incident that took the lives of 10 Sailors, and we now have a thorough report from outside the USN lifelines – the National Transportation Safety Board.
Their report came out on Monday and deserves a good read. It is not, by design, a blaming exercise;
The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation,
“accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties . . . and are not
conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person.”
What is good to see – and what the entire Navy deserves to have more accountability on – is where the report clearly outlines some fundamental shortfalls.
Were there a lot of issues on the bridge that day that created unsafe conditions?
This report identifies the following safety issues: the decision to transfer the location of thrust control on board the John S McCain while the vessel was in a congested waterway, the lack of very high frequency communications between the vessels, the automatic identification system data transmission policy for Navy vessels, the procedures for the transfers of steering and thrust control on board the John S McCain, the training of Navy bridge watchstanders, the design of the destroyer’s Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, Navy watchstanders’ fatigue, and Navy oversight of the John S McCain.
Yes, Command is Command – but if the NTSB cannot assign blame, what about probably cause? The NTSB will do that, and the probably cause starts well beyond the lifelines of the MCCAIN;
The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the collision between the destroyer John S McCain and the tanker Alnic MC was a lack of effective operational oversight of the destroyer by the US Navy, which resulted in insufficient training and inadequate bridge operating procedures. Contributing to the accident were the John S McCain bridge team’s loss of situation awareness and failure to follow loss of steering emergency procedures, which included the requirement to inform nearby traffic of their perceived loss of steering. Also contributing to the accident was the operation of the steering system in backup manual mode, which allowed for an unintentional, unilateral transfer of steering control.
Are we doing what we should have done to respond to the concerns of the NTSB report?
