" Still reading this and not sure if it's been posted yet but this article is pretty good.
https://features.propublica.org/navy...crash-crystal/
Great reference thanks for sharing.
Green and undermanned crew. Poor radar and AIS
equipment, fatigue, watch keeping on port side but no watch on starboard side which was where the risks were present.
Many errors leading to this collision.
Snipets:
Then there was the crew. In those eight months, nearly 40 percent of the Fitzgerald’s crew had turned over. The Navy replaced them with younger, less-seasoned sailors and officers, leaving the Fitzgerald with the highest percentage of new crew members of any destroyer in the fleet. But naval commanders had skimped even further, cutting into the number of sailors Benson needed to keep the ship running smoothly. The Fitzgerald had around 270 people total — short of the 303 sailors called for by the Navy.
Key positions were vacant, despite repeated requests from the Fitzgerald to Navy higher-ups. The senior enlisted quartermaster position — charged with
training inexperienced sailors to steer the ship — had gone unfilled for more than two years. The technician in charge of the ship’s radar was on
medical leave, with no replacement. The personnel shortages made it difficult to post watches on both the starboard and port sides of the ship, a once-common Navy practice.
Although the Fitzgerald radars did not show them, more than two dozen ships surrounded the destroyer, all close enough to track. Three of them, large vessels off the starboard bow, posed a grave
danger to the warship. They were closing in. Quickly.
But the ships didn’t appear on the combat room’s key radar, the SPS-67, because neither Combs, nor Woodley, nor anyone else, realized that it had been set to a mode designed to scan the seas at a greater distance. With the SPS-67 button taped over, only specialized technicians could change the tuning from another part of the ship.
The lack of ships on the radar
screen created such a false sense of
security that Woodley felt comfortable asking Combs permission to leave his station for a bathroom break, which is rare for a shift in the combat room. When he returned at 1:20 a.m., he glanced at his screens. Nothing to concern him.
“I didn’t get any radar, I didn’t pick up anything on the 67,” Woodley said.
Then, at 1:29 a.m., one minute before the collision, Woodley looked up at the
laptop with the Automatic Identification System. He noticed a “pop-up” — a ship that he had not seen before. It appeared very close.
Woodley turned to Ashton Cato, a weapons specialist assigned to midwatch. Cato operated a
camera with thermal imaging that could see miles away. On some nights, he would watch the crew on faraway ship decks
lighting up cigarettes.
Woodley ordered Cato to point the
camera in the direction of the approaching ship. As Cato moved the camera, the
screen suddenly filled with the image of a fully loaded cargo ship, lit with white lights like a
Christmas tree. It was headed straight at the Fitzgerald, a few hundred yards distant.
Cato only managed to get out a few words.
“I got a ship.”
From the bridge, Coppock could see 12 miles across the ocean to distant lights glimmering in cities along Japan’s coast. The moon had risen, casting a river of light across the Pacific. The temperature was around 65 degrees. The waves were cresting 1 to 3 feet.
Coppock glanced up at the SPS-73 radar screen in front of the darkened bridge. She noticed a cargo ship approaching the Fitzgerald from about 12 miles away. The radar indicated it would pass behind the Fitzgerald, about 1,500 yards to its stern. She began
tracking the vessel but did not pay close attention to it.
Much like the radar in the combat room, the bridge radar was not providing a complete picture. In reality, there were three large cargo ships approaching the Fitzgerald, but the SPS-73 never showed more than two of them at the same time.
It remains unclear why the radar did not show an accurate picture of the ships at sea that night. One explanation is that the three ships were traveling close together. The cargo ship Coppock was
tracking was west of the Fitzgerald but parallel to two other ships following roughly the same
route. Closest to the Fitzgerald was a Chinese cargo vessel, the Wan Hai 266, slightly smaller than the Crystal. Next was the Crystal, about 1,000 yards past the Wan Hai. Farthest away was the 142,000-ton Maersk Evora, one of the beasts of the ocean at 1,200 feet in length. About two dozen smaller ships, many
fishing boats, bobbed around them.
Another possibility is that Coppock may not have ensured that the radar on the bridge was properly adjusted to obtain a finer-grained picture. A post-crash reconstruction showed that Coppock
lost sight of one of the ships due to clutter on the “improperly adjusted” SPS-73 screen.
Even without the radar, however, Coppock and the bridge team should have been able to see unaided the lights on the masts of the cargo ship she’d identified along with the two others running parallel to it. All three were headed toward the Fitzgerald — though at times, they would have obstructed one another from view.
A video taken just minutes before the
accident, for example, clearly shows the Maersk Evora illuminated from 10,000 yards away. The Crystal also had navigation lights running, and it was less than a few thousands yards away at the same time.
But nobody, it turned out, was standing watch on the starboard side of the ship.
In years past, commanders traditionally posted lookouts on the port and starboard sides of the bridge. The lookouts had one job: search the sea for hazards. But Navy cutbacks in personnel prompted Benson and other captains to combine the duties into a
single job. “We just don’t have enough bodies, qualified bodies, to have a port and starboard lookout,” said Samuel Williams, a boatswain’s mate first class.
Parker, Coppock’s No. 2 that night, was supposed to walk back and forth between the two sides during the watch, with the rest of the bridge team helping her keep an eye out.
But Parker had walked out onto a small metal
deck located off the bridge on the port side of the Fitzgerald just after 1 a.m. She was there with Womack, trying to fit in some training by helping him develop his seaman’s eye, the ability to estimate distance and bearing by sight. Parker had not received a promotion on a previous ship, after its commanding officer thought she had trouble assessing the risk posed by ships in the surrounding ocean.
Over the next 15 to 20 minutes, the pair observed five or six ships. It may have been a good training exercise. But it was poor navigation practice. None of the ships on the Fitzgerald’s port side were a threat.
arker walked across the bridge to check the starboard side of the Fitzgerald. She glanced at a display to check the time. It was 1:20 a.m. As she stepped out onto the bridge wing, she saw lights shining from the bow of an approaching ship off in the distance, about 6 miles away. It was the Crystal. Parker alerted Coppock. Coppock told Parker not to worry — she was tracking the ship. She said it would pass 1,500 yards behind the Fitzgerald.
Parker had her doubts. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to cross us behind,” she said. Parker stepped out to the bridge wing to check again. Suddenly, she noticed something strange. A second set of lights glided out from behind the first.
It was the first time that anyone on the Fitzgerald had realized that two ships were steaming toward the Fitzgerald’s starboard bow. The Chinese cargo ship was indeed going to pass behind the Fitzgerald. But the Crystal, which had slightly altered its course, was heading straight for the destroyer.
“We gotta slow down,” Parker told Coppock.
No, Coppock told her again. “We can’t slow down because it’ll make the situation worse.” Coppock worried that slowing down might bring her into the path of the ship that was supposed to pass behind them.
In such situations, Parker, the subordinate, is supposed to express concerns to a superior officer. The Navy encourages what it calls a “questioning attitude” supported by “forceful backup.” But Parker did not press her concerns with Coppock about the oncoming ship.
At 1:25 a.m., the Fitzgerald was 6,000 yards from the Crystal, 5,000 yards from the Wan Hai 266 and on a collision course with the Maersk Evora, approaching from 14,000 yards away. There was still time for the highly maneuverable Fitzgerald to get out of the way.
But Coppock disobeyed Benson’s standing orders. Rather than call Benson for help, she decided to continue on her own. Coppock didn’t call down to the combat room to ask for help, either.
“I decided to try and handle it,” she said.
At around 1:30 a.m., time had run out. Parker ran inside from the bridge wing, yelling, “They’re coming right at us.”
Coppock looked up and spotted the superstructure of the Crystal through the bridge windows. She stepped out on the starboard wing for a better look and realized she was in trouble. In Navy terms, the Fitzgerald was in extremis — in grave
danger of catastrophe.
To avoid the Crystal, Coppock decided to order a hard turn to the right, the standard action for an evasive maneuver under international navigation rules.
She shouted the command to Womack to pass on to the helmsman. But Womack did not immediately understand her order. After Womack hesitated, Coppock decided that she was not going to clear the Crystal by going toward the right. Such a turn would put her on a possible collision with the Wan Hai 266.
“Oh ****, I’m so ****ed! I’m so ****ed!" she screamed.
Coppock could have ordered the Fitzgerald into reverse; there was still time to stop. Arleigh Burke destroyers can come to a complete halt from 20 knots within 500 feet or so.
Instead, Coppock ordered a move that disregarded the very basics of her training. She commanded the helmsman to gun the destroyer’s powerful engines to full speed and duck in front of the Crystal by heading left. “All ahead flank,” she ordered. “Hard left
rudder.”
Helmsman-in-training Simona Nelson had taken the
wheel of a destroyer at sea for the first time in her life 25 minutes earlier. Nelson froze, unsure of how to respond.
Petty Officer 1st Class Samuel Williams noticed Nelson struggling. He took control of the
helm and did as Coppock ordered: He pushed the throttle to full and turned the
rudder hard left. The ship’s engines revved to full
power.
The move put the Fitzgerald directly into the path of the oncoming Crystal.
Coppock did not sound the collision
alarm to warn sailors of the impending risk.
“I just got so wrapped up in trying to do anything that I had to just drop the ball on everything else that I needed to do,” she said.
Instead, she ran out to the starboard bridge wing. The Crystal’s blunt prow loomed above her, a wall of black
steel angled sharply upward. To keep from pitching
overboard, Coppock seized the alidade, a large metallic instrument used for taking bearings.
“Grab onto something,” Womack shouted to his fellow sailors on the Fitzgerald bridge.
At 1:30:34 a.m. on June 17, 2017, at 34.52 degrees north latitude and 139.07 degrees east longitude, the ACX Crystal slammed into the USS Fitzgerald. The 30,000-ton Crystal was moving at 18 knots. The 8,261-ton Fitzgerald had accelerated to 22 knots.
The Crystal’s prow and its protruding lower bow seized the Fitzgerald like a pincer. The top dug into Benson’s stateroom, 160 feet back from the Fitzgerald’s bow, shearing off the
steel hull and crumpling his
cabin. The bottom ripped across Berthing 2 and nearby compartments, leaving a hole 13 feet by 17 feet.
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