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Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils To Help Avoid Collisions at Sea (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Urgent new orders went out earlier this month for United States Navy warships that have been plagued by deadly mishaps this year. More sleep and no more 100-hour workweeks for sailors. Ships steaming in crowded waters like those near Singapore and Tokyo will now broadcast their positions as do other vessels. And ships whose crews lack basic seamanship certification will probably stay in port until the problems are fixed.[...] The orders issued recently by the Navy's top officer for ships worldwide, Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden, drew on the lessons that commanders gleaned from a 24-hour fleetwide suspension of operations last month to examine basic seamanship, teamwork and other fundamental safety and operational standards. Collectively, current and former officers said, the new rules mark several significant cultural shifts for the Navy's tradition-bound fleets. At least for the moment, safety and maintenance are on par with operational security, and commanders are requiring sailors to use old-fashioned compasses, pencils and paper to help track potential hazards (alternative source), as well as reducing a captain's discretion to define what rules the watch team follows if the captain is not on the ship's bridge. "Rowden is stomping his foot and saying, 'We've got to get back to basics,'" said Vice Adm.
After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the surprising findings was that adding more inspectors could actually make things less safe. Each inspector figured if they skipped inspecting a part, the other inspector(s) would catch it. So they felt it was not that big a deal to be lazy at their job and skip a few of the harder inspections here and there. But when all the inspectors think this way, the chances of a bad part passing "inspection" increased compared to if there was only one inspector.
In the same way, if you know there's a computer system which tracks your ship's location and the location of all other ships, and automatically sounds an alarm if it detects a collision course, then you're more likely to slack at your job and start reading slashdot or the latest J.K. Rowling book. OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task. Double or multiple redundancy works for equipment, but not always for people.