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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.
When the navigation computer has to reboot on the B-52 bomber, the crew breaks out the slide ruler and map to figure out where they're going.
Yes, but the E6B slide rule is not something that ever went obsolete like traditional slide rules. The E6B was still used in ground school in the 1990s, might still be used in classrooms today. And many pilots still carry one in their bag, next to the paper chart and a flashlight, just in case. Its not a B-52 or a military thing. We're talking Cessna 150 pilots too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, my family was Air Force and not Navy. However I can imagine at least one reason why Navy ships might not have been transmitting position information.
During times of conflict you don't want to be doing this. It's great for your team and it's even greater for the opposition, during a war, to know where you are.
In places and at times when there is no conflict however, perhaps cooperating with civilian locator systems might be a good idea. Ultimately the Navy needs to determine how that will work.
At least for officers, the basic navigational and shiphandling courses got replaced by a dvd set.
I'm not kidding.
How about we just stop with all the "war on X"s? When you are constantly on a war footing training takes a backseat and duty patterns change, leading to fatigue. In the Navy's case ships are kept out of port for much longer than they should, meaning many repairs are done underway which leads to a further reduction of training time and off duty time for the sailors. Stop wasting money on massively overbudget projects like the DDX/Zumwalt program (only 3 ships produced for a cost of almost $4 billion per ship) or the LCSs which are under-gunned, have engine issues, and have hulls so poorly made that one got cracked from a champagne bottle at the christening. $12 billion just from the DDX program would have gone a long way towards refitting ships and training current/more crews for said ships. And let's not even get started on the F-35 program.....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
on the Great Lakes.
caught that in an article last year, Celestial navigation has made it back into the curriculum. Now factor in a 3 to 4 year window before you see any results of that into the system (training enough people in the arts, & getting them in enough mustard in chief positions, yada yada. in other words it takes time for solutions to take effect, unlike. Hence it is gonna take a year or two before the navy finally changes course to a core competent naval force,,,, again. Because in the long run, nothing beats reinventing the wheel every two generations. (P.S. yes, yes it is Master Chief, but if you can't be creative you shouldn't join.)
It's so much more than that. The bridge is manned by deck, which are the same guys who make the ship pretty and they also have their hands in a bunch of other shit.... but the most important thing to the pissbaby CO is how much paint he can get these kids to put on the ship so the admiral will say "OH BOY THE SHIP LOOKS GREAT". They make these guys sweep and paint nonstop until some of them kill themselves no joke.
The most relaxing times for these guys are lunch, watch, pooping, and the few hours a day they get for sleep.. and if they have watch during sleep time.. they simply get no sleep! For them free time is measured in minutes a day, they sleep and poop at the same time. It's an absolutely unimaginable way to live. Doing a watch that would be the same as a normal civilian workday might have been the only time these guys weren't doing hard labor in the past 24 hours.