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The Fourth US Navy Collision of the Year Was Ultimately Caused By UI Confusion (arstechnica.com)
Yesterday, the U.S. Navy issued its report on the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain this summer, which was the fourth U.S. Navy collision this year. "The Navy's investigation found that both collisions were avoidable accidents," reports Ars Technica. "And in the case of the USS McCain, the accident was in part caused by an error made in switching which control console on the ship's bridge had steering control. While the report lays the blame on training, the user interface for the bridge's central navigation control systems certainly played a role." From the report: According to the report, at 5:19am local time, the commanding officer of the McCain, Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, "noticed the Helmsman (the watchstander steering the ship) having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control." Sanchez ordered the watch team to split the responsibilities for steering and speed control, shifting control of the throttle to another watchstander's station -- the lee helm, immediately to the right (starboard) of the Helmsman's position at the Ship's Control Console. While the Ship's Control Console has a wheel for manual steering, both steering and throttle can be controlled with trackballs, with the adjustments showing up on the screens for each station. However, instead of switching just throttle control to the Lee Helm station, the Helmsman accidentally switched all control to the Lee Helm station. When that happened, the ship's rudder automatically moved to its default position (amidships, or on center line of the ship). The helmsman had been steering slightly to the right to keep the ship on course in the currents of the Singapore Strait, but the adjustment meant the ship started drifting off course.
At this point, everyone on the bridge thought there had been a loss of steering. In the commotion that ensued, the commanding officer and bridge crew lost track of what was going on around them. Sanchez ordered the engines slowed, but the lee helmsman only slowed the port (left) throttle, because the throttle controls on-screen were not "ganged" (linked) at the time as the result of the switch-over of control. The ship continued to turn uncontrolled to port -- putting the ship on a collision course with the Liberian-flagged chemical carrier Alnic MC.
At this point, everyone on the bridge thought there had been a loss of steering. In the commotion that ensued, the commanding officer and bridge crew lost track of what was going on around them. Sanchez ordered the engines slowed, but the lee helmsman only slowed the port (left) throttle, because the throttle controls on-screen were not "ganged" (linked) at the time as the result of the switch-over of control. The ship continued to turn uncontrolled to port -- putting the ship on a collision course with the Liberian-flagged chemical carrier Alnic MC.
See? This is what happens when the project team is made up of "full-stack" developers - no one knows how to code a decent UI... That, and the whole thing was written in Angular...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yes, the displays could be improved, but there were many issues involved. The proper crew members were not on the bridge. The captain had let them sleep an extra hour, so the most experienced crew were still at breakfast. The crew involved were not experienced enough to make quick changes to the ship configuration in a critical situation. Lesson learned, don't get in a critical situation you know will happen with the back up crew. Another good point - don't have just one set of high quality bridge crew-members.
It means that the navigation UI was overlaid by the Solitaire UI,
Whether or not it's a UI-issue, it seems to me whoever was on the bridge was simply confused about all that is going on and a variation of the mythical man-month. Splitting controls across multiple officers in multiple locations is harder to manage than just having a single person responsible. I understand the need for fail-over but that doesn't mean you can simply distribute higher loads.
Not knowing whether you are dealing with a human error or a mechanical issue is another one of those things that just reeks of bad management and having too many cooks in the kitchen, the captain just couldn't keep track of all the information coming in and made bad decisions as a result.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who's controlling it?
What's "it"?
The ship!
You are, right?
Only the rudder.
Whose controlling the propellers then?
I thought you were.
No, I thought you were!
Let's ask Mikey. Mikey, are you controlling the propellers?
I was earlier, but I thought you guys took control of them. See, the red icon is on.
That's not a red icon, that's the object we are about to collide with...
Table-ized A.I.
It sounds a little like the Titanic and the suggestion the it hit the iceberg because of confusion between the use of Tiller Orders and Rudder Orders.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Just design, humans, contractors and internal gov/mil policy.
Who would have expected not having a good design and testing that design with crews would have been an issue?
How to do a "navy".
1. Your crews have to have skills. Find the best people to work in your navy. Give them the wages, support and education they need.
2. Read up on how other winning nations did the "navy" design over the many, many years.
Saying a ship is new or a different "design" is no excuse.
The UK built its Dreadnought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... having to consider new designs and new ideas. The new parts got made with skill and people worked very hard to get the new design ready.
Any unexpected issues got corrected by real engineers and top experts before they became an issue for the navy.
Find the experts, test things a lot, have good crews and ensure the skill sets are ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This ship has had the same controls for decades. What has changed is the people operating it are incompetent!
How much intelligence does it take to know you are steering, or not? To know if you turned down the power on one engine, or both?
How stupid are you when the HELMSMAN can't manage direction and speed at the same time?
Despite Ars Technica's single-minded view on the incident, there were multiple levels of failure, including but not limited to:
Insufficient lookouts
Overcrowded bridge interior
Insufficient training(What Ars Technica neglects(possibly deliberately) to mention is that parts of the crew on watch on the bridge were on temporary assignment from the cruiser Antietam, which according to the report has a different control system)
Contrary to protocol, the CO issued orders, without announcing that he was taking direct control, and then didn't keep a firm grasp of the situation.
Insufficient bridge watchstanding experience in general in the US Navy officer corps, partially due to the generalist nature of US Navy surface officers, rather than the specialization found in the Royal Navy for example. As highlighted by a USN officer: "âoePeople squeak through the system. They may be great officers and they may great engineers, but they might not have had a lot of time handling ships in busy waterways,â McGuffie told USNI News in an interview.
âoeWe have guys that are commanding ships right now that have 400, 500 hours of bridge watchkeeping time in their career.â
In contrast, as the bridge officer on a Royal Navy frigate for a six-month deployment, McGuffie stood watch for more than 2,000 hours â" all of them logged"
The Fitzgerald was both better and worse. The OOD had 0 situational awareness, ignored technical tools such as AIS that'd have given him sufficient situational awareness, ignored warnings by the junior OOD, insufficient lookouts posted(none on starboard side), the OOD had no knowledge of the TSS(despite being based out of Yokohama!!!!), and the TSS was not mentioned in the navigation briefing.
And, as on all USN surface warfare ships, non-pilots seem to be chronically sleep-deprived.
So, you have systematic issues at multiple levels, of which the UI was just one small part
I wonder, what kind of Naval Collisions are unavoidable accidents?
WTF is this, star trek?
They don't need reconfigurable controls, do they? Wouldn't it make more sense to have discrete controls? They can be electronic displays if that's your thing, but probably shouldn't be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... Was Ultimately Caused By Failure Of the Captain, Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, to maintain control of his Ship.
That is why they fired his ass, and that of his XO.
Ships have been navigated safely for Centuries before Trackballs and User Interfaces. The Command Structures are set, and everybody is supposed to know their job. Blaming the Tools for a piss-poor Carpentry job is common these days, but the Carpenter is ultimately responsible.
And you know what? I don't blame the training either, or the lack of it. For a couple of decades now at least, when shit like this happens, training is blamed, and more training is laid on, and shit like this still happens. It ain't the training.
Some people should just never go to Sea. They shouldn't fly Planes either. Hell, they shouldn't even drive a car. They have neither the aptitude nor the temperament, and this can't be trained into them, although that is the US Military way.
Makes a pretty good UI.
This sort of thing has crashed airplanes. When they went from yokes to joysticks. There was the air France one where an idiot pilot held the joystick back and the other pilot had no way of knowing.
Crude and simple works.
That said, on traditional naval boats, the helmsman working the wheel had no idea of where the ship is going. Often cannot ever see out the front. Look outs tell the officer, the officer tells the helmsman a course, and the helmsman is just like an auto pilot. This has cause other accidents.
That bit about having trouble controlling throttles and steering at the same time is dubious. Traditionally that would be done by many different people, each trained to do one tiny task -- naval ships have huge crews. But how hard can it be to handle them together? Presumably the helmsman has had some training and practice before taking primary responsibility.
is that they are willing to look long and hard at their mistakes so they can do better in the future. That's
an incredibly valuable trait. (Disclaimer: never served, but spent many years working with military and
ex-military).
The three stoog's would be proud
Impressive the the Navy fessed up.
I was part of the team that shipped the first ECDIS' to the the Navy over 20 years ago. Electronic Chart Display and Information System are the marine equivalent to aircraft automated flight navigation controls. ECDIS was in response to the Valdez finding a rock and folks asking why can ships' navigation systems do that planes can do? The charts are "smart" and will not let you plan a route over too shallow of an area. I know our product was on the Enterprise and Constellation 20 years ago. Why are they not on these smaller ships? FYI, back then the navigator on these nuclear aircraft carriers (yes there was a specific officer assigned to this) also had a sextant, watch, paper charts and compass, just in case.
Light gray text on a white backgroud, even I would have crashed and android ship.
I guess it sounds good in theory to have controls that can be configured to allow a single person or multiple people, as needed, drive the ship. Until this happens. What's the point? One less body on the bridge, saving a few bucks? On a warship that costs billions of dollars, a few redundant personnel at the controls seems like cheap insurance.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The USS John McCain, much like its namesake, is apparently confused, bumbling, dangerous, and incompetent.
Right! It sure is great that the US military learned from the Russians to not invade Afghanistan. What a winner. And how about when they totally learned from the Korean War and then declined to invade North Vietnam? And all the CIA color change revolutions have worked out GREAT for the Middle East. Thanks, US military; you totally got it all right and surely did not cause the death of millions as a result of Washington imperialism.
I'm pretty sure the Officer of the Deck's name was Zapp Brannigan.
Who knew that the Airbus Consortium designs ships for the United States Navy?
..in the kitchen. Look, the organization of a bridge crew and the controls of a naval ship are archaic, a vestige of a passed age when all those controls were mechanical.
You don't need all those damn people on the bridge anymore. Even Star Trek has it all wrong, you just don't need that many people with the ways we can control everything via a computer workstation. Having all these people just introduces delays in ship's response time to the Captain's orders, and human error.
So there you go, DoD, there's your solution, get rid of most of the bridge crew, streamline the Captain's control center so (s)he can properly control all the ship's systems. Better response time, less error, less people, all wins.
> The helmsman sent all control (not just throttle) the the other station.
And neither he nor the anyone else looking at the situation didn't realized all control had been sent away, because the UI didn't gray out of the inactive controls or anything. Two people looked at it and couldn't tell it had been inactivated. Guess which controls are disabled here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
> The second helmsman throttled down only one engine.
When he too couldn't tell that a) he had control of steering or that b) the engined weren't ganged. Again, try to figure out which controls are ganged and which aren't:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_IOWi...
It's not hard to make it obvious.
They were running Gnome software that follows their design guidelines!
The poor sailor guy couldn't figure out how to operate it!
One has to wonder if the training is that bad, or the controls are that complicated? In either case we have a problem controlling ships and we may have a case of over using technology so much so that we can't fly our planes, ships, and whatever else and that could be a big problem in the stress of war. If we can't handle it in peaceful conditions.
Splitting throttle control from steering was a well intentioned move, executed (and verified) very badly.
I believe this kind of separation of the two types of controls used to be fairly common, in the days of old physical levers and such controls.
In any case, after mistakes were made, the next problem was that no one was able to come quickly at correct "state awareness", and that is down to both bad training, bad procedures or procedure following, AND terrible UI design on the computerized control consoles.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
They brought in some material UI "clean" designers - and all the fucking things they need to interactive with, have UNLABELLED icons and they're all the same bloody colour.
Also there's animations anywhere and everywhere they can put them.
Maybe they should just design US destroyers with a huge rubber skirt, like bumper cars. Then cargo ships would just harmless bounce off them.
I mean the navy may not be able to pilot a ship, but they are dam sure top notch in gender inclusiveness a d divers8ty affirmation. I for one don't want out military messed up with the hostile male dominated ideas of warfare. We want our soldiers designing th3 best uniforms and learning about the importance of being safe and inclusive
Windows 7 GUI?
A case of automation bias gone awry.
Do these ships no longer post a watch anymore?
Like, guys with binoculars to look at the seas around them for obstacles?
is that they are willing to look long and hard at their mistakes so they can do better in the future. That's an incredibly valuable trait. (Disclaimer: never served, but spent many years working with military and ex-military).
I am not an expert, but I thought the whole point of the story is that they keep crashing their boats? This would suggest they aren't in fact learning from their mistakes, or is each crash caused by something new and unique?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I remember working with that back in the day - the UI was pretty horrible (NAVSSI segment in particular).
That said, this sounds like a training issue.
The problem is ship trajectory is controlled by the elitist few. They should give each seaman a remote steering wheel so the ship will veer based on majority vote.
Liberian-flagged chemical carrier Alnic MC.... the only way to stop and check what this guy has on board without international incident was to do what they did...crash the F@#@3 and then make up the story nobody can sail the ship
A book written 20 years ago explains it.
In their terms, (computer) + (ship) = (computer)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
but it's hard to imagine after months or years using a system that is this flawed that there had not been previous occasions somewhere in the fleet where a misunderstanding of this nature occurred and everyone had a good laugh about it because they didn't hit anything.
My point is that after these issues occurred in the past the crew should have been aware of this pitfall and done something to mitigate it, even if it meant putting a line of masking tape over the screen of the console that had no control - I don't know, but some kind of low tech solution that everyone on the bridge understood and verified.
If however, after millions of ship-hours of use this is really is the first time this issue arose then maybe it's harder to mess up operating the UI than the Navy are letting on
Nullius in verba
This just seems incredulous - What if they were in a war situation?! If the system is so easy to get confused on in a calm peace-time environment, how the hell are they going to use it in a hectic battle situation!?
I can only imagine how this unusable software, clueless crew, and out-of-control captain would have fared when actively fired on by a couple of enemy ships/boats/planes while trying not to get killed and actually destroy the enemy. What a complete multimillion dollar JOKE