Quote:
Originally Posted by Seahawk
Dan, agree with all of your post. The only odd thing to me is the Captain not being on the bridge.
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True enough, Paul. I called the CDO or the CO a number of times, even in my relatively little time driving surfaced.
But then, the Collisions and Groundings trainings are full of tales of incredibly smart guys falling into one version of complacency or another. I mean, in the submarine world, we often see these reports and say, "Oh, those guys were dumb, that won't be us, because we're smarter." But those guys were us, another bunch of random dudes out driving a warship somewhere, the cream of the crop. Once, in DH school, the instructor set our class up with a scenario that had once resulted in a submarine collision -- same geometry, same data ... and we made the same decisions that had gotten the other guys in trouble.
Heck, an OOD on my boat got run over by a merchant that we had tracked in from 40 miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Had we been running a bit more shallow, it would have been a serious disaster. That particular OOD was somewhere between genius and savant, and he had a well-seasoned team of sonar and fire control guys tracking targets. There was only one contact on the screen, so it wasn't a clutter issue. They just all collectively missed it, somehow.