By Michael Grey*
“She’s not answering the helm!” It was a call to chill the heart of any watchkeeping officer, at least in the days when there was a man on the wheel to react with such alarm. It happened to me just once, but in the middle of the Straits of Gibraltar, with lots of traffic around. Panic stations – call the master – stop the engines – get the not under command signal hoisted – explain to the engine room that we really wanted to stop – it was an afternoon to remember. After the engineers had strewn the various bits of telemotor around the wheelhouse, the culprit was found in a plug of oily waste, left over from the ship’s recent refit. The voyage was resumed, after a lot of bad language, with no near-misses and all of us just a little older, and perhaps wiser. In such events, the first reaction, and very human it is too, is one of confusion, before the proper reactions hopefully kick in.
If one has been a watchkeeper on any sort of ship, it is something of an education reading of accidents where confusion was not a momentary hiatus, but also can provoke a reaction of deep sympathy. There, but for the grace of God etc…Problems with controls seem to have been a perennial contributor to confusion in the preliminaries to an accident. The failure to switch from one set of manoeuvring controls to another has been the cause of a great deal of bent steel, and worse, over the years. There is a case in the current edition of the excellent Marine Accident Investigation Branch Safety Digest, where a nice new trawler apparently went berserk when shifting ship in a fishing harbour, bouncing off a concrete wall and finally grounding. The skipper was vainly attempting to handle his ship with inert controls, as they had not been switched to where he was standing in the wheelhouse.
Confusion from poorly-designed controls
One might ask why, in a wheelhouse a few paces from one side to the other, it was necessary to have separate port, starboard and central controls, but I am told not to be old-fashioned, as convenience and labour-saving are the priorities these days. I recall a ferry master friend telling me that after confusion had reigned in his bridge, they fashioned an enormous wooden “tablet” that distinguished the active console from the currently dead ones.
It was, he said, on the same principle as the huge tokens exchanged by the drivers of railway engines on single tracked lines. But these sort of “instrument enabled” accidents, which probably would not have happened before the multiplication of control stations, still occur on a fairly regular basis. And there is no denying that confusion is sometimes occasioned by poorly designed controls or switches, with vital functions insufficiently distinguished from others, sometimes badly lit.
It seems to be often a function of digitisation, with touch-screens and pressure switches taking over from more “human-friendly” controls, where status was more immediately apparent.
Accidents from autopilots
Accidents involving autopilots also happen rather too often and can be a source of embarrassment and worse. A classic example which will be written into textbooks forever more is the stranding and subsequent loss last year of the New Zealand Navy’s dive and hydrographic ship HMNZS Manawanui, which met her end amid confusion on the reefs of Samoa. The final report into the circumstances, which attribute the stranding to those on the bridge not realising the vessel was on autopilot when they were trying to turn the ship away from the coast, makes sobering reading, with the (partially redacted) voice transcripts from the bridge recorder, of that career-ending evening. It will be little comfort to those involved to learn that their problems were pretty well identical to those on the bridge of the tanker Torrey Canyon, which, in 1967, ushered us into the age of the super-spill.
They too had wasted desperate final seconds trying to disengage the ship’s autopilot, circumstances which have been repeated down through the intervening decades, aboard too many ships. Insufficient familiarity of the operating crew with their ship and her controls were suggested as one problem in the New Zealand report, which might seem surprising to commercial sector readers, as naval vessels invariably spend a long time “working up”, where crews of merchant ships are expected to take their ships to sea without such a period of familiarisation. But the old saw “different ships – different long splices” still manage a certain resonance in an era of infinitely more complex vessels and their sophisticated equipment.
(Photo from Dreamstime of a navigation officer on watchkeeping duty)
*Michael Grey, a past Master Mariner, is former editor of Lloyd’s List. This column is published with the kind permission of The Maritime Advocate.