USS Fitzgerald collision

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The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center

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Before we lay this all on the feet of one junior officer, provide the full story. That ship was a mess and the two senior officers aboard were basically AWOL.

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Just wait till they put an Asian woman in charge of navigating the ship. SMH

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Link?

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The ghost in the Fitz’s machine: why a doomed warship’s crew never saw the vessel that hit it
By: Geoff Ziezulewicz
10 hours ago
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Fort and his team of investigators walked to the destroyer’s electronic nerve center, the combat information center everyone calls the “CIC.”

It hadn’t taken a direct hit from the bow of the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal, but it was trashed nonetheless and smelled like urine.

He found a pee bottle that had tipped and spilled behind a large-screen display. Fort’s eyes started to take over for his nose, and he took it all in.

“There was debris everywhere,” Fort said under oath. “Food debris, food waste, uneaten food, half-eaten food, personal gear in the form of books, workout gear, workout bands, kettlebells, weightlifting equipment, the status boards had graffiti on them.”

“I’d never seen a CIC like that in my entire time in the Navy,” the surface warfare officer of more than 25 years recollected.

The more Fort looked, the worse it got: broken sensors that were reported for repairs but never fixed.....

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CIC watchstanders couldn’t use their remote control to guide it because it also was broken.

A dead radar control button had been “covered by a piece of masking tape,” but Fort’s investigators couldn’t locate a casualty report chronicling the malfunction.

A work order had been generated to order, install and test new control buttons.

That was 194 days before the collision, Fort found.

And that long delay was far from unusual on board the Fitz.


Fort’s investigators interviewed a watchstander who told them that a SPA-25G radar console had been broken for at least four months before the collision.

Then there was the ship’s Voyage Management System.

Used to navigate the destroyer without relying on paper charts, the Fitz’s VMS was so freighted with problems that technicians cannibalized the set in the skipper’s quarters for parts to keep the system running.

But the Fitz’s VMS had started acting up while the destroyer was in dry dock in 2016 and early 2017, Fort found. The bridge unit would lock up and take several minutes to reset.

Technicians were supposed to peek at it in April of 2017 but “that visit was cancelled due to FTZ’s schedule change requiring the ship to be underway,” Fort wrote.

A “Bright Bridge” console also was listed as operational before the ACX Crystal accident.

But like the VMS, one console had been cannibalized for parts to fix another console and no casualty report was found for any of that, the report states.

A work order repair number, however, had been generated — 135 days before the collision, Fort found.

LINK

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