What is with cruise ships? They are always having epidemics, power failures, fires, food poisoning, and sinking.
I've only been on one, the QE2 from New York to France. I wanted to visit the engine room, which is usually allowed, except that they'd just had a big fire. The trip took 5 days because one boiler was still out.
John
There do seem to be quite a few of them around, and they are built and run by fallible human beings, so they break from time to time.
At least they don't have nuclear reactors on board.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
WTH?? I thought Andy Rooney died a couple of months ago. Art
Designs by Larkin ?:-) Flail away, Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude... dork, dork, dork :-) ...Jim Thompson
Well, it is sort of amazing that, with radar and GPS and sonar depth sounders and computers and stuff, a crew would manage to run a ship this big onto the rocks in clear, fair weather.
It's like the Airbus that crashed over the South Atlantic; automated and computerized to the hilt, engines running fine, and the crew stalled it all the way into the sea.
John
Maybe a "brat" running the ship ;-)
Flail away, Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude... dork, dork, dork :-) ...Jim Thompson
Is that all you can do, keep making those same stupid noises?
What a moron.
John
Platitudes, platitudes, but as long as your name is in lights, the manic-depressive persona is satisfied ?:-) ...Jim Thompson
If they did, they would be in hardened containment. Not quite as hard or thick as your skull, however.
"The ship was 2.5 miles off route when it struck a rocky sandbar, according to the Italian Coast Guard" probably accounts for the grounding. Too early to say why; perhaps they were running late and cut across a dogleg. Unfortunately, not all areas are equally well charted and once off their normal track, they were taking quite a chance.
The usual cause is a chain of dumbshit actions where multiple players had a chance to say "Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't look right!" or, worse, somebody does speak up and gets brushed off.
This does sound as if somebody messed up pretty badly.
In the case of the Airbus, I believe that the leading theory is that the crew flew the plane into some pretty severe weather conditions, and the pitot tubes iced up. This caused the airspeed sensing system to go completely haywire, and the crew probably had no way of knowing what the plane's true airspeed was. Hence, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
IIRC, there's actually a pretty narrow set of flight conditions which work, when you're flying as high and fast as those planes do... both airspeed and pitch need to be quite tightly controlled in order to maintain a flat-and-level flight.
must have been a long long time ago, I was still in school when they switched to diesel
-Lasse
sage
..
lThe captain said he had been over that route many times before, close to the island so passengers could take pictures... and where the ship ended up is not where it struck the rocks, they maneuvered the ship to its present location after the collision. As you can see he damned near beached it, the water isn't waist deep there, and all this hysteria about reliving the Titanic is kinda sad...
This plane doesn't have control yokes, but has independent joysticks for the two pilots. Neither gets any tactile feedback on what the other is doing, and the computer averages their inputs. One guy was apparently trying to keep it level, and the other was pulling back to the max. The average was enough to stall it. The pilots on this plane do not have a visible angle-of-attack indicator! And, apparently, didn't understand much about how airplanes work. They were used to the computer flying the plane.
They flew it all the way into the sea that way, nose-up.
John
Haha- didn't someone's Navy slam a nuclear submarine into a deep outcropping at high speed not too long ago?
Yup. Big ships are now mostly direct-drive reversing diesels. Steam is more efficient, but it's hard to find crews that can manage the complexity of a steam plant.
John
There's likely to be a simple explanation. The crew are as tanked up as the passengers.
.
This ship was diesel-electric.
ge
he
It was just 6PM their time when they crashed.
"Dave Platt"
** Commercial jet pilots have commented that at high altitude, a throttle setting of 85% and a nose up attitude of about 4 degrees will result in level flight. The A330s throttles and artificial horizon indicator were working fine so doing this was possible.Seems the three pilots involved did not trust ANY of their instruments and had lost " situational awareness " - that is until the plane went splash.
... Phil
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