"The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money. Ten sailors paid with their lives."
When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the loss of 10 sailors. The truth is the Navy’s flawed technology set the McCain up for disaster.
By T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi and Agnes Chang
December 20, 2019
Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.
But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.
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But a ProPublica examination shows that the Navy pursued prosecutions of the two men even as its investigators and those with the NTSB were learning that the navigation system, if it hadn’t technically malfunctioned, had played a critical role in the deadly outcome in the Pacific.
Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.
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https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
From the read, it looks like the system was able to transfer controls to a variety of places around the bridge but wasn't very clear on which station was managing what.
There are some things for which buttons, switches, and knobs are superior to touchscreens, and I think ship controls are one of them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...they learned enough to do what they need to do and ignored the rest. Or used the rest rarely enough that the permutations of options and advanced features were not fully understood, or understood on an instinctual level.
If you have to think too much, you weren't trained enough, or properly, or didn't practice enough. Especially when the job is time-sensitive, like steering an 8,000 ton warship!
For example, the article talks about "the big red button".
Each station that could run the helm had a big emergency-stop-like switch that, when you whacked it, turned that station into the one handling the helm. It's sort of an "I've got this" button. But the sailors didn't know that! They thought if they hit it, it put control to a station in the aft of the ship, down past the engine room someplace.
Some things are too customizable!