Astute Sub grounding 'catalogue of errors'

maxi77 said:
I chose terminology to suit the audience. Mind you it was common in my day, when we still issued the tot, to not use nautical terms, but these fashions come and go.

Time for some Egyptian PT.
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Yes, same fashion in MN in those days - it was considered hip to "drive", "park", etc., ;-) So, time for tabnabs and smoko - my Sea Cadet son had no idea what I was on about!
 
john_morris_uk said:
Try and keep up - some ex submarine navigators have pointed out that your DON'T normally have a chart up on the top of the fin in a submarine.



Why do people who think that the world beyond the buoyed channel is completely out of bounds? The submarine weren't following the buoyed channel and they might have been spending lots of their time outside it during the trials that they were undertaking for all sorts of good reasons. All the evidence is that they knew where they were - but the man on the bridge either ignored or didn't respond to the increasingly urgent reports from those plotting that they were standing into danger.

Like many such accidents, it was a series of errors and failures that compounded to make a mess.
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Well in this case it was - the buoys were MARKING the shallows - and to think it was a channel is misleading. Take it you have never been near the Skye bridge from your comments.
 
Maybe if they started started calling it a 'conning tower' again, it might remind those in it why they are there. ;)[/QUOTE]

That was how Gunther Prein did it!
 
kyleview said:
Well in this case it was - the buoys were MARKING the shallows - and to think it was a channel is misleading. Take it you have never been near the Skye bridge from your comments.
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Well as it happens I have been in these water, both on a grey warship and in the fin of a submarine. I don't know the waters though, and I was trying to respond to several people who were exasperated that they were the 'wrong' side of the buoys. The fact is that there is often no problem with being the 'wrong side'of lateral hand marks, but you have to know what you are doing. At the end of the day if they had all done their jobs properly they wouldn't have cocked up.
 
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I've found this thread very revealing on a number of issues I hadn't really thought much about.

Perhaps most interesting for me has been to find that a submarine's navigator would be using clearing bearings - I think a lot of the "Should have had a Garmin" comments are probably based on the assumption, which I too had made, that navigating warships would be a far more hi-tech process than the way we navigate our own small boats. My own mental image was that there'd be more than a bit of the Starship Enterprise about it, with just minimal human input before the computer "made it so"! I quite understand the reasons people have given why its not like that, but nonetheless its been an education.

Another issue I've ended up mulling over is to wonder when, in a naval training, you do get to make your mistakes? I suspect a lot of people here can imagine their own horror at being the OOW in that sub, arriving at the top of the conning tower with no chart, little idea of where he was or where he was going and finding that he's got minimal communication with the man at the wheel or the throttle. And I think most of us, who've navigated our own small boats, imagine we'd have seen this as a fairly major crisis and be getting the boat stopped, turned towards deep water or whatever, while trying to sort out communications etc. The fact that the OOW appears not to have been too bothered by these apparently fairly major problems makes me wonder if as small boat sailors we have a very different mindset, perhaps from having been in situations where its all starting to go horribly wrong and having to work our how to get ourselves out of them. Clearly you can't get that sort of experience in a submarine - if you run it aground you'll, understandably, be in big trouble. Yet realistically, you have to make mistakes in order to learn where the boundaries are. So when, as a potential OOW, do you get to drive a boat in which you are allowed to push the boundaries, and sometimes cross them and get things wrong, without being court martialled? I wonder if you don't, and if that's why many on this board feel they'd have been more alert to the developing situation than the unfortunate chap on the Astute was.

Those with naval experience feel free to tell me I'm talking rubbish, of course!

Cheers
Patrick
 
Morven said:
Maybe if they started started calling it a 'conning tower' again, it might remind those in it why they are there. ;)
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That was how Gunther Prein did it![/QUOTE]

They call the conning tower the conning tower and the fin the fin. Gunter Prein did not have a fin on his boat, he did however have a conning tower.
 
parsifal said:
In reality the fin is simply a term used to describe a streamlined conning tower; streamlined to reduce turbulence (and hence noise).
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Nope, see my post above, the conning tower is still ther inside the fin which not only encloses the conning tower but also the periscopes and other masts. The conning tower refers to a very specific part of the pressure hull, not the streamlining which is all external.
 
kyleview said:
The sub was well inside two red flashing buoys which were put there for a purpose - shallow waters! Most reasonable people would keep outside them even without the assistance of charts or electronics.

As they were only transferring crew there was no need to be anywhere near them, let alone inside them, as the distance to the shore facility was much the same from the deep water they had gone through for the last 1/2 miles.

Says little for the training and leadership on the sub that such basic errors can occur.
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+1.
 
maxi77 said:
Nope, see my post above, the conning tower is still ther inside the fin which not only encloses the conning tower but also the periscopes and other masts. The conning tower refers to a very specific part of the pressure hull, not the streamlining which is all external.
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I meant 'streamlined' in the sense of being surrounded by a streamlined casing. In the same way that the locomotive Mallard is said to be 'streamlined'.
 
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Woodlouse said:
It's hard to keep up after 200 plus posts but I remember one stating that the chap up top had forgotten to take a chart with him but had requested one to be sent up. Anyway, I give up here, this thread has gone round and round in ever decreasing circles since about the 4th post.:D

Anyway, as a parting shot, isn't the fin on a submarine technically called the sail? Or is that an americanism?
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I was taught, that you should never take a chart on deck!
 
Woodlouse said:
Each to their own. I fear that you might find there are exceptions if you were to do some cruising in the Scandinavian archipelagos.
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Tradition, based upon paper charts being expensive & precious items of knowledge - no plastic coatings way back then. Hence great care taken with them, which obviously includes a soft pencil (easier to erase & doesn't cut the paper fibres).

Damage or loss, could seriously spoil your day.
 
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