TITANIC SINKING -Crucial Steering Error

Danny_Labrador

Danny_Labrador

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Tiller Orders V Rudder Orders - it seems plausible ?


Titanic_1721816c.jpg


they spotted it well in advance but still steamed straight into it because of a basic steering blunder.
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more .........

The error on the ship's maiden voyage between Southampton and New York in 1912 happened because at the time seagoing was undergoing enormous upheaval because of the conversion from sail to steam ships.

The change meant there was two different steering systems and different commands attached to them.

Some of the crew on the Titanic were used to the archaic Tiller Orders associated with sailing ships and some to the more modern Rudder Orders.

Crucially, the two steering systems were the complete opposite of one another.

So a command to turn "hard a starboard" meant turn the wheel right under the Tiller system and left under the Rudder.

When First Officer William Murdoch spotted the iceberg two miles away, his "hard a-starboard" order was misinterpreted by the Quartermaster Robert Hitchins.

He turned the ship right instead of left and, even though he was almost immediately told to correct it, it was too late and the side of the starboard bow was ripped out by the iceberg.

"The steersman panicked and the real reason why Titanic hit the iceberg, which has never come to light before, is because he turned the wheel the wrong way," said Lady Patten who is the wife of former Tory Education minister, Lord (John) Patten.
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All here :http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/8016752/Titanic-sunk-by-steering-blunder-new-book-claims.html
 
Probably a load of cobblers. The steering orders changes on British merchant ships occurred as a result of the Merchant Shipping (Safety and Load Line Conventions) Act, 1932, which came into effect on 1 January 1933.

The Titanic sank in 1912. Is it at all plausible that the White Star Line would have bridge officers and coxswains who worked to two different steering rules some 20 years before the changes came in?

According to your link, the account in the book is based on what an officer who wasn't on watch told his wife, who after his death then relayed it to her granddaughter.
She (granny) died when I was sixteen ...

Nearly forty years later, with Granny and my mother long dead, I was plotting my second novel and it struck me that I was the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank.

My grandfather’s extraordinary experiences felt like perfect material for Good As Gold.
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Yep, good as gold - cash all the way to the bank. There's nothing pays as well as a good conspiracy theory.
 
This subject often comes up in the film where the helmsman is seen to turn the wheel to port. They actually had it historically correct as at the time the command meant 'tiller to starboard'.

The changeover was not as sharp as might be inferred from the ear;ier post but wasn't happening in 1912.

One possible reason is that when putting the helm over to steer to port initially causes the stern to swing to starboard so in a very close quarters situation with a stationary object the best plan is often to steer towards the object.
 
This one comes up now and again with the forum linked to Encyclopaedia Titanica. I dont follow it much these days but recall that the debated major issues revolved around

1 A larger ship that most of the crew were accustomed to working. BUT, the officers were experienced men, some of whom had previously served on Olympic with similar characteristics. Even so, the instiinctive "I need this much room to steer so must give the orders now" element may have been missing.
2. Possible failure, in so far as we know from survivors testimony, to use the screws to tighten the turn, doubly an issue given that the ship's ability to change course was poorer than ideal. The centre screw on the turbine, would not have done a great deal in reverse.
3. Too fast in limited visibility, and we all get taught about that one!
 
Little Rascal said:
Is it true that if she'd hit head on she might have stayed afloat?
ie only damaged one or two compartments...
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it would still sink because the top of the bulkheads were not sealed to the deck head, there was a gap which allowed water to flow into the next compartment, as soon as the captain realised this he ordered abandon ship.

as I understand it the main reason why it hit the ice berg was that the rudder was too small.

The Titannic is part of a big steep learning curve.
 
Nope sorry,

The whole concept was that with one or two compartments flooded the trim change would not be enough to submerge the top of the watertight bulkheads. She would have floated with a couple of flooded compartments but as so many were holed, the top of the next undamaged section was submerged leading to the progressive flooding...

There was a critical point at which this started - the designer(s) just didn't envisage so many compartments being damaged at once.
 
I dispute quite strongly that a deliberate head on would ever have been a viable, as opposed to theoretical, alternative prospect.

"So, Mr Murdoch, why did you cause the vessel to crash head on into the iceberg?"
"Well Sir, in my judgment it gave the ship the best chance of survival. In fact Titanic did not finally sink until a day after Carpathia arrived to take off the passengers and Olympic had arrived and taken her in tow.Only then was it obvious that her keel had cracked open near boiler room six and she was slowly flooding aft through the double bottoms."
"Could you not have alter course sharply and missed the iceberg altogether?"
[reluctantly]"Maybe so, but she was prone to being slow in answering her helm."

I have seen calculations based on a 20 knot collision into the iceberg that crumple the bow back to the bridge, opening three compartments and possibly breaking her back where the firemans starts and passage met near the bulkhead to BR6. Nasty things also happen to the superstructure around the expansion joints.

Worth pointing out that construction to a four compartment standard made Titanic pretty safe on paper even by modern standards. Unlike Lusitania, which also had longitudinal bulkheads, Titanic sank pretty much on an even keel, just going down by the head, so all the lifeboats could be launched. Her stability, even in a damaged condition (ends riddled in naval speak) was perfectly acceptable.

It remains open to speculation what difference reaming punched rivet holes might have made, or better steel in the rivets, but some of that was a product of her time. Queen Mary, 20 years later, was specified with reamed rivet holes from the start, which is a major exercise and adds substantially to the cost and time of construction. The steel of the time, in the ambient temperature at the time, was below the brittle transition temperature and nobody really knew about designing out notches to stop crack propagation and catastrophic failure..
 
Marsupial said:
The Titannic is part of a big steep learning curve.
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A documentary I saw a couple of years ago suggested the White Star Line were using old designs to save money whereas the contemporary Cunard ships were much more modern and able to survive such events more effectively.
 
Wheel orders

The change-over was not achieved by a stroke of a parliamentary pen. When I was a Suez Canal Pilot in the fifties, one came across this in various ships in various flags, almost entirely Merchant ships being steered by an "old Hand" quartermaster. The Navy, with a more highly disciplined structure managed the change-over better.
The Navy's big steering cok-up was "chasing the lubber's line" which had much the same effect. Good watchkeeping is the only real safeguard.
Even Lieutenant Milliamp has not got on top of steering problems
 
snowleopard said:
A documentary I saw a couple of years ago suggested the White Star Line were using old designs to save money whereas the contemporary Cunard ships were much more modern and able to survive such events more effectively.
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Longitudinal bulkheads, as previously stated, probably caused greater loss of life on the Lusitania by causing her to list havily due to assymmetric flooding. The Navy learned about this one the hard way as well.
 
Andrew_Fanner said:
I dispute quite strongly that a deliberate head on would ever have been a viable, as opposed to theoretical, alternative prospect.
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Thank you Andrew - that actually answers my original question, which was more about the damage done by a 20 knot collision, rather than simply about the effect of flooding the forward compartment.

Jon
 
Can someone explain why the bulkheads in Titanic were not closed up to the deck?

It seems to me that if you go to the trouble of fitting transverse bulkheads and managing all the internal structural and layout issues that must bring with it, then why not close to the top?

Wouldn't that add massively to the strength and stiffness of the whole structure as well as preventing water flowing over the top?
 
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