Category Archives: Sailing

Ship Blocking Suez Canal Had History of Losing Control

Were nautical engineers in denial (pun intended) when they created a massively massive ship that has the grace of a drunken sailor on ice?

All the fresh reports of a ship named Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal seem to underplay the most important point. This ship built in 2018 was in a similar accident in 2019:

…the cargo ship ran into a small ferry moored on the Elbe river in the German port city of Hamburg. Authorities at the time blamed strong wind for the collision…

It wasn’t a small ferry that was hit. This ship is massively massive at 400 meters long and 59 meters wide. Everything is small compared to that. Do you know how wide the massive Suez Canal is? Only 286 meters.

The prior crash suggests it’s a known design flaw in handling wind (and by that I’m including bridge comms) that should have been fixed long ago. Here’s analysis from 2011 saying wind is a major factor in container ship engineering only getting worse:

…the amount of hours with troubling winds and loss of productivity on a container terminal due to wind will double. Increase of wind pressure The increase in world sea trade causes an increase in port equipment and vessel size. For example, the 9500 TEU container vessel commissioned in 2005 is almost ten times the capacity of the first generation container vessels of 1962. This also affects the size of the cranes. The effect of wind increases due to larger wind surfaces of cranes and vessels, but the effect is also augmented because of the extra wind speed at higher altitudes.

And here’s a graphic from analysis in 2013 that modeled steerage loss in rivers due to even light winds.

The effect of the beam wind force for different superstructures. Source: THE SIMULATED EFFECT OF THE WIND ON A 13.300 TEU CONTAINER SHIP, Naval Academy Press 2013

In other words, the ship itself is too tall to avoid thinking of itself as a sail and then stacking containers on top literally becomes an act of creating a permanent sail with predictable effects in wind (e.g. as demonstrated in 2012 wind tunnel experiments).

Source: “Wind Forces on Container Ships” by Ingrid Marie Vincent Andersen. DTU Department of Mechanical Engineering Fluid Mechanics, Coastal and Maritime Engineering

The winds in the 2019 Germany crash were reported as force seven with gusts of force eight (30 knots with gusts to 40 knots). That’s a bit strong (25 knots is the top end of most sailors’ comfort level) but more importantly it was a foreshadowing.

Zum Zeitpunkt der Kollision herrschte Windstärke sieben vor Blankenese – bei Böen der Stärke acht!

The sort of obvious problem is that engineers have come up with designs so tall that in just 30 knot winds (which seems to be the same wind force in Egypt 2021 as in Germany 2019), despite traveling at a blazing 12.8 knots, it couldn’t steer a reliable path.

WindFinder forecasts like this one for the Suez Canal show how a ship’s bridge would be well aware of risks.

That’s why I say their ship operated like a drunken sailor on ice, twice!

Vessel Head to Wind with Headway. Source: Knowledge of Sea

This is a metaphor for engineering mismanagement by not thinking ahead about design decisions relative to the very well known natural environment.

Bigger is not better. Also patches need to happen faster. Lack of planning and a failure to respond to earlier warnings leads to… bigger disasters.

Some reports include the point that the ship experienced a power outage when it lost steerage. Others dispute this. Power loss maybe complicates matters but the ship should still have had fine steerage (let alone ability to drop anchor).

Some reports include the point that the wind caused visibility issues because of sand. This doesn’t sound right to me as the ship ran aground precisely on 23 March 05:45am and sunrise on this day was 05:50am. Visibility before sunrise?

It comes back to the ship was so wide, tall and long it lacked an ability to stay pointed at 12.8 knots of momentum in flat water. I mean 30 knot winds would be unusually strong for the canal (let alone gusts to 50 knots), which reportedly sees 5-10 knots year round, but it’s something that engineers should have planned for especially after the 2019 crash.

Steerage in constrained space is a major problem for nautical engineers, such as a river where the ship moves too fast for micro course corrections and too slow for major course corrections (and of course lacks brakes). For a ship this size 30 knot winds wouldn’t mean a thing in open water, but in a river underway in-between slow and fast controls it’s a recipe for disaster.

This is how the drift looked, tracked in a VesselFinder video:

The ship starts to slide to port and compensates with over steering towards starboard. Its stern then spins towards port, which maybe is expected from wind pressure changing, driving the bow increasingly starboard into the canal bank.

Also let’s be honest, 12.8 knots sounds unusually high for a ship in this canal. What was it thinking? That decision rendered her bow thrusters and low-speed controls useless (as speed increases thrusters become less effective and rudders become more effective) meaning it was going so fast it needed lightning speed reaction times of complex geometry by human pilots to course correct.

Perhaps that’s the real investigation here? (Not saying automated pilots would do better, but calculations of known factors like wind speed, direction and rudder/engine adjustments can be made faster by machines)

Now for the opposite perspective. People say they didn’t see such a looming disaster coming.

Images showed the ship’s bow was touching the eastern wall, while its stern looked lodged against the western wall – an extraordinary event that experts said they had never heard of happening before in the canal’s 150-year history.

Nobody has heard of a ship going sideways so far that it touches both banks? This ship is so big it had very little time before it was touching both. Many ships have certainly run aground (e.g. 2017 another very new massive ship was stuck in the Suez).

I guess you put those two facts together and the past could have easily predicted the present.

Source: Airbus Pleiades intelligence satellite

Note the unlimited fetch (unobstructed path) for wind along the canal in the images where the ship is stuck. A 30 knot wind is a much more solid force when there are no trees or buildings, as disturbances in flow significantly reduce power.

A couple more interesting points here.

Being aground as she is, all the way up on the eastern bank, and she’s listing to port, it’s very hard to be able to pull her off. They’re in a very dangerous, precarious position too, with both ends of the vessel on the beach there’s a potential for the vessel to sag in the middle. If they cannot get her off that position with the tugs, they’re going to have to start removing fuel out of her, and then containers, but the difficulty with getting the containers off her is she’s so high, so tall, that it would be very difficult to get the correct size cranes in there.

The ship being so tall also impacts the ability to off-load it to get it off the ground. Cranes afloat probably will not be tall enough (because if they were tall enough they also might be blown over by winds).

And the ship being so long means it could end up sagging with both ends aground but the middle in deep canal water.

Pressing tugs against the middle of the ship while the bow and stern are stuck on land could be a structural nightmare. Did engineers think about that too? I would bet not.

This story has many lessons and insights about engineering that hopefully will be studied in great detail to change the future in terms of ethical product management. It is almost exactly a repeat of the kind of thing meant to be avoided by studying the 1940 collapse of a bridge during high wind.

Just four months after Galloping Gertie failed, a professor of civil engineering at Columbia University, J. K. Finch, published an article in Engineering News-Record that summarized over a century of suspension bridge failures. Finch declared, ‘These long-forgotten difficulties with early suspension bridges clearly show that while to modern engineers, the gyrations of the Tacoma bridge constituted something entirely new and strange, they were not new — they had simply been forgotten.’ … An entire generation of suspension-bridge designer-engineers forgot the lessons of the 19th century.

The lessons forgotten here are obviously related to how a boat on water with a giant sail (fixed or otherwise) tends to sail like a sailboat when the wind blows. The solutions, pun intended, will be found in improved bridge resource management.

“Stateless” Dhows Smuggling Weapons Near Somalia Caught by US Navy

I think the phrase that stands out for me most in this US Navy press report is “stateless”.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) seized illicit shipments of weapons and weapons components from two stateless dhows during a maritime security operation in international waters off the coast of Somalia, Feb. 11-12.

It was a “flag verification” that led to the discovery, after these dhows were monitored for nearly two days in international waters.

Churchill’s Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) team and embarked joint service Advanced Interdiction Team (AIT) discovered the illicit cargo during a flag verification boarding conducted in accordance with international law and in international waters. The cache of weapons consisted of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, light machine guns, heavy sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and crew served weapons. […] The original source of the weapons has not yet been identified. Churchill located the dhows and provided more than 40 hours of over watch and security for the ship and its boarding teams throughout the two-day operation.

“Source of the weapons has not yet been identified” seems odd as well, given 40 hours of over watch. Pretty clear these are Chinese-made RPG-7… so I guess the remaining question is who is buying and shipping them?

Source: US Navy Press Office, Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Louis Thompson Staats IV

Some speculate these are Iranian deals, and perhaps even headed for Yemen.

Yet I’ll go out on a limb based on export data and wonder aloud whether the arms originally were Chinese shipments to Ethiopia that ended up diverted.

Ethiopia seems likely to top Chinese diplomats’ agenda for East Africa. China and Ethiopia have expressed their enthusiasm for expanding military ties, and officers from the Ethiopian military have even received training in China.

Another clue could come from the UAE Embassy attack plot in Ethiopia, disclosed February 3rd.

Ethiopia’s state-run media have said authorities arrested 15 people over a plot to attack the United Arab Emirates’ embassy in the capital, Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian Press Agency (EPA) on Wednesday cited a statement from the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) as saying that the suspects were working on foreigners’ direction.

The US Pentagon clarified “foreigners’ direction” to mean Iran was behind this plan to attack UAE embassies.

Rear Adm Heidi K. Berg, director of intelligence at the Pentagon’s Africa Command, said that Iran was behind the 15 people arrested in Ethiopia and that the “mastermind of this foiled plot”.

Tempted to say these were Chinese arms for a failed plot in Ethiopia diverted via Somalia smuggling network somewhere else. Or maybe they just didn’t get to the plot in time and were in limbo.

And I hate to admit it but the idea of these “stateless” caches of guns from unknown origin floating about reminds me of the latest story in America:

Untraceable ghost guns are now the emerging guns of choice across the nation. Nobody who could buy a serialized gun and pass a background check would ever need a ghost gun. Yet we allege Polymer80 has made it easy for anyone, including felons, to buy and build weapons that pose a major public safety threat.

The Movie “Jaws” Foreshadowed America’s Disinformation Crisis

If you want to talk about disinformation in America, “Jaws” is one of the best examples of how a simple story based on a false fear can do exceptional long lasting harm.

It is very difficult to get sharks back to what they are, correctly seen as loving and affectionate.

An example of shark reality is from 1959 to 2010 the TOTAL number of fatalities was 26 in America (0.5/year average). Only 1 in a 3.7 million chance.

For an obvious comparison in risk homeostasis, lightning data shows a 37.9/year average. That average means 1 in 180,746 Americans will be killed by lightning. And that actually is less likely even than being killed by a dog, which is 1 in 118,776!

Ok, to be fair American citizens killed by anything means we take the population total and divide by recorded deaths. The resulting number really shouldn’t be substituted for a probability because factors creep in.

Do you swim every day with sharks? Things like that make better factoring for probability.

Speaking of swimming with sharks then, here is another example of shark reality, as written by Sune Nightingale:

On a dive one day Cristina Zenato noticed a hook inside a shark’s mouth. In the end she just stuck her hand in and pulled it out. From that moment on the shark changed her behaviour and would show up on the dive and allow Cristina to stroke her, and would give Cristina a little nudge on the hip as if to say “hey I’m here”

Then other sharks started showing up wanting hooks removed…..Cristina now has a box of over 300 removed hooks.

“This is a wild animal and she’s giving me full trust…….It is something to be absolutely in awe of no matter how many times it happens …..what I developed is an appreciation for their vulnerability.”

Really changes your perception of sharks doesn’t it to see one being so cuddly and kind?

Again the odds of an American being killed by shark are about 1 in 3.7 million for everyone in the general population. It’s super remote on a generic predictive scale prone to error.

Yet here we see the odds of being killed by a shark actually even MORE remote, reaching towards zero for someone swimming with them constantly. They seem to love her and trust her.

The author of Jaws expressed his deep regrets for writing such a dangerous fiction, but obviously it did little to change the disinformation effect of his book and the movie.

“Spielberg certainly made the most superb movie; Peter was very pleased,” Wendy Benchley told Associated Press. “But Peter kept telling people the book was fiction, it was a novel, and that he took no more responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia,” she said, referring to Puzo’s screenplay and novel “The Godfather.”

“Jaws” was “entirely fiction,” Peter Benchley repeated in a London Daily Express article that appeared last week.

“Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today,” said Benchley, who also co-wrote the screenplay for “Jaws.” “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

Americans target sharks and hold grudges against them. Not the other way around.

The Future-Future of Aircraft Carriers

The impressively huge Aircraft Carrier was a decisive platform in past wars and still gets a lot of airtime (pun not intended).

…when word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it’s no accident that the first question that comes to everyone’s lips is: ‘where’s the nearest carrier?’

However, I can’t help but think about it in terms of a commoditization line over history.

What I mean to say is that there is a line that goes from the 1960s drone war being conducted on a mainframe in a few high-security buildings, all the way to warfare today being done using mobile phones in everyone’s pocket.

Take the core concept of the “carrier”. In today’s commodity technology terms I believe you get an autonomous sea box of tiny drones ready to swarm.

Source: Louisiana-based shipbuilder Metal Shark, selected to develop and implement the Long Range Unmanned Surface Vessel (LRUSV) System for the United States Marine Corps

One of the lessons of the 1980 failed operation Eagle Claw, for example, was they came up one single aircraft short of a complete mission.

Imagine telling that story instead where the numbers of aircraft launched from sea are no hurdle at all — opposite problem really, as you have surplus of highly operational units.

The sea launch platform already was pioneered a while ago by submarines launching drones out of their missile tubes. And the Navy many years ago was manually launching swarms of 50 drones. Surely by now they’ve combined these two advances into tubes at sea having a magazine attached.

Now flatten the carrier to waterline (e.g. into a Low Visibility Craft or LVC) to remove its target profile, and with a towline attach a submarine filled with sensors and tubes of hundreds or thousands or drones.

It would look like a fatter version of the 2016 Wave Glider submersible by Liquid Robotics.

Obviously this means surface vessels could easily reload by picking up another tow-line submersible, bringing resupply buoys (forward docking stations) into the picture on “long line” deployments.

Also I can’t help but mention this is very similar to what was being designed in the late 1800s and even demonstrated by Tesla himself, so we’re on a very late cycle of adoption (postponed by WWI emphasis on maintaining control over petroleum distribution).

The drones could launch undersea or on surface. Either way it’s a far more modern take on an old solution, for an even older problem in warfare.