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Learning lessons from the loss of the Norwegian frigate Helge Ingstad

>Some hasty judgements were made by those speculating about the event, with some suggesting the accident “must have been the fault of the tanker crew as a highly trained naval personnel on board a modern warship with sophisticated sensors would be unlikely to make such a mistake.”

That certainly wasn't the general opinion in Norway at the time. Everyone blamed the frigate crew from the start.

4 months agoby ginko

> confusion and internal communication problems limited damage the control effort

It is hilarious to me that the sentence blaming communication issues is so grammatically incorrect as to be incomprehensible.

4 months agoby adastra22

How many hours had the officer on watch in this case worked that week? How many hours of sleep did he have?

And why is no one except me asking those questions?

4 months agoby rwallace

The Norwegian Defence Ministry did not cover itself in glory by suing the classification society DNV for $1.7Bn in damages but was forced to drop the case when the investigation showed the ship ultimately sank due to the failure to close internal doors.

Ouch.

4 months agoby lysace

> There was a reliance on visual cues for too long and ironically the accident would probably have never happened if the visibility had been poor.

Ironic indeed.

The incident reconstruction video a bit further down the article is well done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXUf6B2wLtw

4 months agoby forkerenok

> Despite the very heavy investment in warship survivability measures, this makes one wonder just how little damage modern combatants can sustain without being immediately crippled.

The essence of the article.

4 months agoby M95D

How do all the people involved, IRL, cope with the reputational impact of being part of such an event? Do people change name, move, cut off ties with their past etc? Or never tire of telling the story?

Edit to add: I was wondering about the emotional angle as well as the career angle.

For example there is the The Mizuho Securities "Fat-Finger" Error in 2025 that cost a Japanese bank $340M. According to management anecdotes the employee was kept by the bank and the bank chief said that they will never find a more careful and diligent employee in the future. However, quick ask of an AI says that the anecdote ending is probably a urban myth told to demonstrate a management principle, so we don't know what happened to the employee nor how they feel.

4 months agoby willvarfar

Traditionally, a key duty of senior NCO's has been to babysit (in effect) young naval officers, when the latter are in command of critical things. That's both to prevent expensive noob goofs, and to have a seasoned leader on hand if the "routine" situation suddenly jumps out of the young officer's limited competence zone.

Might anyone be familiar with the Norwegian Navy's traditions or practice in this regard? From the article, it sounds like the "young and relatively inexperienced" OOW was probably the most experienced (years of service at sea) person on the frigate's bridge. With two trainees under him, who he'd have needed to keep eyes on.

4 months agoby bell-cot

I often wonder whether modern advanced battle systems might be more easily disabled as they have more complex and delicate sensors, etc. but this is on a different level. Not sure if any ship is designed to survive this but a total power failure disabling comms (and thus modes of restoring control) seems to be a weak point here.

As always, communication and coordination are crucial, so they should have been prepared to fall back to older comm methods (the "runners" manually carrying messages). With the steering gear still working, this might have changed the outcome of the incident.

4 months agoby Liftyee

The Norwegians badly needed more warships so we've sold them some new ones, to be built in the UK.

4 months agoby mrlonglong

The approach is so different in airline business (but not sure about military).

4 months agoby ngcc_hk

What I learnt from this article: the Combat Management System of these Norwegian frigates must be hot garbage.

A modern CMS will automaticaly plot anything moving in the range of the ship sensors and warn of an approaching vessel. That doesn't excuse the human error obviously but you have to wonder how outdated the Norwegian navy equipment must be if that kind of thing can happen.

4 months agoby StopDisinfo910

So finaly It isn't Navantia's fault, they fucked up.

4 months agoby spaniard89277