Navy reverting DDGs back to physical throttles, after fleet rejects touchscreen controls

IBNS helm controls on USS Dewey (DDG-105).

Touch-Screens are not always ideal in certain work environments.

Designers should note.
US Navy Photo

From USNI news by Megan Eckstein

The Navy will begin reverting destroyers back to a physical throttle and traditional helm control system in the next 18 to 24 months, after the fleet overwhelmingly said they prefer mechanical controls to touchscreen systems in the aftermath of the fatal USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) collision.

Damage to the left side is visible as the destroyer USS John S. McCain steers towards Changi Naval Base, Singapore, following a collision with a merchant vessel on Aug. 21, 2017.

The Navy is replacing touch-screen throttles and helms on destroyers with hand-held ones after determining that the McCain's controls caused confusion that contributed to the collision.
Joshua Fulton / U.S. Navy

The investigation into the collision showed that a touchscreen system that was complex and that sailors had been poorly trained to use contributed to a loss of control of the ship just before it crossed paths with a merchant ship in the Singapore Strait.
After the Navy released a Comprehensive Review related to the McCain and the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) collisions, Naval Sea Systems Command conducted fleet surveys regarding some of the engineering recommendations, Program Executive Officer for Ships Rear Adm. Bill Galinis said.

 USS Fitzgerald returning to Yokosuka, Japan, after the collision

Picture: US Navy

“When we started getting the feedback from the fleet from the Comprehensive Review effort – it was SEA 21 (NAVSEA’s surface ship lifecycle management organization) that kind of took the lead on doing some fleet surveys and whatnot – it was really eye-opening.
And it goes into the, in my mind, ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ category.
We really made the helm control system, specifically on the [DDG] 51 class, just overly complex, with the touch screens under glass and all this kind of stuff,” Galinis said during a keynote speech at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ annual Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium.
“So as part of that, we actually stood up an organization within Team Ships to get after bridge commonality.”

NTSB Image

Galinis said that bridge design is something that shipbuilders have a lot of say in, as it’s not covered by any particular specification that the Navy requires builders to follow.
As a result of innovation and a desire to incorporate new technology, “we got away from the physical throttles, and that was probably the number-one feedback from the fleet – they said, just give us the throttles that we can use.”

Galinis told USNI News after his speech that “we’re already in the contracting process, and it’s going to come on almost as a kit that’s relatively easy to install.
[NAVSEA] would do it – it’s not something that the ship would do – but it doesn’t need to be done during a CNO availability, we think it could be done during a smaller one.
Obviously, we have to work our way through that, but that’s the vision.”

In total, the NTSB found seven safety issues associated with the crash.
Safety issues identified in this accident include the following:

• The decision to transfer the location of thrust control on board the John S McCain while the vessel was in a congested waterway
• The lack of very high frequency radio communications between the vessels
• The automatic identification system data transmission policy for Navy vessels
• The procedures for the transfers of steering and thrust control on board the John S McCain
• The training of Navy bridge watchstanders
• The design of the destroyer’s Integrated Bridge and Navigation System
• Navy watchstanders’ fatigue

NTSB Image with Navy redactions

NAVSEA spokeswoman Colleen O’Rourke told USNI News that “the Navy is designing and planning to install physical throttles on all DDG-51 class ships with the Integrated Bridge and Navigation System (IBNS), the ship control console with the touch-screen throttle control.
The first throttle installation is scheduled for summer of 2020, after the hardware and software changes have been developed and fully tested to ensure the new configuration is safe, effective, and has training in place.
The first in-service ship planned to receive the install is DDG-61; the first new construction ship planned to receive the install is DDG-128.
A contract award to support these efforts is planned for this fiscal year.”

During a later panel, Galinis said that PEO Ships is also looking at variance in bridge designs and systems within ship classes – primarily the LHA/LHD amphibious assault ships, and to a lesser extent the LPD-17 amphibious transport docks – but he added that PEO Ships isn’t trying to achieve fleet-wide commonality at this time.

“Where we do have some variance (within ship classes) and what changes we should make to improve the functionality of standing bridge” are the focus of this ongoing engineering effort, he said.

 NTSB Image

Also during the panel, Navy chief engineer and NAVSEA deputy commander for ship design, integration and engineering Rear Adm. Lorin Selby said that the move to achieve greater commonality is not just limited to where helm control systems are installed in the bridge, but how functions appear on the screens of the control systems, and anything else that would contribute to confusion for a sailor moving from one ship to another within the same class.

“When you look at a screen, where do you find heading?
Is it in the same place, or do you have to hunt every time you go to a different screen?
So the more commonality we can drive into these kind of human-machine interfaces, the better it is for the operator to quickly pick up what the situational awareness is, whatever aspect he’s looking at, whether it’s helm control, radar pictures, whatever.
So we’re trying to drive that,” Selby said.

He added that NAVSEA meets once a month to talk about progress on any of the hundreds of recommendations that came out of the Comprehensive Review and the related Strategic Readiness Review that touch NAVSEA.
That progress is reported up from NAVSEA to the vice chief of naval operations, who is overseeing monitoring progress implementing CR and SRR recommendations.

Some of the recommendations will require more substantive changes to address, such as the helm control system backfit effort.
Others are much simpler but just require the thought by engineers to make sure ship operators have access to systems they need in an intuitive way.

Seaman Joseph Brown mans an older verison of helm controls on the bridge of USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) on July 25, 2019.

US Navy Photo

John Pope, the executive director for the program executive office for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I), said the ships have a laptop in the bridge that runs the Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver.
Ship crews have, in the aftermath of the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, complained that the laptops have a finicky connection to the ship via cables, and that they are located behind other gear and hard to access, and other issues that should be easy to address now that there’s a discussion about simplifying the user experience in the bridge.

“We’re going back and relocating that whole configuration– it’s easy to walk a laptop aboard, but how do you make sure that it’s being used right, configured correctly, and a sailor can rely on that?” Pope said.
“So that’s something we picked up out of the Comprehensive Review.”

Links :

• USNI news : NTSB: Lack of Navy Oversight, Training Were Primary Causes of Fatal McCain Collision
• Naval technology : US Navy to replace touchscreens with mechanical controls
• The Verge : The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers 
• BBC news : US Navy to ditch touch screen ship controls
• Gizmodo : Report on 2017 Destroyer Crash Prompts Navy to Ditch Touchscreen ...
• The Maritime Executive : NTSB Releases Its Analysis of the USS John S McCain Collision  
• Business Insider : New report shows crew of the USS John S. McCain weren't trained to ...

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‘War at Sea’ book review: reading the wreckage

From the WSJ By Walter R. Borneman

A sweeping history of naval warfare told through the evidence of sunken ships scattered around the globe.

There is something warmly nostalgic yet also chilling about shipwrecks.
Proud vessels that sailed the seas lie hidden beneath the waves.
Some wrecks squat in muddy waters a few meters deep; other are entombed in icy depths miles beneath the surface.
The ruins of warships hold a special fascination: Their underwater resting places can amount to a map of what occurred during battle, sometimes unread for centuries.

In “War at Sea,” James P. Delgado delivers a sweeping history of naval warfare told through the evidence of sunken ships scattered around the globe.
Mr.vDelgado has spent a career researching shipwrecks and diving down to them.
In 2001, he produced “Lost Warships, An Archaeological Tour of War at Sea,” a large-format survey of the subject.
At least half of the material in that book reappears in “War at Sea”—some of it verbatim—but there is also a good bit of new material drawn from what Mr.
Delgado terms the “exponential growth” in warship discoveries over the past 20 years.

A British transport sinking at an unknown location after being torpedoed by a German submarine. Photo : Naval history and heritage command

One purpose of Mr. Delgado’s narrative is to trace the development of seaborne technologies and the changes they brought about in naval warfare, even ahead of shipwreck evidence.
He describes, for instance, the innovation of the ram at the bow of Greek galleys around 850 B.C.
as “the ancient equivalent of introducing gunpowder.”
There are observations on tactics as well, such as the maneuverability of Octavian’s smaller ships as they won victory darting about and ramming the larger vessels of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C.

No wrecks from that battle have been found, but there are numerous sites in northern Europe dating from around A.D. 1000 that provide what Mr. Delgado terms “a detailed sense of ‘Viking’ shipbuilding and warships”—vessels that included the gracefully curved hulls and tall bows of the type “used by the Danes and the Normans to conquer England.”
About the same time, Byzantine warships were operating in the Mediterranean: Some of them, retrieved by marine archaeologists, are preserved so well that one can see the benches where the rowers sat side by side, their oars passing through “leather sleeves that served as watertight gaskets.”

Across the globe, Chinese naval might ruled Asian waters in the 1400s and protected trade as far west as the Ottoman Empire.
An archaeological prize long sought but not yet discovered, Mr. Delgado says, is one of Adm. Zheng Ho’s massive treasure ships from this period—they likely “out-weighed, out-gunned, and out-classed anything afloat in a European navy.”
European powers were only beginning to build larger warships, and they “never came into contact with the full flower of Chinese naval might.”

Two of the most famous European shipwrecks from the era of sail are the well-preserved Mary Rose, sunk off Portsmouth, England, in 1545 en route to dueling a French fleet, and the Vasa, King Gustaf II Adolf’s prized galleon meant to rule the Baltic, sunk in Stockholm harbor in 1628 on its maiden voyage.
Both ships met their demise not from enemy guns but from top-heavy designs compounded by inept seamanship.
Mr. Delgado calls the Mary Rose a “Tudor naval time capsule,” yielding thousands of artifacts, including an array of longbows.

North America holds a treasure trove of wrecks, from the 16-gun British sloop Boscawen, lost on Lake Champlain during the French and Indian War, to flat-bottomed bateaux sunk by the British in the cold lake waters.
Preserving boats by gently sinking them meant they wouldn’t come to destruction from the winter ice or be captured by the enemy—and could be lifted up and made seaworthy again.

Search technology, Mr. Delgado notes, has improved in recent years and led to many discoveries.
Multibeam sonar and ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) have permitted archaeologists to map not only individual wrecks from the 1915 Battle of Jutland in the North Sea but also the entire Jutland battlefield of some 3,000 square nautical miles.
In some cases, we now know whether ships were advancing or retiring during the battle.

The scale of World War II maritime archaeology staggers the imagination.
A total of 1,454 warships of all countries—and many thousands more merchant ships—were lost during the conflict.
The Battle of the Atlantic project, conducted in 2008-14, documented the losses of Allied warships and merchant ships and their predator U-boats at locations such as “Torpedo Junction” off Cape Hatteras, N.C., where U-boats made hundreds of kills within sight of the American coast.

There have also been hunts for the legendary ships from the conflict: the German battleship Bismarck (found in 1989), the British battleship Hood (2001) and the American aircraft carrier Yorktown off Midway (1998): all were sunk in battle.
Robert D. Ballard, the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in the 1980s, led the efforts to locate the Bismarck and Yorktown.

Mr. Delgado has been involved with not only research on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor but also the initial search for a Japanese midget submarine reportedly fired upon in the outer harbor that Sunday morning.
In 2002, the sub was located with a hole in its conning tower, validating the report of the captain of the destroyer Ward.
As for the Ward itself, it eventually participated in the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, where it was sunk in December 1944.
The wreck was found in 2017, one of the discoveries made by a team of marine archaeologists financed by the Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.

In the past two years expeditions have located the cruiser Juneau off Guadalcanal, the final resting place of the five Sullivan brothers who insisted on serving together; the cruiser Indianapolis, sailing alone after delivering components of the first atomic bomb; and the carrier Lexington, sunk by the U.S.
Navy in May 1942 to keep it from falling into Japanese hands after sustaining bomb damage in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

And discoveries continue.
Last month, the wreck of the USS Eagle 56, one of 60 identical ships of the Eagle class of patrol boats, was found off the coast of Maine.
Evidence from the site suggests that the Eagle 56 was sunk not by a boiler explosion, as long thought, but by a torpedo—making it the last U.S. warship sunk by a German submarine.

Readers of “War at Sea” may find themselves wishing for even more about the World War II wrecks, given how many have been found and how dramatic their battle histories are.
And readers may wish to know more of Mr. Delgado’s personal experience, given the hints he offers of his own shipwreck searches.
Having written a highly readable survey of naval warfare and technology, he clearly has more stories to tell.

Links :

• Naval : War at Sea: A Shipwrecked History
• National Interest : Battleships Attack!: Meet the 5 Greatest Warships to Ever Head to Sea

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Skeleton Bay tube wave

Returned to Skeleton Bay in Namibia with Koa Smith to try do a repeat of what we captured last year except with a new never before seen angle of the wave shot with the GoPro Fusion 360 Camera and the Sail Video System backpack mount

images : Chris Rogers 

Links :

• YouTube : Koa Smith: 3rd Person Barrel in Africa