Collision Course: The Classic Story of the Collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm

by Alvin Moscow

There are two ways to reduce the speed of a ship. One could throttle down by reducing the number of nozzles feeding high-compression steam from the boilers into the turbines. Or, one could reduce the steam pressure in the boilers. The latter was the practice on the Andrea Doria. It was cheaper to reduce steam pressure and burn less fuel although cutting steam pressure reduced the power and maneuverability of the ship in event of emergency, for it takes far longer to build up boiler pressure than to open closed turbine nozzles.

Never heard this method mentioned before! Wonder how much fuel it actually saves,

Dead reckoning, so misunderstood by so many laymen, should properly be written d’ed reckoning, an abbreviation for deduced reckoning. Despite all modern innovations it is still the prevalent method of navigating across a trackless ocean in a small or large ship.

Practically, it allowed opposing sides in a civil litigation to discover enough information to convince each other to settle their controversy out of court.

Haight, then setting out to prove that even by the observations made aboard the Andrea Doria the two ships were not on parallel opposite courses to pass starboard-to-starboard, approached the witness chair and handed the captain a pad of plotting paper. He asked the captain to plot the radar observations, as remembered, aboard the Doria. Captain Calamai took the paper, looked at it and said softly, “It is the first time I see.” “Do you know how to use this kind of a plotting sheet?” asked Haight. “I am not very familiar because this is one work I let the officers do,” said Captain Calamai.

WoW!

Human error was also blamed for the collision between the American Export liner Constitution and the Norwegian freighter Jalanta just outside New York Harbor on March 1, 1959. Once again it was FULL SPEED AHEAD in dense fog. Captain James

i was with my Dad (and brother?) on an open boat fishing for cod out of Sheepshead Bay the day this happened. I remember the dense fog, and fog horns; and I remember my Dad calling me up from the boat's cabin to see the freighter without its bow. As far as I remember, we did not see the Constitution.

W. La Belle told the Coast Guard hearing that he was relying upon his radar for safe passage, but he was not plotting the pips of other ships seen on his radarscope. As the Constitution, coming from Newport News, Virginia, headed towards the mouth of New York Harbor, Captain La Belle noted on his radar that he was in a head-to-head situation with a ship leaving the harbor (which was the Norwegian freighter Kingsville, bound for Savannah, Georgia). For a safer port-to-port passing, Captain La Belle ordered a 20° turn to starboard. The Constitution ran right into another ship, the Jalanta, which Captain La Belle had not seen at all. The Constitution hit with such force that it sliced off part of the Jalanta’s bow. Captain La Belle was found at fault for his failure to search. Without plotting all the pips on his radar scope, there was no way he could tell what other ships were doing in the area. Despite his thirty-two years at sea, the captain had no defense. He was charged by the Coast Guard

in the proper use of radar. New radar schools were opened in the United States and in most major seafaring

Another 10,000 tons of oil were lost when the tanker Fortune, collided with the U.S. aircraft carrier Ranger in the South China Sea.

In another remarkable first, in heavy seas in the dead of night off the southern tip of Japan, the most technologically advanced and sophisticated of ships, the U.S. nuclear submarine George Washington, traveling beneath the surface, rammed into a small Japanese freighter, the Nissho Maru, and sent her to the bottom of the Japan Sea. The captain and the first mate were lost at sea. No one aboard the Nissho Maru had the slightest warning of the approach of a submarine. The collision became an international incident when it was reported that the George Washington “hit and ran.” The U. S. Navy did not acknowledge its submarine’s involvement in the sinking for a full thirty-six hours after the collision. It also touched off an international politically embarrassing question as to what a nuclear-armed American submarine was doing in Japanese waters.