All eyes seem to be on the sinking of the Costa Concordia, but what really happened? You must know that I am both a pilot and a sailor and as such am very familiar with modern navigation. How the sinking happened is nothing short of a case of total incompetence. Here is my short take on what happened.
For about $100 on ebay, you can purchase a GPS that would of easily prevented the sinking if a 4th grader was at the helm. Sailors have been out front making maps for the past few thousand years. There is no part of the Earth that is better mapped than the seas. Maps have always had a problem and that was common reference points. You may not know that the Earth is "not" a perfect sphere. I am not talking about mountains. The fact is the Earth is not round. This has made the job of accurate maps difficult, but with the GPS, this problem has been eliminated. All of this change has taken place in the past 25 years. Now we have maps for all the oceans of the world that are accurate to about 24". You will get a different reading for where you are if you hold the GPS in the right hand vs the left hand. I have several different GPS's that I use to navigate and they all have a warning if you are off from your course by more than a set amount. On a valuable ship like the Costa Concordia, they had one of the best GPS systems available. I am sure that when the captain allowed the ship to go off course, the alarms all went off all over the place. Every person on the bridge had to have known that the ship was off course and that it was in shallow water. In the US Navy, any captain who runs his ship aground is out of the Navy faster than you can say, "Jack Robinson". It happened a few years ago with a new destroyer. It bent the drive shaft and the side had to be cut out of the ship to get at the drive shaft so that it could be repaired.
For the ship to have hit the rocks, the captain had to purposely taken the ship into the shallow water. All the people who worked for the captain knew that they would be fired if they allowed the ship off course. They needed to feed their families and none would want to be fired. It was the captain who was responsible. It is going to be very interesting how this all works out.
One other point that you need to follow is the roll of unions in all this. Captains belong to a special union and it just might turn out that the captain will now lose his job and if he does, you can expect him to get a fat pension. Remember the oil spill in Alaska? That captain is still working as a ship captain. The rules of the sea can be very strange to us "land" people. It will be interesting to watch.
PS---------------
With the same $100 GPS purchased on Ebay, any passenger on the Costa Concordia while in their cabin could determine the speed of the ship and its exact location. If they put in the course, it would sound an alarm if the ship was off course more than some set amount. With their won GPS, any passenger would know when the ship was in trouble. You could also do this same thing with your Tom-Tom. You could watch as you saw on the map display, the ship hitting the rocks. Even at night, you could see that land was near by on your Tom-Tom. I recommend that people carry their own personal GPS when they travel so that they know what is going on and be safe.
