[Collision Course 720p Torrent
Edelira Longinotti
Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.
Sanchez grew to distrust the navigation system, especially for use in delicate operations. He often ordered it to run in backup manual mode, which eliminated some of the automated functions but also created new risks.
Immediate responsibility, the Navy ruled, rested with Sanchez, his officers and senior sailors. They had been lax, even complacent, in their training of the sailors steering the ship. Sanchez had made a critical error in not adding more sailors to stand watch as the McCain navigated the treacherous strait. Sanchez was charged with homicide. A chief petty officer, responsible for training the sailors to use the navigation system, was charged with dereliction of duty. The chief petty officer had himself received less than an hour of instruction.
Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.
In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.
Northrop Grumman, the Virginia-based defense contracting giant that developed the navigation system, defended it. The Navy has selected the company to carry out installation of the improved version across the destroyer fleet.
One of the more modest efforts, almost unremarked upon at the time, was the IBNS. Up to a dozen or more sailors could crowd a bridge, issuing orders, steering, keeping lookout and even training there. The IBNS would allow as few as three sailors standing watch on the bridge to navigate a destroyer.
In July 2008, the Navy announced its first contract with Northrop Grumman for an initial payment of just under $7 million. Three years later, the USS John Paul Jones was the first Navy destroyer to sail out of harbor with the new system in place.
It did not take long for troubles to develop. Each retrofit took months. Contractors had to string more than three miles of cables and fiber optics throughout each ship. The Navy could only modernize three or four ships a year, as they rotated through previously planned long-term maintenance periods.
The IBNS was so complex that it overwhelmed the junior sailors who used it. Navy technicians would even disable the touch screen to avoid rudder changes caused by accidental taps, forcing sailors to use the manual wheel instead, according to a former Navy technician who worked on the system.
Despite the peril, Sanchez ignored the advice of his navigator and his second in command to add extra crew for the approach. The Fitzgerald was on his mind. Word had spread that some of its sailors had been working 100-hour weeks before the collision. Sanchez wanted his men to get an extra hour of rest before awakening to pilot through the strait itself.
Sanchez got up a little after midnight to make sure he was on the bridge in case anyone needed help. In those early dark morning hours, he made two decisions about the IBNS that had fateful consequences.
At around 4:35 a.m., with the lights of the Malaysian coast in view, the navigation system suffered a problem. It was yet another false alarm. But after months of such hiccups, Sanchez had lost faith in the technology.
About 45 minutes later, Sanchez made another fateful decision. Bordeaux was on the bridge acting as a lookout. But when the acting helmsman wanted to grab a meal, Bordeaux volunteered to take over for a few minutes. He had only steered the ship by himself six times previously.
But two reports, one by the Navy and one by the NTSB, both ruled out a malfunction of the IBNS as a cause of the steering transfer mistake. They based their conclusion on digital logs kept by the navigation system that did not indicate any such error.
Gillilan and Mitchell had begun the year as sailors on the USS Antietam, but the ship ran aground in an embarrassing incident as it departed Yokosuka Harbor in Japan. The Antietam returned to the yards for repairs. Gillilan and Mitchell were sent to the McCain to fill manpower shortages. Neither Gillilan nor Mitchell returned requests for comment.
But before he could do the same with the starboard shaft, Bordeaux called out loss of steering. Ordered to broadcast the emergency over the ship intercom, Gillilan was distracted and did not complete the transfer.
But numerous sailors on the McCain believed that the function of the big red button was to send steering control to the rear of the ship. It is unclear how this misunderstanding developed, or why it was so widespread among the crew. Mitchell told investigators that the instruction booklet on the bridge had not been updated to match the most current version of the IBNS.
Sailors remember a sharp, powerful blow that knocked them off their feet. The force of the collision locked the two ships together so that they lurched ahead, stuck to each other, for almost 10 minutes, before slowly separating.
Over the next nine hours, the sailors of the McCain fought back flooding throughout the ship, filling holes and using pumps to clear water. Rescue ships from Singapore and Malaysia, as well as the USS America, an amphibious assault ship, helped get the vessel to port. Fifty sailors were recognized for their bravery during the incident.
Bordeaux mourned the dead. But he and the other sailors took pride in saving most of their shipmates and the ship itself. They had stood in water filled with diesel fuel and chemicals and human waste, pumping it into the ocean.
The McCain sustained hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and was in such bad shape that it took two months to tow the warship back to Yokosuka. It would take another two years before it was fixed.
As a senior enlisted officer, it had been his job to train Bordeaux and other young sailors on the McCain in the use of the IBNS. Some of the crew had joined the McCain from the USS Antietam and needed to be schooled in how their new ship functioned.
A few weeks later, the Navy released its comprehensive review of the collisions in the 7th Fleet. Mentions of the IBNS were scattered throughout the document. Pieced together, with acronyms untangled, they offer a damning portrait of the system.
Later that fall, the Navy appointed four-star Adm. Frank Caldwell, who reported directly to the chief of the Navy, Adm. John Richardson, to investigate whether the McCain sailors deserved additional punishment.
The inquiry resulted in a set of instructions issued to every destroyer in the Navy. The Navy decided not to abandon the system, so the instructions were an effort to better educate sailors about its flaws and known vulnerabilities, a choice that remains in effect today.
To the consternation of many of his fellow officers, Sanchez was charged with homicide. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of dereliction of duty. He received a letter of reprimand and had to forfeit $6,000 in pay.
Before Weiland pronounced sentence, Butler turned to face rows of people filled with grief. Wives in black, young boys in suits and teenage girls in dark dresses had all come to the courtroom to give testimony about their loved ones.
As the months passed, Bordeaux noticed that he was having difficulty bringing enthusiasm to the job he had once loved. And he was confronted by a series of personal losses. The grandfather who had inspired his entry into the Navy passed away. So, too, did his other grandfather and grandmother. A woman he was dating dumped him.
We return again this morning to Paul's epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter 2. 1 Thessalonians 2 where we have an amazing description of the difference between those who have been truly born again versus those who remain unregenerate. I've entitled my discourse to you this morning "A Collision Course with the World," and here we have a great example of that very collision. Follow along as I read the text that we will be looking at closely beginning in verse 13. 1 Thessalonians 2:13,
You can really divide the world into two categories of people: there are those who love the word of God and live the word of God, and then there are those who hate the word of God and hate the people of God. Here in this text, we have a description of both.
As Christians, we are all increasingly aware of the growing opposition in our culture towards the Christian faith. We find ourselves being marginalized, persecution is mounting in various ways and, frankly, the culture is realigning itself in order to support a moral and even a sexual revolution. You go to virtually any college or university and lecture on Christian values and watch what happens. You will be heckled. You will be scoffed. You will probably not be able to complete your lecture. You will be called names that you don't even understand.
It should be no surprise that this kind of hatred of Christianity can affect many of us as believers. For example, Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, "Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." He's warning us that the world can unwittingly squeeze you into its mold; it can unwittingly cause you to adopt the values and the priorities of the culture. It can shape you into its image and before long you will begin to think and you will begin to act like people of this satancially dominated world system, people who are spiritually dead and at enmity with God. All you have to do is spend time on the television or watch the news, listen to the pundits and before you know it, you begin to kind of think like they do, act like they do, look like they do. But Paul says instead we need to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, in other words, saturate your mind with Scripture so that the Spirit will control you and help you manifest your redeemed nature.
795a8134c1