Costa Concordia Trial

[happy daze john in oz]

What ever the captain may or may not have done, whether he is guilty or not, what were the full circumstances? The fcat is this man will find it hard to get a fair trial as he has already been found guilty by trial by media. All evidence will be tainted to some degree and some involved are exempt from giving evidence as thye have aready pleaded guilty.
I have no love for anyone who breaks the rules knowingly, but i do believe all miscreants are entitled to a fair and unbridled trial, something I fear this man will not get.

[happy daze john in oz]

Which one would you have asked John , in fact any of the UCL passenger ship men , I sailed with three of them as a junior engineer and never saw a glimmer of humour

Two that for me did have a reasonalbe sence of Humour, Abercrombie chief engineer, and unusual for a Scot, and Joe Murphy senior second.

[robpage]

ALL Engineers have a sense of Humour John , it is just that the rest ofthe World does not always understand it . Some of the Scottish Chief Engineers with one exception , were great blokes to sail with , and having had one play his chanter down the engine room telephone for an hour one night , to see if I appreciated pipe music , I did not always understand the humour either , that one was Archie McLean known as the " White Haired Animal " . The exception , well he is best forgotten , but I have never sailed before or since with such a Bigot

[j.sabourn]

Ref. post 30. I have yet to sail on a ship that had no faults. There was always something wrong on a ship somewhere be it a blocked toilet, a compressor out, main faults with machinery or ballast or bilge pumps, blocked strainers. Always something there is no such thing as a ship with no faults, even straight from the builders yard. That's what crews were carried for to fix and keep the vessel running sometimes in a not too seaworthy condition, there will be faults on the Costa Concordia there is no doubt about that, but they will be known to the staff in that department who are able either to fix or work around. This comes back to the general gripe about demanning, in the past most repairs have been affected by ships staff and ship able to work until more permanent repairs available, also on most British ships a running survey was carried out on a continuous system for Lloyds or whoever and in a lot of cases the Chief was a reconised Lloyds surveyor and kept the vessel in Class. Nowadays I fail to see on the average ship (excluding passenger vessels) how this can be done with the crew manning as it is. personally I think the owners have cut off their nose to spite their face. Regards John Sabourn

[John Arton]

John S
All ships will be classed by one of the classification societies, be they LLOYDS, GERMANSCHIR LLOYD< DNV, etc. If you are not operating under class rules you wont get insurance and hence no cargo.
Apart from the annual Surveys required by SOLAS you also have the Annual Class Survey.
Ships will have a CSM (Continuous Survey Machinery) and CSH ( Continuous survey Hull) and at these annual surveys the Class and Flag surveyors will inspect/test/survey the vessel.
There will be on board a Master list that lists every item on board and from this the Planned Maintenance system will be drawn up that the ships officers (deck and engine) use to carry out the routine maintenance that is required to maintain the vessels class.
I would have thought that the reduced manning that is apparent on many merchant vessels does not affect the passenger ships too much as SOLAS and Class will require two man watches etc.
If this Captain is claiming that there were many faults on his ship I can only think that either the ships staff or the Class Societies were not doing their jobs correctly but at the end of the day it is always the Masters responsibility to ensure that his ship is seaworthy before proceeding to sea.
Lets take his claim that there was problems with the water tight doors not closing correctly. Would you have taken your ship to sea knowing that the hatch covers were faulty and did not give watertight protection? This guy knew that there was problems with the water tight doors so his engineers must have been on the ball and told him so, yet they were unable to fix the problem. So the question has to be asked, what did he do about this. Did he inform head office and demand that the problem be fixed as his vessel was now out of class, did he bow to pressure from head office to sail knowing that there was a problem but thinking he could get away with it until there was time/personnel to fix them, or did he just ignore the problem.
Whatever action he took (remember halting a passenger ship from sailing will have a massive financial consequence and its not as if there would have been a replacement ship on hand, unlike the airline industry where if a plane is unfit to fly then a replacement can usually be found within hours), he compounded that error by steering a course far too close to land and not having the correct scale charts on board (electronic or paper) to allow his ship to safely navigate the area. He then further compounds his error by entertaining his lady instead of attending to the navigation of his ship whilst it was in such close proximity to land. Finally we have to ask what sort of Master was this guy and how did he treat his watchkeeping officers. What were they doing whilst they were so close to danger? Was the bridge team management so poor that even if they saw that the ship was steaming into danger they were too afraid of the man to intervene and warn him? We all must have sailed with Masters and Chief Engineers who thought they knew everything and would not heed any advice given to them by their juniors but that tended to be in times past. These days all those Officers and the Captain would most likely have undergone Bridge Team Management and it would have been enshrined in the Companys Safety Management System.
So to me, with all of these systems in place and the backups required under International Regulations, this guy chose to ignore them all and put his ship in danger, either through ignorance (should never happen) or sheer bravado (lets show boat for the passengers). In the end it is he and he alone who must bear the full responsibility for the consequences of his actions and not try to shift the blame onto others. If he knew there were serious faults with the water tight integrity systems on board he should have not sailed until they were fixed...full stop. The only excuse for sailing in such a condition was if he had taken a different route that did not put his vessel in any danger, going a couple of hundred metres off a rocky shore just to be able to wave at some guy ashore, to me, is putting your ship in danger.
rgds
JA

[j.sabourn]

Yes John we know and understand this. My statement was there is no such thing as a trouble free ship. Re your point about a ship not being able to get a cargo if out of class however I take with a pinch of salt, some of the present day ships sailing under Flags of Convenience have never been in class to start with. I have sailed on ships out of class would you not say a vessel having condemned lifeboats was out of class. In a perfect world the world you are describing on paper, still has a long way to go. Someone should do a rough survey of all vessels trading in the Far East to start the ball rolling and maybe get a story about the real world of shipping as seen through some of these 3rd. world crews eyes. Shipping laws where they do exist are the same as all laws, there to be broken. However this is detracting from Schetto who can in no way clear his slate this way, however as said there will be faults on ship but I would not imagine severe enough to use as an excuse. Regards John Sabourn

[Ivan Cloherty]

When I left my UK supt's job, I took one with a Swiss Company expecting everything above board and run like clockwork. My first job was survey of a company ship in Karachi, there were too many faults to list here. Anyway I stopped the ship from sailing, I was as popular as a fox in a hen house, my above board employers outraged at such action, the supt prior me was Swiss, a naval architect by trade, never been to sea, he should have been made to sail on the ship. Another company ship which had sailed prior my arrival had to be towed back to Karachi, naturally I had to attend to her, I also stopped her from sailing again until all LSA requirments had been met. I could see my new job disappearing before my eyes, but after 9 years as a supt for a British Company crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' I wanted everything correct and my conscience wouldn't let me let those vessels sail regardless of all the sh*t I got from Switzerland. I sacked the Master of the vessel towed back because he had had a total disregard for the safety of the crew (deflated liferafts, one lifeboat with a broken keel, short fire hoses). I guessed money had changed hands somewhere but couldn't prove it. Anyway I made very detailed reports and lodged them with a lawyer. Even in those days (70's) I thought that management and Supts' bore as much responsibility as the master to ensure that all was correct, and I still do. After my return to Switzerland I did get full support from the owner for my actions and various office employees were made to accompany me on further ship visits in Europe so that they could learn that going to sea was not like traversing Lake Lucerne, still as popular as a fox with some of them though. I have always been a great believer in 'look after your crews and they will do their best, but there are boundaries not to be crossed' there was always the exception, but on the whole it worked well for me. On the CC a lot of shore based staff need to be examining their consciences.

[Captain Kong]

When I was in ESSO we had at times various Office members, Non Seafarers, sailing with us from Loading in the Gulf and round the Cape to europe and the discharge before returning to the Office.
They enjoyed the trip as it gave then a good idea of what the job was all about. They stayed on the bridge with us to see what that was like Loveley in the tropics with no trafic but a shocker for them approaching europe, the Channel with bad viisibility and all kinds of lunatic ships . They spent time in the engine room and watching us load and discharge 250,00 tons of crude. When they went back into the Office they knew that seafaring.was not the exotic job they imagined, We had a lot more co-operation from the Office after that.
Cheers
Brian

[j.sabourn]

Ivan if every ship went by the book there would be very few ships at sea, also if one insisted on going by the book one would have a very short seagoing career. I doubt very much one could pick out any ship on the ocean including all your so called better class companies who were not infringing the law in some minor way. Unfortuanetly there are owners the same as there are business people ashore who have lower moral ethics than others, this is a fact of life. The eyetie master is grasping at straws as he probably has to for survival, he will however bring others into disrepute whether it be the office boy or whoever, as regards as to the severity of any faults found, be it a leaking tap washer, the press will blow up to all out of proportion. He has his peers to answer to and will undoubtably know that world opinion is unforgivingly against him, all he has to do is read some of the posts on here. As someone said his fate was sealed on the first press releases. Regards John Sabourn

[John Arton]

Posts ~59 and 60 have it in anutshell. Office staff who are not ex. seafarers should be made to do trips on the vessels they have charge of as happened with my last employers, especially staff in the Marketing Dept.
The CC Master appeared to be well thought of by his employers but more for his talents as an entertaining of the passengers rather than his seamanship qualities (my view).
When I was a very junior Officer on the empress of Canada the Master was renowned for his interaction with passengers to such an extent that regular crossing passengers (this before the days of cheap air travel) would only book crossing when they knew he was in command. Despite his talents regarding the handling of passengers he was first and foremost a seaman, never leaving the bridge for hours/days when the ship was undergoing any tricky navigational areas but boy was he a stickler for discipline, bollicking me once for being incorrectly dressed in a photo taken by the ships photographer of a passenger with me when I was doing the bridge tours (no hat) and also for having my jacket undone when going across the alleyway from my cabin to the bog for a piss (no passengers allowed in Officers accommodation (hah!) and no junior officers accommodation with own bathrooms).
I later sailed with the same Master, after the demise of the Empress ships, on a container ship and a VLCC and it was only then did I truly realise what a fine seaman and Master he was as within a very short period of time he had totally immersed himself in the requirements of the trade of these ship types and you would have thought that he had been on these types of ships all his life, such was his knowledge and the way he ran them. The only carry over from his passenger ship days was he never appeared without being dressed in full rig of the day, still consumed 1 bottle of Gordons a day and went through 100 Senior Service cigarettes per day which did cause the pilot berthing us in Ras Tanura on a VLCC a bit of consternation as the Captain kept leaving the pilot with me on the bridge wing whilst the Captain dived into the wheel house for a quick drag on his cigarette (I was 3rd mate). Despite his frequent trips inside this Master never lost his situational awareness or missed any order given by the pilot. A true seaman unlike a certain Italian now having to face the consequences of his reckless actions in the full glare of publicity. Regarding the publicity given to him and the events, despite what many claim that he has been judged before even standing trial, surely the legal system in Italy cannot be too different to that in the u.K. and here I draw parallels between his trial and that that is going on at present at the Old Bailey in the case of phone hacking where the actions of the defendant's have been well publicised yet they are still expected and have been told by the presiding judge that they will be given a fair trial and be judged guilty or innocent by a jury after they have listened to all the evidence presented to the court.
rgds
JA