Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Something So Stupid Even the Royal Navy Didn't Do It Yet

The Royal Navy and the US Navy have been having a race in recent years to see who could crash the most ships and who could build the most new stealth ships which don't work (e.g. USS Zumwalt and all new littoral vessels).

The Royal Navy has generally had the lead in crashing their ships but I have no knowledge of them ever crashing a submarine into a mountain.  Yahoo, the US Navy did it.

Ed:  submarines are boats, not ships!

I know real submariners now and past and the source of this article came from Pink who is one of them.  In any case, neither will typically crash into a mountain.

The USS San Francisco did:



Popular Mechanics:  In 2005, a U.S. Navy Submarine Ran Into a Mountain


Maybe you were curious enough to read the article and that reveals it wasn't the captain's fault since the mountain was not on their charts.  However, there were mistakes and the captain was relieved of command.  He was assigned to shore duty but was not called to a court martial.  (WIKI:  USS San Francisco (SSN-711))

I've painted this as screaming incompetence until now and that judgment remains for the stealth vessels but the Navy has been building extremely safe submarines ever since the USS Thresher emergency in 1963 in which the submarine and all hands were lost.  (WIKI:  USS Thresher (SSN-593))

Note:  you may want to skip the WIKI link as, I repeat, all hands were lost.  There's some particularly unfortunate wording in the article since it referred to the loss of the USS Thresher as a 'watershed event' and ... just no more to add to that.


After Thresher, the Navy set up their SUBSAFE program to ensure the hull's integrity regardless of what happened and the results are clear as this boat sailed under its own power back to port.  (WIKI:  SUBSAFE)


It doesn't look like the Navy is doing too well with building surface vessels but they sure built the USS San Francisco to stay safe and it retired as a permanently-moored training vessel after repairs.

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