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To: LindyBill who wrote (314981)	7/15/2009 10:14:41 PM
From: greenspirit	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793851

Bill - sometimes it's funny reading reports from well meaning authors who don't know anything about the equipment they're writing about. What jumped out is "The VMS wasn't calibrated". The VMS is nothing more than an electronic chart display system. It doesn't get calibrated. What happened is the boat lined up the VMS to receive inputs from the RLGN system (Ring Laser Gyro Navigator), instead of receiving position from the GPS. The RLGN wasn't calibrated prior to underway as it should have been. It's a 30 hour cal and someone either didn't know how to do it, or didn't bother to perform it properly. If they had, shifting VMS to receive inputs from RLGN would not have been a big deal. Normally, they're very accurate and close to GPS position. Nearly the same thing happened to the Arliegh Burke a couple of years ago. The key is training. Quartermasters and Navigators onboard surface ships have a lack of training on how those systems work together in an ECDIS-N (Electronic Chart Display and Information System (Navy) environment. Something you may find interesting. The Navy is transitioning to electronic charts. It's a huge paradigm shift to drop paper charts after hundreds of years and completely rely on a piece of software to navigate around the world. The submarine service is nearly 80% complete the transition, the surface fleet less than 10% complete. The surface fleet is having difficulty, primarily due to a lack of leadership in coordinating all the training that needs to take place to make it happen safely. They've underestimated the challenge. There's a more accurate article that came out about the incident here. honoluluadvertiser.com