Watch Super Yacht Go crash into the dock

https://www.mby.com/news/superyacht-crash-video-77m-go-collision-caribbean-dock-113024

And this is why I don't like boats heavy on electronics

From another angle, hit it twice.

Well, this boat, my first, cost me eight million bucks. They let me operate the boat without instruction. I'm innocent. Sue the builder, not me, please.

Simi 60 wrote, "And this is why I don't like boats heavy on electronics."

Amen, brother.

Is this when the " Owner '' tells the captain ..... '' I will take her in !

These things always bring up questions given such little information...such as...how could it reverse out twice if it was stuck in forward?

No thruster. Wonder what happened. Certainly no place for him to dock.

Peter

Reading the second article it seems he was in position for the bridge opening
Boat takes off by itself
Hit the bridge or hit the jetty.

To be fair, he said,

“I found I had extremely limited control, almost limited to only the bow thruster, but with now only 50 metres between us and the bridge I had to make a decision fast.

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and it was the reporter who said it was stuck in gear.

There is no excuse for the yacht designer to exclude manual overrides on all automatic controls. And the commissioning crew should have insisted that they be fitted.

That massive stainless steel waterline bow feature sure came in handy

https://youtu.be/Fnd7RpMmF0s

This video explains what happened based on an

interview with the captain of "Go".

Not at all a surprise. Many of us have fly by wire controls and there have been a couple reports of incidents of malfunctions (as listed on this forum) and crashes as a result. I have them on my boat and there is always a bit of a background worry, but I find them very nice to use.

To be fair, he did have 1 fender out, so he was well prepared to dock.

I had something happen on my tiny (by comparison) boat last year that was unsettling, but did learn something from it. All feedback is welcome, as well as criticism, I can take it.

I was bringing my boat to a different harbor for winter haul and storage. It's a fairly narrow channel into the harbor with docks and mooring on both sides. I was alone on the boat and when I got out of the rough weather and into the harbor channel where it was nice and calm, I prepared to dock. I was barely making headway and had to put out fenders and lines. I put the gear in neutral and hit the autopilot so I could make quick runs to the bow etc. No worries as there were no other boats operating nearby and I was watchful while working. As the boat slowed to almost zero and the autopilot tried to correct against the current, it eventually reached the rudder limit. When I went back to the helm, the rudder was locked in position against the stop. Even turning the autopilot completely off (power down) did not release it. After a couple minutes with the pilot off, and trying to move the wheel but not forcing it, it released.

In hindsight, I should have slowed the boat to a near stop and not engaged the autopilot, at least that's what I would do next time.

I was once witness to just this sort of uncontrolled collision with a lock sidewall. We were entering a lock just behind the unfortunate boat. As this boat was slowly approaching the sidewall at a proper angle, a warning from the mate was called out on the radio that they had lost control of the throttles. The boat struck the wall, bounced away, moved forward into the stern of an already secured boat, bounced back, and then again into the lock wall with its pulpit wedging underneath a railing. It happened so fast and at the most inopportune moment that the captain could not shut the engines down fast enough to prevent the collision.

We had been among several Loopers who happened to be traveling in the same vicinity. Anyway, we later learned that the cause was low voltage on the battery supplying the juice to the electronic engine controls. The voltage had gone low enough such that the computer defaulted to the last commanded choice. Turned out that the battery that supplied current to the controls was the bow thruster battery. It was deduced that previous, recent, heavy use of the thruster had lowered its voltage to the critical point. Obviously, this was a bit of a design flaw. Those controls should have been supplied by the house bank or the starting batteries.

lwarden said:

Not at all a surprise. Many of us have fly by wire controls and there have been a couple reports of incidents of malfunctions (as listed on this forum) and crashes as a result. I have them on my boat and there is always a bit of a background worry, but I find them very nice to use.

Click to expand...

Things like low voltage causing controls to misbehave is why I refuse to put electronic controls on my boat. There's no reason they can't work well, but it seems that too many of the currently available marine implementations just aren't designed well. It should have built in voltage regulation, for example, so unless the voltage is so low that nothing else works, the controls would be fine.

When things go wrong and it's not immediately apparent what has happened, there will usually be a little bit of panic. And then some delay while you try to figure out what's happening. So even with an override or shutdown, it's easy to not hit it soon enough.

backinblue said:

As the boat slowed to almost zero and the autopilot tried to correct against the current, it eventually reached the rudder limit. When I went back to the helm, the rudder was locked in position against the stop. Even turning the autopilot completely off (power down) did not release it. After a couple minutes with the pilot off, and trying to move the wheel but not forcing it, it released.

Click to expand...

Sounds like the AP forced the rudder to the mechanical limits of the rudder or ram. The AP has preset electrical limits to prevent this IF properly set. Generally these limits are set at about one half of the way from center to the mechanical limit. Get out your AP Installation Guide and double check the Rudder Limit setting. Something is still wrong.

High Wire said:

Sounds like the AP forced the rudder to the mechanical limits of the rudder or ram. The AP has preset electrical limits to prevent this IF properly set. Generally these limits are set at about one half of the way from center to the mechanical limit. Get out your AP Installation Guide and double check the Rudder Limit setting. Something is still wrong.

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Thanks. That's pretty much what I expected and will check it out. Although, with normal use, the AP should be nowhere close to the limits I would think. Now that I know better, I won't make that mistake again.

backinblue said:

To be fair, he did have 1 fender out, so he was well prepared to dock.

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He was departing and had been off the dock for quite some time. Clearance through the bridge was so tight fenders could not be used. He choose to hit the dock because that was the best option out of only bad options.

Captain of ‘GO’ opens up on mega yacht’s unexplained malfunction.

backinblue said:

I had something happen on my tiny (by comparison) boat last year that was unsettling, but did learn something from it. All feedback is welcome, as well as criticism, I can take it.

I was bringing my boat to a different harbor for winter haul and storage. It's a fairly narrow channel into the harbor with docks and mooring on both sides. I was alone on the boat and when I got out of the rough weather and into the harbor channel where it was nice and calm, I prepared to dock. I was barely making headway and had to put out fenders and lines. I put the gear in neutral and hit the autopilot so I could make quick runs to the bow etc. No worries as there were no other boats operating nearby and I was watchful while working. As the boat slowed to almost zero and the autopilot tried to correct against the current, it eventually reached the rudder limit. When I went back to the helm, the rudder was locked in position against the stop. Even turning the autopilot completely off (power down) did not release it. After a couple minutes with the pilot off, and trying to move the wheel but not forcing it, it released.

In hindsight, I should have slowed the boat to a near stop and not engaged the autopilot, at least that's what I would do next time.

Click to expand...

Some autopilots have limits. Set the limit a few degrees off hard over, that last little bit of rudder doesn't do much anyway.

Regarding control failures. I have experienced failures with push pull cables, mechanical linkage, pneumatic, hydraulic and electronic controls. Any and all can and will fail. There's an old saying that will mostly keep you out of trouble "Stop her before you dock her". But, one failure happened after the stop before the dock. That was a failure of the final connection at the transmission. It's important to know the failure mode of your control system. Does it fail where last command was, i.e. ahead or astern? Does it fail safe i.e. neutral idle? It's important to be able to stop the engines in the event of a control failure. The failure that drove me nuts trouble shooting it was on a pair of John Deere 4045 common rail electronically controlled engines. Low voltage was the problem, displayed error was excessive water in the fuel?!?!

I saw reverse thrust from the port prop, so its not like it was solidly stuck in fwd. Must be more to the story. And he hit twice, so there was a decision after the first incident to give it another go.

Puzzling there, and the videos make no comment on either.

Ski in NC said:

I saw reverse thrust from the port prop, so its not like it was solidly stuck in fwd. Must be more to the story. And he hit twice, so there was a decision after the first incident to give it another go.

Puzzling there, and the videos make no comment on either.

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Yes, the video is VERY confusing with regards to figuring out what was going on.

Seems odd to me that the captain mentions the use of the bow thruster but there is no evidence of a bow thruster wake in any of the videos. Also, with the port in reverse and the starboard in forward there is very little movement of the bow to port as you would expect. Perhaps the props are closely spaced or due to the size there is little effect from opposite thrust.

Watch the video in post #13 - it explains quite well what happened.

lwarden said:

Also, with the port in reverse and the starboard in forward there is very little movement of the bow to port as you would expect. Perhaps the props are closely spaced or due to the size there is little effect from opposite thrust.

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Depends on the underwater shape of the hull as well. Some pivot pretty far forward and will move the stern sideways more than the bow.

Jon H said:

Watch the video in post #13 - it explains quite well what happened.

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No, that video does not explain it well at all.

Look at the vid in post #3. Clearly shows port prop in reverse at times, apparently in some amount of control, and seems to show stbd in fwd. If stbd was out of control in fwd, correct thing to do was shut down stbd and maneuver with port and thrusters. Saw no thruster wake, but that might have been occluded by hull. If stbd was running in fwd un-commanded, a call to the engr to shut it down locally should have been made.

The vid in post #13 discusses none of this. And makes no discussion why capt makes a second go at it.

The video around 4:10 discusses the 1st failure, around 4:50 discusses the 2nd
failure.

I could argue that electronic controls leave a few things to be desired... one is accidents. Electric vehicles has a higher rate of crashes. (Kelly Richmond, Future insights)



I'm not a big fan of computer control that could cause catastrophic accidents when they fail. Look at Sully's issue, the Boeing Max, this incident, etc.


In "my" world my electronics have failed significantly more that their old mechanical counterparts and are MUCH more expensive to fix. (mostly aircraft, fortunately)



My boat is pretty much mechanical, except for the Glendinning throttle/shift control, which is really a great unit. I "can" operate it manually if it quits, but would require two people to do that.



Good old mechanical is hard to beat. And a good electronic device for information gathering (MFD) works great with that, as it can't cause the engine or thrusters to quit or malfunction.

Jon H said:

The video around 4:10 discusses the 1st failure, around 4:50 discusses the 2nd
failure.

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Hardly any discussion. He mentions computer failure 1 and computer failure 2. No discussion, no analysis of the second run into the YC dock without having figured out what went wrong on the first try. We don't even hear how much time between the two impacts.

I hope someone lets us know as the investigation proceeds.

Seevee said:

I could argue that electronic controls leave a few things to be desired... one is accidents. Electric vehicles has a higher rate of crashes. (Kelly Richmond, Future insights)



I'm not a big fan of computer control that could cause catastrophic accidents when they fail. Look at Sully's issue, the Boeing Max, this incident, etc.


In "my" world my electronics have failed significantly more that their old mechanical counterparts and are MUCH more expensive to fix. (mostly aircraft, fortunately)



My boat is pretty much mechanical, except for the Glendinning throttle/shift control, which is really a great unit. I "can" operate it manually if it quits, but would require two people to do that.



Good old mechanical is hard to beat. And a good electronic device for information gathering (MFD) works great with that, as it can't cause the engine or thrusters to quit or malfunction.

Click to expand...

Respectfully, wasn't Sully's crash due to ingesting some geese in the engines, i.e. a good ol mechanical failure? Like it or not, everything will be electrically controlled going eventually. I don't know if there is data supporting that electrical controls of cars are more crash prone. If there is I would think it's only because they are new, but eventually will be much better than humans at detecting danger and intervening.