A huge blunder in the sinking of HMNZS Manawanui

The NZDF announced:

Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Garin Golding stood up a Court of Inquiry following the incident in order to understand the facts of what occurred.

“The direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors which meant the ship’s autopilot was not disengaged when it should have been,” Rear Admiral Golding said.

“The crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, as a consequence, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure.

“Having mistakenly assessed a thruster control failure, standard procedures should have prompted ship’s crew to check that the ship was under manual control rather than in autopilot. This check did not occur. Remaining in autopilot resulted in the ship maintaining a course toward land, until grounding and eventually stranding.”

So a $150 million ship sunk because no one thought to check if the autopilot was off!!!

This is beyond embarrassing. It is a huge people failure or training failure or both.

Rear Admiral Golding said given human error was identified as the cause, a separate disciplinary process would need to be commenced once the Court of Inquiry had concluded.

I can only imagine multiple officers will go through the disciplinary process.