Belts and Suspenders
Heinlein often wrote about "belt and suspenders" people, those that felt backup systems to be mandatory. If one fails, you always have the other, and, by implication, your ass is always covered. A few months ago, a friend and I reached disagreement over that philosophy, specifically on how much coverage one ass needed.
He briefly served as captain to a classic yacht (that shall remain nameless, even though it's a pretty cool boat). This is no mere pleasure boat. 90 feet long, wooden hull, built in 1929. A gorgeous boat, but, like anything old, updated with not enough attention to holistic detail.
When it was first built, I imagine it needed an engineer in the engine room at all times maneuvering was a requirement. Back before hydraulics, many boats were equipped with direct reversible engines. You want to move ahead? Start the engine. Reverse? Stop the engine, reverse the cams for the valves, and restart, in reverse. No disconnect between the engine and the prop shaft, and the entire process manually enabled from the engine room.
The new incarnation avoided the ugly buggaboo of the engine that wouldn't start in time (crashing into something, often at high speeds, was a common cause of marine mishaps, often due to an inability to restart in the proper direction). Much newer, smaller and more reliable engines had replaced the mammoth monsters of the past. A pneumatic shifter now directly engaged, reversed and -- importantly for this entry -- disengaged the transmission. The captain didn't have that panic in his gut, that creeping wonder if the engineer was in the head or asleep. He could simply reverse thrust, and hopefully the course of the vessel, himself, thanks to pressurized air.
After my buddy left the boat another captain got a chance to drive a tour. To save money, the owners didn't give the captain his regular deckhand/engineer.
Big mistake.
This yacht docks in a private boathouse. The entrance, normally closed to the general boat public, narrows due to a rolling door 40 feet high, giving the captain only 6 inches to play with, and no bow thruster to fine-tune approach position. The captain was making his final approach to the boathouse when he tried taking the engines out of gear to shed speed.
They didn't come out of gear.
Remember the transmission? The pneumatic shifters relied upon air pressure provided by a simple electric air compressor for actuation. As with many pneumatic systems, there were leaks in the system, nothing serious, but which would, over time, deplete the resevoir. To avoid having the compressor kick on every few hours, the practice was to keep the thing switched to manual overnight, and to switch it to auto before a cruise. That is something the regular deck/engineer knew well.
The replacement engineer did not know this well, or at all.
In the course of the cruise, the resevoir had provided what it had, and was now, unbeknownst to the captain, empty.
A helpful note: This was a twin-prop boat, with combined throttle/transmission controls. This is so standard as to need no explanation, but I shall explain nonetheless, for those unfamiliar with boats in general.
A combined control has a lever for each engine side by side on a pedestal. When a lever is pointing straight up, the engine should be idling in neutral, ie. with engine given minimal throttle and the transmission disengaged, no rotational torque from the engines to the prop shafts. Push the lever forward and one should feel a moment of resistance, called the indent. Some throttles, like the ones on this boat, actually click in place. In this position, the transmission is engaged forward, but the throttles still idle. Push forward from that position and the throttles will ramp up in speed until the levers can be pushed no farther. Pull back on the levers and one found a reverse indent and subsequent throttle band for reverse thrust.
(I once captained a boat that was just a bit too slow ahead, because a tight installation of the throttle/transmission pedestal assembly, which forced the ball of the control lever to hit the dash well before the engine hit redline. I would regularly pick up half a knot by unscrewing and removing the ball underway. Sadly, when I forgot to replace the ball, I often cut myself on the lever's threaded end when docking.
(But I digress. Back to the docking yacht of the story.)
So, with the control levers pointing straight up, instead of coasting in neutral, the boat was idling ahead. After making his turn to the boathouse, the captain knew he was in trouble, but did not yet know the source of his trouble. He managed to get it into the boathouse, running hot. Had he thought about the boat's systems, he might have thought to simply kill the main engines and stop increasing his forward way ("way" is boat talk for momentum) and just hit hard.
Instead, he pulled back on the levers to engage reverse, and rev the engines.
Remember, the props still turn, giving forward thrust. He has no transmission control. Putting it in reverse is pointless, because the actuators are dead, dead, dead.
But the throttle controls are separate, controlled not by air pressured pistons but directly, through the shared cable. They work just fine.
So when he backed down hard on the levers, he actually gunned ahead.
And plowed through about four feet of boathouse decking. Messy, messy, messy.
Thankfully, no one was injured, and the boat was not harmed much beyond scratches. Pre-Depression New York shipyards, building for, in this case, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, did not skimp on the thickness of the wooden hulls they laid, especially in an era when transmissions for boats were notoriously unreliable. The boathouse? That's another matter. Damage should easily top tens of thousands.
As to the cause? That's where my friend and I disagreed. He maintains that the experienced engineer must always be present when sailing, and that the accident was the direct result of this oversight.
I take a wider view. After all, I am a Heinlein man. I maintain that agreeing to sail witout qualified crew was only the last failure the captain made.
The others?
Let's start with the engine room itself. Any self-respecting Heinlein Guy or Gal would point out that the air resevoir needed two mechanisms to maintain pressure, or a promenantly displayed and independantly lit pressure gauge and an audible low-pressure alarm in the wheelhouse, or (my personal favorite) both.
I maintain that a cruise can start with the best of intentions, but feces often strikes the blades. What if your engineer is disabled? Drunk? Injured, unbeknownst to anyone? Hell, swept overboard? The captain should be able to at least know that a safe landing can be attempted. An audible alarm and visible pressure gauge make that possible. It is not, in my opinion, too much to ask that redundant systems be in place before the boat leaves the dock.
After all, was the engineer in any way blamed for destroying a million-dollar boathouse? Hardly. Even if he had been onboard, which he wasn't. On a boat, the captain is in charge because the captain takes the blame if anything goes wrong. Think of us behind the wheel as the predecessors of Sorbane Oxley (sp?) Law that makes the CEO of publicly held corportations ultimately responsible for what happens on our watch. There won't be an official inquiry into the accident since it occurred on a private yacht and there was not serious injury or loss of life, but if there were, the Coast Guard would have identified the failures as ultimately human caused, thanks to a lack of redundancy and/or manpower.
And that failure would have been born solely by the Captain.
So my friend maintains that the accident would not have occurred if he had been in charge.
Really?
I'm sorry to play what-if, but. . .
The deck/engineer was a newbie. It's one thing to tell a decky to go below and check X. What if he checks Y or Z instead? What if he is a total moron, and lazy to boot, and just says "Did it?" Without, in this specific case, a pressure gauge, audible alarm and/or means of alternate pressurization, the captain has no way to know. I have been on trips where I could not trust in the piloting skills or judgment of deck crew enough to check the engine myself, and yet I was forced to do so. Sometimes nothing happened, and sometimes I came back to the wheel just in the freakin' nick of time.
In fact, just thinking about it, I can remember a time when a throttle status alarm sounded during a tricky approach, and enabled me to avoid crashing the vessel right into the gates of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks small chamber, gates which have peopled walkways at that moment crowed with tourists. So, yes. Suspenders with my belt are not too much to ask. I proved that myself.
He briefly served as captain to a classic yacht (that shall remain nameless, even though it's a pretty cool boat). This is no mere pleasure boat. 90 feet long, wooden hull, built in 1929. A gorgeous boat, but, like anything old, updated with not enough attention to holistic detail.
When it was first built, I imagine it needed an engineer in the engine room at all times maneuvering was a requirement. Back before hydraulics, many boats were equipped with direct reversible engines. You want to move ahead? Start the engine. Reverse? Stop the engine, reverse the cams for the valves, and restart, in reverse. No disconnect between the engine and the prop shaft, and the entire process manually enabled from the engine room.
The new incarnation avoided the ugly buggaboo of the engine that wouldn't start in time (crashing into something, often at high speeds, was a common cause of marine mishaps, often due to an inability to restart in the proper direction). Much newer, smaller and more reliable engines had replaced the mammoth monsters of the past. A pneumatic shifter now directly engaged, reversed and -- importantly for this entry -- disengaged the transmission. The captain didn't have that panic in his gut, that creeping wonder if the engineer was in the head or asleep. He could simply reverse thrust, and hopefully the course of the vessel, himself, thanks to pressurized air.
After my buddy left the boat another captain got a chance to drive a tour. To save money, the owners didn't give the captain his regular deckhand/engineer.
Big mistake.
This yacht docks in a private boathouse. The entrance, normally closed to the general boat public, narrows due to a rolling door 40 feet high, giving the captain only 6 inches to play with, and no bow thruster to fine-tune approach position. The captain was making his final approach to the boathouse when he tried taking the engines out of gear to shed speed.
They didn't come out of gear.
Remember the transmission? The pneumatic shifters relied upon air pressure provided by a simple electric air compressor for actuation. As with many pneumatic systems, there were leaks in the system, nothing serious, but which would, over time, deplete the resevoir. To avoid having the compressor kick on every few hours, the practice was to keep the thing switched to manual overnight, and to switch it to auto before a cruise. That is something the regular deck/engineer knew well.
The replacement engineer did not know this well, or at all.
In the course of the cruise, the resevoir had provided what it had, and was now, unbeknownst to the captain, empty.
A helpful note: This was a twin-prop boat, with combined throttle/transmission controls. This is so standard as to need no explanation, but I shall explain nonetheless, for those unfamiliar with boats in general.
A combined control has a lever for each engine side by side on a pedestal. When a lever is pointing straight up, the engine should be idling in neutral, ie. with engine given minimal throttle and the transmission disengaged, no rotational torque from the engines to the prop shafts. Push the lever forward and one should feel a moment of resistance, called the indent. Some throttles, like the ones on this boat, actually click in place. In this position, the transmission is engaged forward, but the throttles still idle. Push forward from that position and the throttles will ramp up in speed until the levers can be pushed no farther. Pull back on the levers and one found a reverse indent and subsequent throttle band for reverse thrust.
(I once captained a boat that was just a bit too slow ahead, because a tight installation of the throttle/transmission pedestal assembly, which forced the ball of the control lever to hit the dash well before the engine hit redline. I would regularly pick up half a knot by unscrewing and removing the ball underway. Sadly, when I forgot to replace the ball, I often cut myself on the lever's threaded end when docking.
(But I digress. Back to the docking yacht of the story.)
So, with the control levers pointing straight up, instead of coasting in neutral, the boat was idling ahead. After making his turn to the boathouse, the captain knew he was in trouble, but did not yet know the source of his trouble. He managed to get it into the boathouse, running hot. Had he thought about the boat's systems, he might have thought to simply kill the main engines and stop increasing his forward way ("way" is boat talk for momentum) and just hit hard.
Instead, he pulled back on the levers to engage reverse, and rev the engines.
Remember, the props still turn, giving forward thrust. He has no transmission control. Putting it in reverse is pointless, because the actuators are dead, dead, dead.
But the throttle controls are separate, controlled not by air pressured pistons but directly, through the shared cable. They work just fine.
So when he backed down hard on the levers, he actually gunned ahead.
And plowed through about four feet of boathouse decking. Messy, messy, messy.
Thankfully, no one was injured, and the boat was not harmed much beyond scratches. Pre-Depression New York shipyards, building for, in this case, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, did not skimp on the thickness of the wooden hulls they laid, especially in an era when transmissions for boats were notoriously unreliable. The boathouse? That's another matter. Damage should easily top tens of thousands.
As to the cause? That's where my friend and I disagreed. He maintains that the experienced engineer must always be present when sailing, and that the accident was the direct result of this oversight.
I take a wider view. After all, I am a Heinlein man. I maintain that agreeing to sail witout qualified crew was only the last failure the captain made.
The others?
Let's start with the engine room itself. Any self-respecting Heinlein Guy or Gal would point out that the air resevoir needed two mechanisms to maintain pressure, or a promenantly displayed and independantly lit pressure gauge and an audible low-pressure alarm in the wheelhouse, or (my personal favorite) both.
I maintain that a cruise can start with the best of intentions, but feces often strikes the blades. What if your engineer is disabled? Drunk? Injured, unbeknownst to anyone? Hell, swept overboard? The captain should be able to at least know that a safe landing can be attempted. An audible alarm and visible pressure gauge make that possible. It is not, in my opinion, too much to ask that redundant systems be in place before the boat leaves the dock.
After all, was the engineer in any way blamed for destroying a million-dollar boathouse? Hardly. Even if he had been onboard, which he wasn't. On a boat, the captain is in charge because the captain takes the blame if anything goes wrong. Think of us behind the wheel as the predecessors of Sorbane Oxley (sp?) Law that makes the CEO of publicly held corportations ultimately responsible for what happens on our watch. There won't be an official inquiry into the accident since it occurred on a private yacht and there was not serious injury or loss of life, but if there were, the Coast Guard would have identified the failures as ultimately human caused, thanks to a lack of redundancy and/or manpower.
And that failure would have been born solely by the Captain.
So my friend maintains that the accident would not have occurred if he had been in charge.
Really?
I'm sorry to play what-if, but. . .
The deck/engineer was a newbie. It's one thing to tell a decky to go below and check X. What if he checks Y or Z instead? What if he is a total moron, and lazy to boot, and just says "Did it?" Without, in this specific case, a pressure gauge, audible alarm and/or means of alternate pressurization, the captain has no way to know. I have been on trips where I could not trust in the piloting skills or judgment of deck crew enough to check the engine myself, and yet I was forced to do so. Sometimes nothing happened, and sometimes I came back to the wheel just in the freakin' nick of time.
In fact, just thinking about it, I can remember a time when a throttle status alarm sounded during a tricky approach, and enabled me to avoid crashing the vessel right into the gates of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks small chamber, gates which have peopled walkways at that moment crowed with tourists. So, yes. Suspenders with my belt are not too much to ask. I proved that myself.