Everybody's responsible for avoiding an accident. Thinking in terms of right of way is exactly how this kind of accident happens. That's what makes you think you're right to proceed towards what looks like a certain collision.

(It's the same on the road; you have to take it as an article of faith that other people will respect your right of way, but at the same time, it makes sense not to go past junctions with waiting cars too quickly, just in case they don't see you. If you get hit, it might not be your fault, but that's little consolation if you're injured or killed.)

Well, the international regulations that govern maritime traffic do think in terms like right of way. They define for various scenarios of two ships approaching the other which one is the "stand on" vessel, that must maintain course and speed, and which one is the "give way" vessel, which must maneuver around the other.

Of course, the rules do also say that both ships are responsible for avoiding collisions with the other, and that both are free to maneuver to avoid collision if they are put in extremis by failure to follow the navigation rules.

> no one was playing chicken because everyone was asleep on the cargo ship.

Unless everyone on both ships was asleep, this statement doesn't have to be true. If anything, it seems eminently plausible the destroyer's crew was playing chicken with the freighter thinking they were playing against a human opponent, when in fact they were dealing with an automated system.

This is more realistic. But it begs the question, why didn't the destroyer out-run it? The freighter was approaching from it's back side, and should have given way, but once you realize it's not going to you have 100,000 horsepower to accelerate away with.

And standing orders were to wake the captain whenever another ship gets within a minimum distance. So the watch had to not only decide to play chicken with the freighter, but not wake the captain when it breached minimum safe distance.

"Unless everyone on both ships was asleep, this statement doesn't have to be true. If anything, it seems eminently plausible the destroyer's crew was playing chicken with the freighter thinking they were playing against a human opponent, when in fact they were dealing with an automated system."

Interesting you should mention this because, IIRC, the book has an aside about ships that (unknowingly) play chicken with lighthouses.

Is that in any way related to the somewhat apocryphal / mostly untrue anecjoke about the aircraft carrier and the lighthouse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...

Both captains were asleep. The question is why the American one was when, given it's a military vessel, they should be concerned about being approached by other ships. Aren't they held to a higher standard than some random container ship crew?

Captains have to sleep, which is why warships have a watch team who are awake. They failed here, which is unfathomable, but that is not, per se, the CO's fault. The CO has to sleep sometime -- I've stood many watches as the senior-most officer awake on a nuclear submarine while my CO slept, and I had to avoid collisions just as much as I would have had to do if my CO had been awake.

It is true that many COs will try to time their periods of sleep for when the operational tempo is lower as a risk management measure. I can only assume the Fitzgerald's CO had made his risk assessment and figured that it was better to sleep at night than to sleep during the day when the contact density would be even higher.

But for a Navy warship being "approached by other ships" is a fact of life for every hour of every day, you can't always plan your sleep schedule for when you're the only boat on the pond.

Other traffic is no reason to wake the captain, but when you're closing from 4000 yards to 3000 to 2000, well, you might want to give them a poke.

Yes, and every Captain out there puts the minimum "closest point of approach" for any contact that they're willing to accept into their standing orders, precisely so that they will be woken up by the watch team with enough time to make it to the bridge and assess the situation.

But this still relies on the watch team detecting the contact and realizing that it will pass near to the ship, and so again the ship's captain is back to relying on his or her watch team to at least get to that minimal level of competence -- because if they can't rely on the officers on watch to be able to wake them up properly, we're back to captains who can never sleep.