Re:Egypt demands over $1B in damages after Suez Canal blockage
by pacificmint on Sunday April 04, 2021 @08:19PM
(#26694078)
> An interesting hypothesis that I ran across
Here [1] is a link from the Financial Times that talks about the hypothesis you mention, where a combination of a lull in the wind and the bank effect pushed the bow of the ship away from the bank while pulling the stern in.
Re:Egypt demands over $1B in damages after Suez Canal blockage
by toomuchtodo on Sunday April 04, 2021 @03:33PM
(#26692172)
Staggered windsocks would be pretty cheap and simple I think, just as you’d deploy at airports.
Re:Egypt demands over $1B in damages after Suez Canal blockage
by zaarn on Sunday April 04, 2021 @04:09PM
(#26692442)
Even with modern weather prediction technology and windsocks, it can happen that airplane encounter very unexpected wind drafts up or down during takeoff or landing. Sometimes you just have bad luck.
An interesting hypothesis that I ran across (on gCaptain? blancolirio?) is that it may actually have been a wind lull that caused the issue.
There was supposedly a steady cross wind in the area in question, and given the ship is 400m long and 13 storeys high, that's a lot of area. The wind seems to have been coming from the west/port-side, so the ship had rudder to port to counteract the pushing to starboard/east.
When the wind dropped suddenly, the pushing-to-starboard force suddenly disappeared, and so the steering to port all of a sudden became 'unnecessary' and if it was not corrected soon enough may have been the reason why the ship steered to port and into the channel wall.
Just an hypothesis though.
I'm sure a sorts of folks will be looking at the sensor logs.
I wonder if the Canal authority has any kind of instruments along the route to measure conditions. If not, they should consider it. Perhaps set up some "buoys" on land next to the channel that broadcast things out via AIS so pilots and captains can see things on their chart plotters.