Us National Transportation Safety Board News

The FBI said on Monday it opened a criminal probe into the collapse of a Baltimore bridge in March when a ship crashed into a bridge support, while local officials confirmed the recovery of a fourth body from the incident.FBI agents boarded the cargo ship Dali to conduct court-authorized law enforcement activity regarding the crash, an FBI spokesperson said. The spokesperson said there was no other public information available and the bureau will have no further comment.The body…

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said at a Senate hearing Wednesday that investigators had conducted interviews with key cargo ship personnel in the investigation of the March 26 Baltimore bridge collapse.The Dali cargo ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, sending it crashing into the harbor and killing six people. Work to clear the wreckage and restore traffic through the Mid-Atlantic state's shipping channel is ongoing.Homendy said investigators remained on site and had interviewed the pilots…

Federal investigators on Wednesday examined the cargo ship that crashed into a Baltimore bridge while emergency teams searched for bodies and details emerged of the intense efforts to save lives in the minutes before the steel span collapsed."Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge. There's a ship approaching that just lost their steering," someone said on police radio minutes before the 1:30 a.m. crash on Tuesday.While voices were heard discussing next steps, including alerting any work crews to leave the bridge…

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is recommending new notification alarms and procedures for potential incursions on pipelines and a change to an anchorage off the California coast following a crude oil release in 2021 caused by ship anchors damaging an underwater pipeline.NTSB investigators determined that the oil leak, which began on October 1, 2021, in San Pedro Bay, resulted from an anchor strike on the pipeline that occurred eight months earlier, when anchors…

The U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday said its engineers recovered remaining debris and presumed human remains from the imploded Titan submersible in the North Atlantic.The evidence recovered from the seafloor by marine safety engineers with the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) was transferred to shore for analysis as part of ongoing investigations into the fatal incident.In June, the Titan imploded while on a voyage to visit the wreck site of the famed sunken ocean liner Titanic, killing all five people on board.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has released a preliminary report on the December 29, 2022, fatal helicopter crash near a Gulf of Mexico oil platform. One pilot and three passengers died in the incident."On December 29, 2022, about 0834 central standard time, a Bell 407 helicopter, N595RL, was substantially damaged during takeoff from an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The pilot and 3 passengers were fatally injured. The helicopter was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135 flight…

BMT, a leading, multidisciplinary management consultancy, has reported phenomenal growth in sales of its maritime simulator and has just signed multiple key contracts with select cruise lines including Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Seabourn in North America and P&O Cruises Australia. The orders for both office and ship-based licences of BMT’s REMBRANDT maritime simulator will support cruise lines on more than 39 cruise ships.REMBRANDT is fully scalable – operating in full mission modes through to desktop and laptop configurable modes.

BMT has reported rapid growth in sales for its maritime simulator and has signed a number of contracts for its simulator system with cruise lines that include Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, and Seabourn in North America and P&O Cruises Australia.The orders for both office and ship-based licenses of the company’s REMBRANDT maritime simulator will support cruise lines on more than 39 ships.Dr. Phil Thompson, Simulation and Training Business Director at BMT, commented: “REMBRANDT delivers the highest standards of maneuvring simulation within an S-57 and S-63 ENC environment.

On 24 January, the IMO issued updated guidelines on fatigue. This is just another in a long series of band aids that attempt to cover over the problem without providing a solution. Fatigue is a long-standing weakness in the maritime industry. It is recognized as a major or contributing causal factor in the majority of maritime casualties. As is well-known, fatigue is caused by a lack of sleep and relaxation. These, in turn, are the result of too few people being tasked with too much work. Guidance on how to recognize and manage fatigue is meaningless.

The United States Coast Guard will on Tuesday start interviewing the crew of a Philippines-flagged container ship which collided with a U.S. warship in Japanese waters killing seven American sailors. The U.S. coast guard investigation is one several into the incident on Saturday involving the guided missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald and the much larger ACX Crystal. The cause of the collision at night and in clear weather is not known. "We are scheduled to interview the crew members," said U.S. Lieutenant Scott Carr told Reuters, referring the crew of the merchant ship.

Hybrid drive and potential fuel savings are well known — from 10 to 30 percent, according to the sources we’ve written about over the years. Less known, is the potential need to purchase some sort of remote monitoring package to complement that diesel-electric or battery hybrid system from a system operator in order to secure the maximum safety benefits. As the count of system operators offering hybrid drives grows, so too, it seems, there’s continuous need to look at who they are and what they’re offering.

The captain of the doomed El Faro cargo ship sounded an alarm for his crew to abandon the vessel shortly before it sank last fall in a hurricane near the Bahamas, killing all 33 onboard, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said on Wednesday. Twenty-six hours of newly recovered audio, captured by microphones on the ship's bridge, offer chilling detail into the final hours before the 790-foot (241-meter) ship sank on Oct. 1, after sailing into Hurricane Joaquin on a routine cargo run between Florida and Puerto Rico. The NTSB released preliminary details from information it recovered from the ship's voyage data recorder, found earlier this month on the ocean floor after a 10-month search.

A group led by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has gathered information from the recovered voyage data recorder (VDR) of sunken cargo ship El Faro to develop a detailed transcript of the sounds and discernible words captured on the ship’s bridge before sinking during Hurricane Joaquin in October 2015. In all about 26 hours of information was recovered from the VDR, including bridge audio, weather data and navigational data. NTSB said numerous events leading up to the loss of the El Faro can be heard on the VDR’s audio…

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it is set to launch a mission to recover the voyage data recorder (VDR) of sunken cargo ship El Faro. The VDR, belonging to U.S. flagged El Faro which sank during Hurricane Joaquin last October, was located April 26 in about 15,000 feet of water near the Bahamas. The El Faro wreckage was positively identified on November 1, 2015, during the NTSB’s initial mission to locate the wreckage. Video gained from remotely operated…

NTSB to meet to consider collision Houston Ship Channel collision The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it will meet June 7 to determine the probable cause of the March 9, 2015 collision between the bulk carrier Conti Peridot and the tanker Carla Maersk in the Houston Ship Channel near Morgan’s Point, Texas.  Both vessels suffered damages as a result of the collision, which led to partial closure of the Houston Ship Channel.

In examining the deadly collision of tugboat/barge Caribbean Sea/The Resource with Amphibious Passenger Vehicle DUKW 34, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has determined that several faults played a part in the collision. On Wednesday, July 7, 2010, the empty 250-foot-long sludge barge The Resource, being towed alongside the 78.9-foot-long tugboat Caribbean Sea, collided with the anchored 33-foot-long amphibious passenger vehicle DUKW 34 in the Delaware River at Philadelphia, Penn. On board the DUKW 34 were 35 passengers and two crewmembers, while on board the Caribbean Sea were five crewmembers. As a result of the collision…

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board hopes to recover the voyage data recorder from the cargo ship El Faro, which sank during a hurricane killing all 33 crew on board, over the next two to three months, an agency official said on Thursday. A surveillance trip to the site where the ship sank last year, some 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) below sea level off the Bahamas, pinpointed the location of the recorder on April 26. It should contain navigational data and the last 12 hours of audio on the ship's bridge, Brian Curtis, acting director of the Office of Marine Safety at the NTSB, told reporters. He spoke after the voyage to locate the recorder returned to port in Massachusetts. "We know where it is but it is still a tall challenge.

Subsea images and video released as part of NTSB public docket on investigation into the sinking of U.S. cargo ship El Faro. Underwater video and images of the sunken cargo ship EL Faro have been released by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as part of its continuing investigation into the vessel’s sinking in the Atlantic Ocean in October. The docket opened by NTSB includes nine underwater images of El Faro wreckage on the seafloor, as well as more than 47 minutes of video from CURV-21, the remotely operated vehicle used to document the wreckage and debris field. Excerpts from that video are available on the NTSB’s YouTube channel. The U.S.

Rail transport activists, analysts and environmentalists get a real taste of what the waterfront has endured for decades. They’ll just have to get in line with the rest of us. This week finds the collective domestic oil industry wringing its hands about the latest in a series of serious oil transport train casualties. This time, on Monday, the news involved a crude-carrying train that derailed in West Virginia, complete with more than one dozen tank cars afire and necessitating the evacuation of nearby towns. Just before that, another train in Canada consisting of about 100 tank cars carrying crude oil derailed in remote Ontario and suffered a similar fate. Both events naturally caught the attention of environmental and safety activists and oil industry analysts.

The e-Navigation Underway 2015 – North America conference will be hosted by The State University of New York (SUNY) Maritime College from September 28 to 30 on the college’s Throggs Neck, N.Y. campus. The conference’s theme is: “Reducing Risk through E-Navigation,” which follows the pace of the IMO’s Correspondence Group on e-Navigation. The keynote speaker will be Joseph Trotti, CEO of AIG Global Marine and Aerospace, and Francis Zachariae, the new Secretary General of the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA) and formerly the deputy director general of Danish Maritime Authority (DMA), will be the luncheon speaker on the conference’s final day. Other confirmed speakers include Tracy Murrell, Director Office of Marine Safety, U.S.

Malaysia confirmed early on Thursday that a piece of a wing washed up on an Indian Ocean island beach last week was from Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the first trace of the plane found since it vanished last year with 239 people on board. "Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370," Prime Minister Najib Razak said in an early morning televised address. "I would like to assure all those affected by this tragedy that the government of Malaysia is committed to do everything within our means to find out the truth of what happened," Najib said.

Deep seas may complicate efforts to find the sunken U.S. cargo ship lost off the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin, a federal safety investigator said, as a search and rescue mission for 32 missing crew stretched into a sixth day. A U.S. National Transportation Safety Board team arrived on Tuesday in Jacksonville, Florida, the port the El Faro departed from last week en route to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The ship disappeared in what maritime experts have called the worst cargo shipping disaster involving a U.S.-flagged vessel in more than 30 years.

Salvage operations for the sunken cargo ship El Faro were suspended on Friday due to Tropical Storm Kate, which moved through the Bahamas with winds of 45 miles (75 km) per hour, U.S. authorities said. The El Faro sank off the southern Bahamas in a hurricane last month with the loss of 33 mostly American crew. Its wreck was located on the seafloor in 15,000 feet (4,500 meters) of water a little over a week ago. A U.S. Navy salvage tug, Apache, is searching for the ship's bridge and voyage data recorder, which became separated from the wreck, the U.S.