I know a little about planes and nothing about ships so maybe this is crazy but it seems to me that if you're moving something that large there should be redundant systems for steering the thing.

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gk1 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are.[1] Unfortunately they take longer to employ than the crew had time.

[1] As it happens I open with an anecdote about steering redundancy on ships in this post: https://www.gkogan.co/simple-systems/

	▲	dopamean 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for this comment!

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cjensen 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Shipping is a low-margin business. That business structure does not incentivize paying for careful analysis of failure modes.

Seems to me the only effective and enforceable redundancy that can be easily be imposed by regulation would be mandatory tug boats.

	▲	protocolture 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>Seems to me the only effective and enforceable redundancy that can be easily be imposed by regulation would be mandatory tug boats. Way it worked in Sydney harbour 20+ years ago when I briefly worked on the wharves/tugs, was that the big ships had to have both local tugs, and a local pilot who would come aboard and run the ship. Which seemed to me to be quite an expensive operation but I honestly cant recall any big nautical disasters in the habour so I guess it works.
	▲	dboreham 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> mandatory tug boats Which there are in some places. Where I grew up I'd watch the ships sail into and out of the oil and gas terminals, always accompanied by tugs. More than one in case there's a tug failure.