Being assigned to a navy ship that has a DEI hire lesbian captain is definitely bad luck.
New Zealand's navy has insisted that a female captain's gender was not to blame for the sinking of a naval ship.
HMNZS Manawanui caught fire and later capsized after it ran aground one nautical mile from the Samoan island of Upolu on Saturday night while surveying a reef.
It was the first time New Zealand lost a military vessel since World War II. And is New Zealand's worst peacetime maritime accident.
the ship's captain Commander Yvonne Gray, has been inundated by trolling online.
New Zealand's defence minister Judith Collins (who is the first female to become defence minister) defended the captain in the wake of the negativity: 'The one thing that we already know did not cause it is the gender of the ship's captain.
Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Garin Golding ordered a probe, which found a 'series of human errors' behind the ship's loss.
'The crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, as a consequence, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure,' Rear Amdl Golding said.
'Having mistakenly assessed a thruster control failure, standard procedures should have prompted ship's crew to check that the ship was under manual control rather than in autopilot.
'This check did not occur. Remaining in autopilot resulted in the ship maintaining a course toward land, until grounding and eventually stranding.'
Confusion over roles, under-training and a lack of risk assessment were all identified in the investigation.
The report also includes a lengthy transcript of the events of that night, including the crew struggling to understand the ship’s movements, and early preparations to abandon. It includes the Captain telling crew, “We’ll get in our liferafts and we‘ll survive this and then we’ll wait for help to arrive.”
Being assigned to a navy ship that has a DEI hire lesbian captain is definitely bad luck.
Well, I guess the saving grace was that she was not in command of an aircraft. Running aground from flight is considerably more serious.
"Oops, my bad!" does not seem adequate to the situation. Especially if she was already planning on the loss of the ship.