There’s a lot more competent crews like this out there than bad ones, but you just hear about the crashes you don’t always hear about the good skilled crews.
@@tylerdavis9826 I would like to watch videos about regular heavy machinery "situations". There was a marine machinist who shared headcam footage but I don't remember where I've seen that.
It feels nice to hear about such emergency situations where crew do everything they could right and in the end things turn out good. I liked watching Mayday for same reasons, alongside of the technical explanations of what went wrong.
Yeah, hearing about how sideways things went and yet how the crew not only managed to save the vessel but also took action to ensure the safety of all onboard and were succesfull in all of that is incredible.
Well, read the accident report. It raises valuable questions like "Why do a bunch of engineers need 15 minutes to think that after a full day of low oil level warnings an automatic motor shut down caused by low oil pressure could be remedied by replenishing oil" or "Why was the standard course of action for a low oil level alarm to reduce the level which triggered the low oil level alarm instead of replenishing oil" or "Why was for 4 years everyone involved in this ships operation unconcerned that no one knew what the correct oil levels were" or "why did the engineers need 40 minutes to reconnect an engine to the power grid" The engineers barely adverted a disaster they helped create by their own negligence.
I haven't been able to confirm this, and I've only heard my mother say it, but allegedly: The people on board this ship "enjoyed" (for a lack of a better word) this emergency situation because of how organized and structured it was. There was no confusion amongst them, and everyone did their job effectively. The people were surprised by the hospitality of the emergency responders. Acted almost like this wasn't an emergency at all. Just another day at work.
Because that's the kind of emergency rescue services would prefer to have. If you're starting evacuation when people are dying or at direct risk then you've probably started it too late
@@el_quba 18 HOURS latter and the air lift of passengers was still going on. That is insane to me and it shows how if it had turned bad alot of people would have died.
It was done earlier rather than later preventing a loss of life and having them on standby if they did lose power or something happened it would save time and resources for rescues
Lubrication professional here: you don't know how often people just ignore lube oil alarms, whether they're in system or from the analyst that lube is being sent to to be tested
Although not a ship but an automobile, comment reminds me of a workplace happening from several decades ago; a then grey haired fellow and I, who did not yet have grey hair, were having lunch when a then 20-something came in for their afternoon shift. Person said to us, "Hey would you guys know what that funny Aladdin's oil lamp light on the dashboard means?" I forget which one of us answered with, "Why ask us, just look in the owners manual, it will tell you." Their reply, "I shouldn't have to read a book, it should just say what it means." Old guy and I looked at each other then continued eating without further conversation.
@@scottfw7169 This is an attitude I just don't understand. It would take you minimal effort to just tell him what it is, and that it's a severe problem that he should take very seriously. Instead you pretend you don't know, leading to a possibility of him ruining his car's engine.
@@wurfyy Indeed it was a problem 20 something should have taken seriously enough to read the owners manual. And speaking of reading things, read my comment again looking for where old guy and I pretended we didn't know and see how it goes this time looking for something that does not exist. What's amusing here is that one person outright rejects sound counsel and refuses to read critical instructions to find what really does exist within the writing and another person reads a comment and inserts meaning in to the writing which contradicts historical reality. Plus there is the data I decided did not need to be included for comment purposes that the same 20-something had also made it known they had no driver license and no intent to ever go get one, and that it was one of the cars their parents owned. Old guy and I concluded that it was logical for the consequences of 20 something's attitude to eventually catch up with 20 something, we were not the parents and it was not our job to save 20 something from 20 something's attitude problem. Again, note that 20 something outright dismissed and refused to act upon wise counsel to read the car's owners manual.
@@scottfw7169 The implication of telling the other person to find it in the owner's manual instead of just telling him is that you don't know, so unless you'd made it abundantly clear in prior interactions that you did not want to ever help that person with anything, yes you oh so absolutely did pretend that you didn't know. Also, the exact interpretation of this isn't really relevant anyway. The point is you knew, you could have easily told him, and you chose not to. It takes a whole lot less effort to ask someone who knows than to look it up in a manual, so why would he not just ask ? Especially if he didn't drive to work early just in case there was a problem he needed to look up in a manual. If I have a problem with my car whilst driving to work, I'm gonna ask around during the shift, and then only after the shift am I gonna start going looking things up. As for the guy not having and refusing to ever get a driver's license, I don't see how that's relevant. If he knows how to drive, he's not a danger to people around him, and it's his choice to get screwed any time he gets pulled over by the police.
@@wurfyy Interesting to hold that it is their choice to get screwed any time they get pulled over, since they refuse to get a driver license, while concurrently seeming to insist it is not equally their choice to get screwed via refusing to read the owners manual for the potentially deadly machinery they are operating and thereby learn critical details of its operation and servicing. The word dichotomy comes to mind.
Having too many alarms go off when something goes wrong is definitely a major issue. I sailed as an engine cadet on board a steam-powered LNGC. We could burn boil-off gas, fuel oil, or a combination of the two. Our plant was steam turbine propulsion and two steam-powered SSTGs, and one diesel SSDG for times that the boilers were offline, as well as the diesel emergency generator. Once, while coming into an anchorage after loading cargo, we had a fuel oil return valve fail on one of our two boilers. That failure triggered a cascade of failures that took the entire plant offline except for the SSDG. We got so many alarms that it took us 2 hours to figure out what happened and get one boiler back online. All this time, the cargo was still boiling off and the pressure in the tanks was increasing. We needed a boiler so we could burn that boil-off gas. I estimate we were half an hour to an hour from venting a bunch of natural gas to the atmosphere when we finally got one boiler working again.
@@gregorymalchuk272 There are no coolers on an LNG ship. LNG it pre-cooled at the loading port and left like that. Boil-off is used as cheap fuel for the ship itself.
l remember a similar problem many years ago when l was engine cadet and the vessel lost propulsion due to losing condenser vacuum tripping the main propulsion plant.This was caused by a fouled main condenser air ejector orifice.The vessel was off the North Cape of Kiwi at the time.
This. I was reminded of the Qantas Flight 32 incident (Airbus A380) when watching the video. There, numerous pieces of debris from a engine that exploded damaged or destroyed a large number of non-engine subsystems when it hit the wing. This was relatively early in the era of aircraft systems being completely integrated into centralised control and error reporting interfaces. The crew was _swamped_ trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, what was still working, etc. They managed, but it was a close call.
Crew resource management and task saturation has become a big focus in aviation! I hope the marine industry has as much focus on this as well, especially with how much larger ships are.
3:52 This is like, literally my nightmare. As someone who deals with production systems, suddenly having a thousand different alarms when I'm trying to diagnose the problem is the stuff of nightmares. All while dealing with a problem that can't be fixed, as passengers are taking emergency evacuations. That situation went on for 18 hours. Truly, a nightmarish situation. It's insane that the engine oil tank had such a huge design flaw, especially considering that everyone knew about the risks.
I’ve read about how those types of alarm situations, and the hundreds of repeat alarms like in the video, are a factor in disasters. Either from crews shutting off sensors or just plain overwhelming the responders. 😓
Reminds me of Qantas Flight 32 accident. Where an engine exploded and destroyed a bunch of electrical systems. Causing the pilots to get hundreds of contradicting error and warning messages. One of those accidents where it’s astonishing how everything ended safely.
Yep I've been in blackouts on cruise ships, and you just get overwhelmed with alarms, as when one or more generator goes down it has a knock-on effect on every other system.
I'm an ROV supervisor/pilot, and on one job I arrived at there were many spurious alarms. They were for a 'network error', and the current crew were doing exactly this, dismissing them without actually reading them. I told them they had to read EVERY alarm message, because buried in there, there might be a real one that would be alerting us to a potentially dangerous situation. The first opportunity we had with a bit of a layup, I dived into the network and found the problem.
It's worth reading the actual report. The alarm system takes much of the blame, with irrelevant alarms mixed up with crucial ones and the crew becoming overwhelmed.
@@rob_lightbody Every engineer adds alarms "just in case", none dares remove any least they get blame for any incident. As a result, every alarm system has a tendency to become nothing more than background noise. I know one case IRL where it actually caused an accident (which luckily resulted in nothing but property damage) by distracting people from their work with constant irrelevant alarm spam to the point where a valve was left in an incorrect position.
Modern alarm systems tend to approach alarms with a "CYA" mentality, where they will add an alarm for every single possible issue, even if that "issue" could be the result of normal operation in somewhat unusual conditions. They don't have any sort of screening, because that fault MIGHT be a problem, but 99.99% of the time it's not, so it's kind of a waste of time to check it. Sure, it seems odd to dismiss alarms like that, but I've worked on systems where it literally gives you a fault every few seconds, yet the machine is running perfectly fine. It's not even a matter of being lazy at that point, you simply don't have the time to investigate every fault, because by the time you might find the reason, you've already got another fault. It creates this mentality of "clear, and if it stays clear, disregard."
Part of the cause of the disastrous Therac-35 radiation therapy machine was how it constantly reported vague errors even during normal operation. When it alerted operators of a deadly problem, they didn't know what it meant and ignored it like the rest.
Many military systems (generators, vehicles) have something called a battleshort that essentially overrides some things that would ordinarily shut down an engine. In normal operation, you'd want to shut down an engine to protect from overheating or loss of oil pressure but in a life-or-death situation, motor life becomes far less important than human life. It's interesting that the ship doesn't seem to have a last-effort "override everything just make the engines run" switch.
@@christopherg2347 That's definitely not the same thing, manual does give you more control however, as it said they had to ignore overspeed and all that kind of stuff, engines still could have shut down because of something, battle short is like na bro send it to hell
@@blank.e5plus The thing was that this was the only operational engine half the time. They probably preferred to not turn it into scrap metal. So they left some shutdowns on.
@@blank.e5plusIt sounds like it was basically the same thing. It was only once they had other generators running that DG2 shut down again due to low oil pressure. Maybe that was a lucky coincidence, but I think it is likely they were just overriding the shutdowns that would have happened before they had the other generators running and that shut down occurred because they stopped overriding it.
Shout-out to the helicopter pilots hoisting passengers in 60 knot winds. I'm a private pilot with ~125 flight hours flying small two-seat and four-seat planes, and landing those planes in even a 15 knot cross wind can quite challenging. I can scarcely imagine the skill required to fly in a north Atlantic storm with winds at 60 knots only a couple hundred feet above the water, next to a ship that would create a ton of unpredictable turbulence, and doing all that while keeping the helicopter stable enough to hoist passengers by rope from a ship that's also rolling and pitching. Not only that, but the pilots were able to do that again and again, for hours on end, in the middle of the night. The sheer skill required to do a rescue like that is astonishing, and as a relatively inexperienced pilot I am truly inspired by the work that they and other rescue pilots do.
Dane here. I distinctly remember how *massive* the rescue effort was. Our national rescue helicopters were sent to help - not in Norway, but in Sweden. Why? Because the Swedes had also sent all _their_ stuff to the Norwegians, who, in turn, had most of everything they had on the task. So there was a large readiness "gap" across the Nordics and, in particular, in the Baltic that had everyone scrambling to fill in; and so it became that Danish helicopters were guarding Swedish waters. And I agree. I'm by no means a pilot, but I've nerded out about such stuff enough to have an appreciation of just how difficult doing that sort of work is, especially in those conditions. Huge kudos to everyone involved.
Coast guard pilots of any country must be both insane AND so highly talented and well trained that they're confident in their own insanity. Coasties have a bad rap as "that" branch of the military, but I don't know why. They aren't "just" the buoy scrapers, nor are they "just" the water police. They're more like the inverse of firefighters, I suppose like a lifeguard with a gun but turned up to a million. Instead of walking into a burning building to carry a child to safety, they'll swim down to Davy Jones Locker and pull you out of the icewater mansion, spitting in the face of death itself in the process.
And to top it all Off, a log carrier Got a blackout too just a few hundred meters from viking sky, giving the rescue team Even more pressure. As a Norwegian, I remember this like it was yesterday
I can't understand why the lube tanks didn't have baffles to stop the extreme sloshing; even fuel tanks in cars have baffles, & racing cars have sort-of buffer tanks to stop this sort of thing happening.
I have read parts of the report from the incident. It describes the lube oil tank in very good detail, and the tank did in fact have a series of baffles. This is normal in maritime equipment. Even small hydraulic tanks have baffles to prevent sloshing.
Why aren't stories like this turned into short or even feature length films? This would be a great watch from the pov of the captain, crew, passenger and rescue workers!
Back in the 1970s, I watched a gripping documentary called The Poseidon Adventure. Absolutely terrifying for all concerned - the whole thing was upside down!
The problem is that even sloshing can cause an engine shutdown if it's bad enough. If the suction of the pump is uncovered due to sloshing then the pump will suck air rather than oil, causing the oil pressure in the engine to drop which will shut down the engine.
If you read the report the usual course of action for persistent low oil level alarms was to lower the level which triggered the alarm. No one knew what the required levels were.
But we’re looking at here is a design defect. That the sloshing can uncover the inlets. And even if they can’t, it means a safety system wasn’t designed to handle the sloshing
@@neilkurzman4907 The tanks were very poor design. A large shallow tank also does not need 150mm gap at the top. The safe vent is volume based, not height. It seems as if the designers used a generic figure, rather than calculate to match the application.
The deepened oil inlet should have been in the center of the tank, not on it's side. It would make the system much more resilient to rolling. Even 90 degrees of roll would not make the inlet dry when the tank is at least 50% full.
railroad enthusiast here, ehm, running out of oil is a well known occurrence for us, it used to be such a common occurrence we coined the phrase "hotbox" for whenever an axlebox would run out of oil and run hot. evidently, the most we get is a stalled train and a small fire, and im sure we haven't been so thankful to hear that as opposed to the ship based alternative
ALL the cruise ships of these days share the same crucial flaw: no (or not enough) backup for emergency situations. Remember one minor fire in the switchboard room that caused the loss of all power on a carnival ship in the Caribbean for days. I'm not sure if any of the modern ships has physically separated engine rooms (or sections of them) which would help in the case of flooding or fire. Considering the number of passengers they are carrying (up to 6000), they are very vulnerable.
The safe return to port regulations require that a ship must have enough redundancy to be able to return to a port safely. Since one of Viking Skys engines was out of operation the ship wasn't even allowed to leave a port, since if it lost the other engine room (separated by a fire/waterproof bulkhead) it would not have been able to return to port. They sailed anyway, lol.
One thing that was omitted here: Many other passenger ships, such as a few by Hurtigruten, which is a Norwegian coastal ferry/cruise ship operator (they've been at it since the 1850s, I think they know what they're doing), stayed in port during the storm. Why on earth did they continue going out in this weather with Viking Sky?
The most important issue of this incident is not discussed in this video: How to evacuate nearly 1000 passengers from a ship? Remember: This was an ideal situation: Good and well trained and very reliable crew handling the situation, nearly perfect radio connections, not far from the next big harbour, well organised well equiped and well trained norwegian rescue organisations - but if the engines hadnt restarted... it is simply not possible to evacuate more then 900 passengers plus crew via helicopter, it lasts too long - even when like here the flight time from the ship to the rescue station was only less then 20 minutes... even with multiple helicopters and such short distances like here the rescue organisations were only capable to transport less than 50% of the passengers off board... Simply too many passengers ant too less place in an rescue helicopter... If this accident had taken place in any other place, with no, or only one helicopter available, with longer flight distances from the shore to the ship and back, with no tugs nearly in time available in the region - this would have been a much more dangerous, perhaps deadly incident. The cruise industry has to anser the question how they plan to solve the question of evacuating ships with 1000, 2000 or even more passengers in case of emergencies during bad weather conditions.
What's to answer? They would use the lifeboats. It's not that they *couldn't* use the lifeboats, it's that a safer option was available. There's always risk; helicopters in bad weather winching passengers up is itself pretty risky.
@@benoithudson7235Yeah, this. In aircraft incidents, when a plane has landed with an emergency, the captain/crew _must_ take into consideration whether the aircraft is dangerous to stay aboard on (unless it's blatantly obvious). Reason being that, even in accidents where people otherwise haven't been hurt, an evacuation is likely to cause at least minor injuries - and sometimes major ones (it has to be mentioned though, that the speed requisite in airliner evacuations - ideally done in 90 seconds - doesn't help here, at all). Same goes for ships, especially cruise (passenger) ships. A large proportion of the passengers are elderly, that's just the nature of the demographics that go on cruises. Imagine having to get a bunch of geriatrics with mobility issues into lifeboats (in a dangerous and stressful situation), and then those lifeboats getting launched into quite possibly rough seas - it's almost guaranteed to cause injury.
I've seen the videos taken inside the ship. Have also been on a cruise where someone had to be airlifted. Most of the passengers were elderly, many with limited mobility, so that would have made evacuation more challenging than it already was for the conditions.
If you have 1000 alarms going off at once, you alarm system needs a redesign. Task saturation is absolutely a thing, and if the alarms are going off that often, they WILL be ignored
I guess the engineers that designed it never heard of trap door baffles in oil pans before, something that's very common in automotive racing. they keep the oil from flowing away from the suction section of the pan in high angles.
so in my understanding there was no way for the engineers to press "ignore" on the lubrication alarms or to prevent engine shutdown? I can see why these systems are so strict about lubrication, but it's just crazy that you cannot simply override in case of an emergency. It's great that engines today can prevent self harm but there should be priorities to it
At time, they only had one DG responding at all. They last thing they wanted to do is destroy that one! In the end, the error was a simple design mistake. Tanks that just weren't deep enough for the roll the ship experienced. Nothing they could have done, without making it worse.
@@dougaltolan3017 Sorry, but that's just blatantly false. Occasional momentary low oil pressure != complete continued zero oil pressure. Those shutdowns react on the former.
I was a marine engineer(retired)for over 40 years i have worked with engines with basic minimum alarm systems that could be manually overridden in an emergency and operations continued under supervision,I have also sailed in tugs where the main engines were controlled by computers…i know which i prefer…just call me old fashioned. It seems that someone got their calculations wrong regarding the oil sump tanks,no wonder it was such a confusing time for the ship’s engineers.
That one screen with all the errors on it? Yeah, that's why I'm a fan of having separate old-fashioned gauges for all critical systems. The screen works fine for normal operation, but when something seems amiss, engineers should be able to just get up from their chair, walk to a wall with gauges and meters and check the current and average oil levels for each engine. Preferably with some extra redundant measurements as well.
Thank you for this really detailed video. I work with them in Bergen and I was looking the incident happening in direct when it happened and worried for my colleagues on board
Some piston aviation engines , some road cars, and many high end racing cars and racing boats, often undergo high G-forces from all different directions that make the oil slosh away from the oil pickups similar to the uncontrolled sloshing that caused the near-disaster experienced by the Viking Sky. To combat this type of oil starvation, they use an oiling system called a "dry sump" system. A dry sump uses a pump or pumps to scavenge oil from the sump, treat it to filtration and cooling, then send it to a storage tank. Oil is continuously drawn from this tank and pumped into the engine while it runs thus ensuring the engine an uninterrupted supply of oil regardless of how much the aircraft, vehicle or vessel moves about. The size and shape of the sumps under the engine are designed to efficiently REMOVE oil from the sump for transfer to the storage tank. The storage tank can be made any size that will fit the machine to make sure the engine never goes dry. This technology is anything but new. Aircraft have been using systems like this since at least the 1930s and maybe before. That's why it's surprising that oceangoing vessels like the Viking Sky still use the wet sump method for these large, expensive, and difficult to repair ship engines. Does anybody here know if indeed there are large ships like this one that use the dry sump method? Is the Viking Sky unusual in this respect?
Most marine engines are effectively "dry sump". The oil sump is a double bottom tank under the engine but not part of the engine itself. Oil drains from the engine through valves which can be used to isolate the sump tank in the event of grounding. Double bottom tanks though still have the issue that they are wide and low in height so still suffer from oil surge.
The Viking sky dit have a dry sump, like most maritime engines. Sloshing is a very well known issue on ships due to a lot of movement. In this case the tank had a design flaw wich made this happen. There is also procedures to prevent this problem before going into bad weather. I understand it can look like a wet sump in the illustrations. In reality its a dry sump that is located directly under the engine like @davidebesant said. Other than that your information sounds solid.
Would be nice if professional shipping could reach the same safety standards and redundancy requirement of professional aviation. But i guess they simply cannot match the few times around the world standard of testing as well as all the other requirements because of the associated cost.
The difference is if a ship loses all engines, there's a good chance it can be repaired or passengers and crew evacuated with no loss of life, depending on weather and proximity shore, obviously. If a plane loses all engines, options are limited and in the likely case power can't be restored, there is no chance for survival depending on the initial altitude of the plane. There's a reason it's called the *Miracle* on the Hudson.
@@eaglescout1984 There is plenty of chance of survival, usually. A plane that loses its engines becomes a glider, it still has control, and it can land in the nearest reasonably flat area. Even helicopters have options, they can autorotate. The "miracle" on the Hudson was no miracle, that's just politician speak. It absolutely was good piloting, no doubt about that, but odds are the vast majority of pilots could have done it. Simulations showed that they probably could have even put it back on a runway, although ditching in the river was the safer bet. The issue with aircraft is that if the engines are gonna die, then it's likely to happen shortly after the takeoff, in which case the plane doesn't have a lot of altitude or speed to work with, which means they have to land on whatever is in front of them. If it's really unsuitable for landing, then yeah, that's bad, but if you have for instance a lake there, then it'll take some effort to mess it up.
@@wurfyy Oh please. Putting it on a runway was only possible when the sim pilots had prior knowledge of the accident rather than take the time to assess the problem before making a decision. And you're seriously overestimating the amount of "reasonably flat area" that they might be able to reach.
@@AdmiralBlackstar First, I'm not sure that's true. Bear in mind that those simulations were done professionally, for the purpose of investigation. The time it took to assess the situation is something they can account for, perhaps by only giving the pilots control past a certain point. Secondly, I don't even think trying to put it on a runway would have been a good idea, since it would have left much less margin for error for not much benefit other than monetary. Rather, my point was that even with less than a kilometer of altitude, they already had multiple good options. Third, the pilots in that situation had loads of options for where they could land their plane. LaGuardia, Teterboro, Hudson, East River, hell, Hackensack in a pinch. And that's just what I can clearly identify as options on the map. Unlikely that the city provided any more particularly attractive options, but I won't rule it out, either. Some of the roads probably could have worked. And fourth, my point was more broad than just the Hudson case. If the engines cut at altitude, like in the Gimli Glider case, then the aircraft has at least a solid 100km in each direction, which is almost always going to be plenty for finding a reasonably flat place to land. Whilst usually these things happen right after takeoff and the options are far more limited than even in the Hudson case, the statement I was disputing is that if a plane loses all power, then there is no chance of survival. That's patently false, there is plenty of chance of survival - in fact, you're probably going to be fine.
I’d just like to say I don’t think I’ve found interest in a channel faster than here, your explanation of things is amazing and the graphics I feel are what make it the best. Top tier content.
I just can't imagine the pressure put on the chef engineer that day. It remember me the sinking of the Explorer were one engineer Macgyver a hand control fuel pump to restart the generator.
This is the kind of disaster I like: no loss of life, and then no loss of material (rip starboard anchor). I guess the roll period would be too long for baffles to make much sense, huh? Maybe complicated ones that allowed oil to move to the sump, but not away from it as easily?
Yes, you would think an effective baffling system(smaller holes?) would not be that difficult to design for a ship known to be working the North sea/Atlantic. The "free surface effect"(simply put, liquids sloshing around in tanks) is generally undesirable in any conditions. Granted I'm no marine engineer, but you would think there would be no down side to "tightly" baffled sumps and tanks with some innovative thinking. This obviously has not been the first time a ship has had to deal with such conditions.
I worked as a junior engineer on a WW2 iberty ship for the Safmarine corporation in Cape Town South Africa in 1965.........we were docked outside the harbor due to an ammunition ship being offloaded and in the morning we raised stem to enter the harbor. All of a sudden the steam pressure started falling due to the boiler feed pump not getting a water supply from the feed water tank and it was later found that the feed water pipe to the pump was corroded at the water level and allowed air to be sucked into the pump that then failed to deliver water, The result was that the vacuum failed and the boiler shut down to lack of water.....luckily we were towed into harbor by the harbor tugs but if this had happened at sea we would have been dead in the water. The whole steam cycle relies on the turbines exhausting to a vacuum and if the vacuum fails the boiler shuts down and the turbines (high and low pressure) stop running which also affects the turbo generators and forced draught fans to the boiler.........a simple hole in the feed water pipe would have sunk the ship as there was no back up plan.
I find it interesting that these engines do not have a complete override mode for such emergencies. I work in the on-highway heavy diesel industry and emergency equipment such as fire engines by pass all emergency shutdowns when they are in emergency mode. Such as fighting a fire. In that mode the control panel will indicate there is a problem such as oil pressure or over temp. However in that mode, no matter the alarm, it will run until it self destructs if you let it.
I see many parallels to modern airplanes and trains. Computers are now everywhere and monitor the systems independently. But such surveillance systems have their own complexity on the one hand, but on the other hand they are just as stupid. It's not the first time that crews have been flooded with 100 or even 1000 error messages, all of which are legitimate but still not helpful for the crew. At this point you need experienced and well-trained crews who can deal with something like this. Things become difficult when such computer systems are designed not only to assist the crew but also to lock people out because the manufacturer assumes that the computer knows everything better, which is perhaps ok under normal circumstances but could even be fatal in certain circumstances
that is the main reasonb why (737 max issues aside) boeing planes are better than airbus the boeing approache to computers was "pilot should always be able to override easily"
I was wondering about something similar. I can think of many different tank configurations which would be completely immune to any sloshing short of capsizing. The tank could be vertical, or spherical, or an upside-down pyramid, also different setups with multiple tanks, there are loads of options and they went for a setup that's likely to cause problems related to sloshing.
Brilliant video dude! Great job. Lube-oil tanks are such an important part of an engine, yet seem so simple to the uninformed, they're often rushed over and taken for granted.
well done by the crew to keep the ship out of harms way. They say safety rules are often written in blood, but I'm glad the regs for oil tank depth can be revised without any
I think for critical components like main propulsion and steering there could be a master override and or redundant auxiliaries to supply minimum necessary function, like for lube oil have a auxiliary oil pump with a deeper pickup location or in its own reserve sump baffle in the tank that keeps a “no matter what” amount of oil in it. Even if the pump can’t supply nominal flow it could at least keep the engines lubricated enough to run for a day. I mean if it’s a choice between running aground because a sensor not seeing the correct pressure/level or rebuilding a couple engines the answer seems clear. Sensors fail ALL the time in every industry, so for emergency’s everything should have a manual override. Make using the override trigger a “deadline” at next port until a concern, cause, correction, confirm can happen. So using it doesn’t get abused.
One problem with alarms is the noise can addle the brain, preventing clear thinking. We had a blackout on one ship when I was off watch. I went to the engine control room where there were several engineers looking lost due to a continually ringing loud bell that they couldn't silence. It was the telegraph. I pulled it back to stop and the noise stopped. Brains then started functioning.
i don't know for sure but I'm told all the passengers had to pay extra for the value-added excitement! More to the point you explanation of a complex set of circumstances was superb. I have sub'd.
Something similar happened to a ferry in the Cook Strait of New Zealand not too long ago where the ship lost propulsion and began drifting towards the rocky coast during bad weather. Luckily, propulsions resumed at the last minute and they avoided a disaster. And now just as I am writing this I see in the news an Interislander has RUN AGROUND but luckily there was no passengers onboard.
The decision-making process, from cancelling port stops to managing the blackout crisis, shows the complexities and pressures faced by ship captains during adverse weather. 🤔🤔🤔
I have a picture of Viking Sky docked at Alta on the 23 march 2019 @ 16:57. I was on the Aurora which left before them. We did have some bad weather but nothing worth worrying about.
I know that this incident is probably better known as the “Viking Sky incident” but I dream of a world where it’s known as “the Scandinavian Cruise Ship Lube Incident” instead
I've done a little recreational piloting and the design of marine propulsion systems confuses and astounds me. It seems as if the designers have prioritized protecting the engines over protecting the _ship._ I noticed this with the Scott Kay bridge collision too. An aircraft engine is specifically _designed_ to melt explode and catch fire before it will shutdown. The throttle spring _opens_ the butterfly so that any failure will default the engine to full power. You can keep flying and land safely like this. It's not easy, but it's a lot better than being reduced to gliding with an idling engine. The ignition switch doesn't connect the ignition, because it's _always_ connected. The ignition switch shorts out the ignition so if that fails, the engine will be stuck running until you disconnect the fuel supply. The whole design principle is to force the engine to run no matter what until it physically can't run anymore. I just don't understand why marine propulsion plants aren't designed based on the same principles, since loss of propulsion on a ship is often very dangerous.
The Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority released a report video in English which Casual Navigation linked in the description for those interested.
It's sort of crazy that a ship with that size and number of people aboard could have such a glaring safety issue built into it's design. I mean even land based machines have baffles built in to ensure that oil, fuel, etc are still available when cornering. Hopefully something was retrofitted to this and other ships with the same design to ensure this would not happen again. Next time might not be so lucky.
The area of sea between Molde and Kristiansund is called Hustadvika and is known as one of the most dangerous stretches of open water in the world. The Bermuda Triangle is a walk in the park in comparison. The 'reception center' was the local sports hall, manned by volunteers and Red Cross.
To anyone wondering about how big those waves where. I've worked with a chief officer that was onboard one of the offshore supply vessels that responded to this emergency, he said it was the only time in his career that he observed another supply vessel completely vanish out of his sight behind a wave while up on the bridge.
I wonder about this design of a vast box where everything is just sloshing around. After all, we have invented those anti-sloshing walls for tanks a long time ago and for me it seems like a no-brainer to add some to the oil tanks. On the other hand, it looks like the whole tank design did never really see QA...
Well, the Hurtigruten ships that traffic these routes all year around decided prior to this to stay in port. Maybe Viking Sky should have done the same due to the weather
I read the accident report, where it was written that the watchkeeping engineer acknowledged a LALL sump tank alarm 2 seconds after it sounded which means the engineer didn't even look at the alarm. In the ship I work at, that wouldn't have happened as we fill the tanks regardless if there is oil or not whenever a LALL alarm comes, just to be sure, and we do manual soundings aswell 3 times a day.
I find strange you didn't mention the ship was sailing with only 3 of 4 engines in working conditions and that was in direct violation of the new-ish safe return to port requirements. Especially considering the fact that they knew bad weather was coming up.
I'm an automation worker who designs and programs these kind of alarm/supervision systems, and i've worked on three different boats along my career This video made so anxious, i was continuously trying to find if something like that could happen on one of my programs :|
TY, Great work on this, the perfect amount of simple, yet adult blends of imfo. I like it. In Canada we likely made , and sold that lube oil that was lacking in volume in the sump. Canola oil also goes to the US Navy, a big customer since 1912.. The industrial version of Canola (rapeseed) , not the version you eat, and cook with. Great story, Viking sky was lucky. * The wisdom missed is that if the bilge was sloshing, so too the lube oil in the sump. This will likely be taught in the right circles.
The Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority also looked into this accident. And they revealed some serious issues ( ruclips.net/video/AnjRoLwcKjo/видео.htmlsi=7GVfMcD0mp_pFjNT ) : Violation of Safe Return to Port regulations by 1. sailing into a storm with one engine out of four engines out of service 2. not having clear instructions for handling low lube level alarms 3. not having instructions monitoring / refilling lubelevel befor going into heavy seas. Technical issues the found 1. Poor lube oil tank design, the engine would have sucked air even when filled to maximum level and with maximum roll of the ship 2. lube oil level system was very inaccurate
My company installed 8 gas turbines on an FPSO (Floating Production Ship Offshore) 4 generators and 4 compressor sets. The generators were installed on the stern fan tail and the compressors in the center of the ship. The lube oil sumps on the Generators had a bottom section sump that went 10 feet below the top deck which the unit frames were mounted to. The oil pumps were large screw pumps that had their suctions 1 foot off of the bottom of that sump. Standing next to those units running during a storm was like been on a amusement ride. The fan tail was going up and down 35 to 40 feet on a 765 hull tied to an offloading rotating buoy near the bow. We did not suffer any shutdowns but that amount of action was bending the sensor float rods in the backup level sensors so we pulled that out after the storm and "Caged" the floats in a 6" tube to prevent the oil tank wave action from bending those float rods. The main tank sensor was ultra sonic and the chart from it during that storm was like a roller coaster plot. Fun times to say the least.
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With so many maritime horror stories, it's great hearing one where the crew acted professionally and diligently.
There’s a lot more competent crews like this out there than bad ones, but you just hear about the crashes you don’t always hear about the good skilled crews.
@@tylerdavis9826 I would like to watch videos about regular heavy machinery "situations". There was a marine machinist who shared headcam footage but I don't remember where I've seen that.
And somewhere with enough coastguard helicopters to take 400 people!
Bear in mind we don't get full reports when problems don't become a crisis. You're hearing about them *because* they're horror stories
@@lightcycler4806 It took 18 hours. Imagine flying those helicopters...
It feels nice to hear about such emergency situations where crew do everything they could right and in the end things turn out good. I liked watching Mayday for same reasons, alongside of the technical explanations of what went wrong.
eeey same, though i was addicted to "Air Crash Investigations" on discovery.
could never figure out what the difference was between it and Mayday. 🤷♂
FEEPS
@@Lcpl_Spartan Different title for same thing. Title changes depending where it was aired.
Yeah, hearing about how sideways things went and yet how the crew not only managed to save the vessel but also took action to ensure the safety of all onboard and were succesfull in all of that is incredible.
Well, read the accident report. It raises valuable questions like "Why do a bunch of engineers need 15 minutes to think that after a full day of low oil level warnings an automatic motor shut down caused by low oil pressure could be remedied by replenishing oil" or "Why was the standard course of action for a low oil level alarm to reduce the level which triggered the low oil level alarm instead of replenishing oil" or "Why was for 4 years everyone involved in this ships operation unconcerned that no one knew what the correct oil levels were" or "why did the engineers need 40 minutes to reconnect an engine to the power grid"
The engineers barely adverted a disaster they helped create by their own negligence.
I haven't been able to confirm this, and I've only heard my mother say it, but allegedly: The people on board this ship "enjoyed" (for a lack of a better word) this emergency situation because of how organized and structured it was. There was no confusion amongst them, and everyone did their job effectively. The people were surprised by the hospitality of the emergency responders. Acted almost like this wasn't an emergency at all. Just another day at work.
Because that's the kind of emergency rescue services would prefer to have. If you're starting evacuation when people are dying or at direct risk then you've probably started it too late
You know, if your job is emergency helicopter pilot, it probably would have been just another day at work.
Honestly it's like perfect ideal rescue conditions. Perfect rescue practice too.
@@el_quba 18 HOURS latter and the air lift of passengers was still going on.
That is insane to me and it shows how if it had turned bad alot of people would have died.
It was done earlier rather than later preventing a loss of life and having them on standby if they did lose power or something happened it would save time and resources for rescues
Lubrication professional here: you don't know how often people just ignore lube oil alarms, whether they're in system or from the analyst that lube is being sent to to be tested
Although not a ship but an automobile, comment reminds me of a workplace happening from several decades ago; a then grey haired fellow and I, who did not yet have grey hair, were having lunch when a then 20-something came in for their afternoon shift. Person said to us, "Hey would you guys know what that funny Aladdin's oil lamp light on the dashboard means?" I forget which one of us answered with, "Why ask us, just look in the owners manual, it will tell you." Their reply, "I shouldn't have to read a book, it should just say what it means." Old guy and I looked at each other then continued eating without further conversation.
@@scottfw7169 This is an attitude I just don't understand. It would take you minimal effort to just tell him what it is, and that it's a severe problem that he should take very seriously. Instead you pretend you don't know, leading to a possibility of him ruining his car's engine.
@@wurfyy Indeed it was a problem 20 something should have taken seriously enough to read the owners manual. And speaking of reading things, read my comment again looking for where old guy and I pretended we didn't know and see how it goes this time looking for something that does not exist. What's amusing here is that one person outright rejects sound counsel and refuses to read critical instructions to find what really does exist within the writing and another person reads a comment and inserts meaning in to the writing which contradicts historical reality.
Plus there is the data I decided did not need to be included for comment purposes that the same 20-something had also made it known they had no driver license and no intent to ever go get one, and that it was one of the cars their parents owned. Old guy and I concluded that it was logical for the consequences of 20 something's attitude to eventually catch up with 20 something, we were not the parents and it was not our job to save 20 something from 20 something's attitude problem. Again, note that 20 something outright dismissed and refused to act upon wise counsel to read the car's owners manual.
@@scottfw7169 The implication of telling the other person to find it in the owner's manual instead of just telling him is that you don't know, so unless you'd made it abundantly clear in prior interactions that you did not want to ever help that person with anything, yes you oh so absolutely did pretend that you didn't know. Also, the exact interpretation of this isn't really relevant anyway. The point is you knew, you could have easily told him, and you chose not to.
It takes a whole lot less effort to ask someone who knows than to look it up in a manual, so why would he not just ask ? Especially if he didn't drive to work early just in case there was a problem he needed to look up in a manual. If I have a problem with my car whilst driving to work, I'm gonna ask around during the shift, and then only after the shift am I gonna start going looking things up.
As for the guy not having and refusing to ever get a driver's license, I don't see how that's relevant. If he knows how to drive, he's not a danger to people around him, and it's his choice to get screwed any time he gets pulled over by the police.
@@wurfyy Interesting to hold that it is their choice to get screwed any time they get pulled over, since they refuse to get a driver license, while concurrently seeming to insist it is not equally their choice to get screwed via refusing to read the owners manual for the potentially deadly machinery they are operating and thereby learn critical details of its operation and servicing. The word dichotomy comes to mind.
Having too many alarms go off when something goes wrong is definitely a major issue. I sailed as an engine cadet on board a steam-powered LNGC. We could burn boil-off gas, fuel oil, or a combination of the two. Our plant was steam turbine propulsion and two steam-powered SSTGs, and one diesel SSDG for times that the boilers were offline, as well as the diesel emergency generator. Once, while coming into an anchorage after loading cargo, we had a fuel oil return valve fail on one of our two boilers. That failure triggered a cascade of failures that took the entire plant offline except for the SSDG. We got so many alarms that it took us 2 hours to figure out what happened and get one boiler back online. All this time, the cargo was still boiling off and the pressure in the tanks was increasing. We needed a boiler so we could burn that boil-off gas. I estimate we were half an hour to an hour from venting a bunch of natural gas to the atmosphere when we finally got one boiler working again.
Are there cryocoolers on ships like that, or are they just expected to burn or vent boil-off after being filled at the export terminal.
@@gregorymalchuk272 There are no coolers on an LNG ship. LNG it pre-cooled at the loading port and left like that. Boil-off is used as cheap fuel for the ship itself.
l remember a similar problem many years ago when l was engine cadet and the vessel lost propulsion due to losing condenser vacuum tripping the main propulsion plant.This was caused by a fouled main condenser air ejector orifice.The vessel was off the North Cape of Kiwi at the time.
This. I was reminded of the Qantas Flight 32 incident (Airbus A380) when watching the video. There, numerous pieces of debris from a engine that exploded damaged or destroyed a large number of non-engine subsystems when it hit the wing. This was relatively early in the era of aircraft systems being completely integrated into centralised control and error reporting interfaces. The crew was _swamped_ trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, what was still working, etc. They managed, but it was a close call.
Crew resource management and task saturation has become a big focus in aviation! I hope the marine industry has as much focus on this as well, especially with how much larger ships are.
10:27 Truly, the most dreadful alarm of all 😱
3:52 This is like, literally my nightmare. As someone who deals with production systems, suddenly having a thousand different alarms when I'm trying to diagnose the problem is the stuff of nightmares. All while dealing with a problem that can't be fixed, as passengers are taking emergency evacuations. That situation went on for 18 hours. Truly, a nightmarish situation.
It's insane that the engine oil tank had such a huge design flaw, especially considering that everyone knew about the risks.
I’ve read about how those types of alarm situations, and the hundreds of repeat alarms like in the video, are a factor in disasters. Either from crews shutting off sensors or just plain overwhelming the responders. 😓
Reminds me of Qantas Flight 32 accident. Where an engine exploded and destroyed a bunch of electrical systems. Causing the pilots to get hundreds of contradicting error and warning messages. One of those accidents where it’s astonishing how everything ended safely.
Yep I've been in blackouts on cruise ships, and you just get overwhelmed with alarms, as when one or more generator goes down it has a knock-on effect on every other system.
I cant even imagine how stressful it must had been to go through that, good grief, I'm glad it didn't end in a disaster
If they grounded it would have become the worst known maritime disaster for the decade equal to Costa Concordia just worse
As an IT engineer who has done on-call, your description of how transient alerts are handled rings many alarms...
I'm an ROV supervisor/pilot, and on one job I arrived at there were many spurious alarms. They were for a 'network error', and the current crew were doing exactly this, dismissing them without actually reading them. I told them they had to read EVERY alarm message, because buried in there, there might be a real one that would be alerting us to a potentially dangerous situation.
The first opportunity we had with a bit of a layup, I dived into the network and found the problem.
It's worth reading the actual report. The alarm system takes much of the blame, with irrelevant alarms mixed up with crucial ones and the crew becoming overwhelmed.
@@rob_lightbody Every engineer adds alarms "just in case", none dares remove any least they get blame for any incident. As a result, every alarm system has a tendency to become nothing more than background noise. I know one case IRL where it actually caused an accident (which luckily resulted in nothing but property damage) by distracting people from their work with constant irrelevant alarm spam to the point where a valve was left in an incorrect position.
Modern alarm systems tend to approach alarms with a "CYA" mentality, where they will add an alarm for every single possible issue, even if that "issue" could be the result of normal operation in somewhat unusual conditions. They don't have any sort of screening, because that fault MIGHT be a problem, but 99.99% of the time it's not, so it's kind of a waste of time to check it.
Sure, it seems odd to dismiss alarms like that, but I've worked on systems where it literally gives you a fault every few seconds, yet the machine is running perfectly fine. It's not even a matter of being lazy at that point, you simply don't have the time to investigate every fault, because by the time you might find the reason, you've already got another fault. It creates this mentality of "clear, and if it stays clear, disregard."
Part of the cause of the disastrous Therac-35 radiation therapy machine was how it constantly reported vague errors even during normal operation. When it alerted operators of a deadly problem, they didn't know what it meant and ignored it like the rest.
That “subscribe to casual navigation” alarm at 10:28 on the IAS made me crack up pretty hard.
That was very good. Glad you commented as I would have missed it.
And it came back multiple times. lol
I always like it when RUclipsrs can sneakily put that in. ThisOldTony (Machining/Welding/Comedy) does it a lot.
😠 ~ Google induced ego
The button should have been subscribe
Many military systems (generators, vehicles) have something called a battleshort that essentially overrides some things that would ordinarily shut down an engine. In normal operation, you'd want to shut down an engine to protect from overheating or loss of oil pressure but in a life-or-death situation, motor life becomes far less important than human life. It's interesting that the ship doesn't seem to have a last-effort "override everything just make the engines run" switch.
6:33 and 7:17 That is the manual mode they used.
@@christopherg2347 That's definitely not the same thing, manual does give you more control however, as it said they had to ignore overspeed and all that kind of stuff, engines still could have shut down because of something, battle short is like na bro send it to hell
@@blank.e5plus The thing was that this was the only operational engine half the time. They probably preferred to not turn it into scrap metal.
So they left some shutdowns on.
@@blank.e5plusIt sounds like it was basically the same thing. It was only once they had other generators running that DG2 shut down again due to low oil pressure. Maybe that was a lucky coincidence, but I think it is likely they were just overriding the shutdowns that would have happened before they had the other generators running and that shut down occurred because they stopped overriding it.
My first thought as well, no way I save the engine a rebuild over the risk of running ashore.
Shout-out to the helicopter pilots hoisting passengers in 60 knot winds. I'm a private pilot with ~125 flight hours flying small two-seat and four-seat planes, and landing those planes in even a 15 knot cross wind can quite challenging. I can scarcely imagine the skill required to fly in a north Atlantic storm with winds at 60 knots only a couple hundred feet above the water, next to a ship that would create a ton of unpredictable turbulence, and doing all that while keeping the helicopter stable enough to hoist passengers by rope from a ship that's also rolling and pitching. Not only that, but the pilots were able to do that again and again, for hours on end, in the middle of the night. The sheer skill required to do a rescue like that is astonishing, and as a relatively inexperienced pilot I am truly inspired by the work that they and other rescue pilots do.
No doubt coast guard pilots and rescue swimmers all clank when they walk.
ruclips.net/video/E63rQ2KgdRA/видео.html&ab_channel=DailyMail
Dane here. I distinctly remember how *massive* the rescue effort was. Our national rescue helicopters were sent to help - not in Norway, but in Sweden. Why? Because the Swedes had also sent all _their_ stuff to the Norwegians, who, in turn, had most of everything they had on the task. So there was a large readiness "gap" across the Nordics and, in particular, in the Baltic that had everyone scrambling to fill in; and so it became that Danish helicopters were guarding Swedish waters.
And I agree. I'm by no means a pilot, but I've nerded out about such stuff enough to have an appreciation of just how difficult doing that sort of work is, especially in those conditions. Huge kudos to everyone involved.
Coast guard pilots of any country must be both insane AND so highly talented and well trained that they're confident in their own insanity. Coasties have a bad rap as "that" branch of the military, but I don't know why. They aren't "just" the buoy scrapers, nor are they "just" the water police. They're more like the inverse of firefighters, I suppose like a lifeguard with a gun but turned up to a million. Instead of walking into a burning building to carry a child to safety, they'll swim down to Davy Jones Locker and pull you out of the icewater mansion, spitting in the face of death itself in the process.
And to top it all Off, a log carrier Got a blackout too just a few hundred meters from viking sky, giving the rescue team Even more pressure.
As a Norwegian, I remember this like it was yesterday
I can't understand why the lube tanks didn't have baffles to stop the extreme sloshing; even fuel tanks in cars have baffles, & racing cars have sort-of buffer tanks to stop this sort of thing happening.
Fuel tankers going down the highway have it too, so that the fuel sloshing doesn't cause an accident.
High performance cars have baffled oil pans so they don't suck air when cornering. It's pretty basic engineering.
I have read parts of the report from the incident. It describes the lube oil tank in very good detail, and the tank did in fact have a series of baffles. This is normal in maritime equipment. Even small hydraulic tanks have baffles to prevent sloshing.
@@bgb50 Oh ok, I learned something new, thanks.
@@bgb50 So the autor of the video is spreading lies, nothing new
Why aren't stories like this turned into short or even feature length films? This would be a great watch from the pov of the captain, crew, passenger and rescue workers!
Exactly, i thought the same thing. THIS would make a nice thriller for every Engineer/Machinist/technically interested person !
They made one for Deepwater Horizon. If you can tolerate it being a Mark Wahlberg movie, everything else is pretty great, especially the sound design.
Better not because they somehow have to cram a love story in there these days and ruin it
Getting the rights and permissions would probably cost so much that the studio wouldn't want to risk it.
Back in the 1970s, I watched a gripping documentary called The Poseidon Adventure. Absolutely terrifying for all concerned - the whole thing was upside down!
A function to warn engineers when an alarm persists for a certain time would also be a useful feature, to tell sloshing and actual low levels apart
The problem is that even sloshing can cause an engine shutdown if it's bad enough. If the suction of the pump is uncovered due to sloshing then the pump will suck air rather than oil, causing the oil pressure in the engine to drop which will shut down the engine.
Most of these type of alarms have a delay on them to prevent low level alarms during rolling
If you read the report the usual course of action for persistent low oil level alarms was to lower the level which triggered the alarm. No one knew what the required levels were.
But we’re looking at here is a design defect. That the sloshing can uncover the inlets. And even if they can’t, it means a safety system wasn’t designed to handle the sloshing
@@neilkurzman4907 The tanks were very poor design. A large shallow tank also does not need 150mm gap at the top. The safe vent is volume based, not height. It seems as if the designers used a generic figure, rather than calculate to match the application.
The deepened oil inlet should have been in the center of the tank, not on it's side. It would make the system much more resilient to rolling. Even 90 degrees of roll would not make the inlet dry when the tank is at least 50% full.
When the shoreline is visible, those low oil pressure cutout switches will be bridged faster than you can say mayday.
That's the point where you get out and push, if you ask me.
You might blow up your engine but at least the last thing you see won't be your ship being claimed by the breakers.
railroad enthusiast here, ehm, running out of oil is a well known occurrence for us, it used to be such a common occurrence we coined the phrase "hotbox" for whenever an axlebox would run out of oil and run hot. evidently, the most we get is a stalled train and a small fire, and im sure we haven't been so thankful to hear that as opposed to the ship based alternative
nja moderna bearing can be very unforgiving (instant bind and then the axle snaps off...)
Incredible thumbnail
omg I just realised that wtf...
nice boat
I am mature... I am mature...
ALL the cruise ships of these days share the same crucial flaw: no (or not enough) backup for emergency situations. Remember one minor fire in the switchboard room that caused the loss of all power on a carnival ship in the Caribbean for days. I'm not sure if any of the modern ships has physically separated engine rooms (or sections of them) which would help in the case of flooding or fire. Considering the number of passengers they are carrying (up to 6000), they are very vulnerable.
The safe return to port regulations require that a ship must have enough redundancy to be able to return to a port safely. Since one of Viking Skys engines was out of operation the ship wasn't even allowed to leave a port, since if it lost the other engine room (separated by a fire/waterproof bulkhead) it would not have been able to return to port. They sailed anyway, lol.
It's a simple thing, but I really like the visualization of the alarm screen. It helps contextualize what the issue looked like to the crew
One thing that was omitted here: Many other passenger ships, such as a few by Hurtigruten, which is a Norwegian coastal ferry/cruise ship operator (they've been at it since the 1850s, I think they know what they're doing), stayed in port during the storm. Why on earth did they continue going out in this weather with Viking Sky?
I always marveled that the ability of these huge engines to operate in rough conditions.
The most important issue of this incident is not discussed in this video: How to evacuate nearly 1000 passengers from a ship? Remember: This was an ideal situation: Good and well trained and very reliable crew handling the situation, nearly perfect radio connections, not far from the next big harbour, well organised well equiped and well trained norwegian rescue organisations - but if the engines hadnt restarted... it is simply not possible to evacuate more then 900 passengers plus crew via helicopter, it lasts too long - even when like here the flight time from the ship to the rescue station was only less then 20 minutes... even with multiple helicopters and such short distances like here the rescue organisations were only capable to transport less than 50% of the passengers off board... Simply too many passengers ant too less place in an rescue helicopter... If this accident had taken place in any other place, with no, or only one helicopter available, with longer flight distances from the shore to the ship and back, with no tugs nearly in time available in the region - this would have been a much more dangerous, perhaps deadly incident. The cruise industry has to anser the question how they plan to solve the question of evacuating ships with 1000, 2000 or even more passengers in case of emergencies during bad weather conditions.
What's to answer? They would use the lifeboats. It's not that they *couldn't* use the lifeboats, it's that a safer option was available. There's always risk; helicopters in bad weather winching passengers up is itself pretty risky.
@@benoithudson7235Yeah, this. In aircraft incidents, when a plane has landed with an emergency, the captain/crew _must_ take into consideration whether the aircraft is dangerous to stay aboard on (unless it's blatantly obvious). Reason being that, even in accidents where people otherwise haven't been hurt, an evacuation is likely to cause at least minor injuries - and sometimes major ones (it has to be mentioned though, that the speed requisite in airliner evacuations - ideally done in 90 seconds - doesn't help here, at all).
Same goes for ships, especially cruise (passenger) ships. A large proportion of the passengers are elderly, that's just the nature of the demographics that go on cruises. Imagine having to get a bunch of geriatrics with mobility issues into lifeboats (in a dangerous and stressful situation), and then those lifeboats getting launched into quite possibly rough seas - it's almost guaranteed to cause injury.
what a wild story. Weather v ship & crew. Engineering crew v automated control systems. Glad it all turned out okay!
I've seen the videos taken inside the ship. Have also been on a cruise where someone had to be airlifted. Most of the passengers were elderly, many with limited mobility, so that would have made evacuation more challenging than it already was for the conditions.
I got a viking cruises ad when I clicked this video lol
😂 algorithm perhaps.
@@Steven-dt5nu Oh, definitely.
Viking Cruises: "Now with deeper oil pans than ever before!"
ublock origin browser extension
If you have 1000 alarms going off at once, you alarm system needs a redesign. Task saturation is absolutely a thing, and if the alarms are going off that often, they WILL be ignored
I guess the engineers that designed it never heard of trap door baffles in oil pans before, something that's very common in automotive racing. they keep the oil from flowing away from the suction section of the pan in high angles.
so in my understanding there was no way for the engineers to press "ignore" on the lubrication alarms or to prevent engine shutdown? I can see why these systems are so strict about lubrication, but it's just crazy that you cannot simply override in case of an emergency. It's great that engines today can prevent self harm but there should be priorities to it
At time, they only had one DG responding at all. They last thing they wanted to do is destroy that one!
In the end, the error was a simple design mistake. Tanks that just weren't deep enough for the roll the ship experienced. Nothing they could have done, without making it worse.
No oil is not possible damage, it's guaranteed never work again damage.
There is zero benefit from "risking it"
@@dougaltolan3017 Sorry, but that's just blatantly false.
Occasional momentary low oil pressure != complete continued zero oil pressure.
Those shutdowns react on the former.
@@artforz please quantify "momentary" and "low". Otherwise you are gambling without knowing the odds.
Not so "blatant" after all.
@@dougaltolan3017 "it's guaranteed never work again damage." Who claimed that again?
I was a marine engineer(retired)for over 40 years i have worked with engines with basic minimum alarm systems that could be manually overridden in an emergency and operations continued under supervision,I have also sailed in tugs where the main engines were controlled by computers…i know which i prefer…just call me old fashioned.
It seems that someone got their calculations wrong regarding the oil sump tanks,no wonder it was such a confusing time for the ship’s engineers.
Having just been on a Norweigan fjords cruise, I'm glad this video didn't come out beforehand 😬
That one screen with all the errors on it? Yeah, that's why I'm a fan of having separate old-fashioned gauges for all critical systems. The screen works fine for normal operation, but when something seems amiss, engineers should be able to just get up from their chair, walk to a wall with gauges and meters and check the current and average oil levels for each engine. Preferably with some extra redundant measurements as well.
However that wouldn't have helped since the oil pressure dropped even at full oil level.
@@SBT300 Of course it needs more gauges than the ones I could come up with in the time it took to write a RUclips comment ;p
Thank you for this really detailed video.
I work with them in Bergen and I was looking the incident happening in direct when it happened and worried for my colleagues on board
Some piston aviation engines , some road cars, and many high end racing cars and racing boats, often undergo high G-forces from all different directions that make the oil slosh away from the oil pickups similar to the uncontrolled sloshing that caused the near-disaster experienced by the Viking Sky. To combat this type of oil starvation, they use an oiling system called a "dry sump" system. A dry sump uses a pump or pumps to scavenge oil from the sump, treat it to filtration and cooling, then send it to a storage tank. Oil is continuously drawn from this tank and pumped into the engine while it runs thus ensuring the engine an uninterrupted supply of oil regardless of how much the aircraft, vehicle or vessel moves about. The size and shape of the sumps under the engine are designed to efficiently REMOVE oil from the sump for transfer to the storage tank. The storage tank can be made any size that will fit the machine to make sure the engine never goes dry.
This technology is anything but new. Aircraft have been using systems like this since at least the 1930s and maybe before. That's why it's surprising that oceangoing vessels like the Viking Sky still use the wet sump method for these large, expensive, and difficult to repair ship engines. Does anybody here know if indeed there are large ships like this one that use the dry sump method? Is the Viking Sky unusual in this respect?
Most marine engines are effectively "dry sump". The oil sump is a double bottom tank under the engine but not part of the engine itself. Oil drains from the engine through valves which can be used to isolate the sump tank in the event of grounding. Double bottom tanks though still have the issue that they are wide and low in height so still suffer from oil surge.
The Viking sky dit have a dry sump, like most maritime engines. Sloshing is a very well known issue on ships due to a lot of movement. In this case the tank had a design flaw wich made this happen. There is also procedures to prevent this problem before going into bad weather. I understand it can look like a wet sump in the illustrations. In reality its a dry sump that is located directly under the engine like @davidebesant said. Other than that your information sounds solid.
Simple, sky and water don’t mix
Shake em harder
@@thebomber7641Don't worry. Be shaker.
Would be nice if professional shipping could reach the same safety standards and redundancy requirement of professional aviation. But i guess they simply cannot match the few times around the world standard of testing as well as all the other requirements because of the associated cost.
The difference is if a ship loses all engines, there's a good chance it can be repaired or passengers and crew evacuated with no loss of life, depending on weather and proximity shore, obviously. If a plane loses all engines, options are limited and in the likely case power can't be restored, there is no chance for survival depending on the initial altitude of the plane. There's a reason it's called the *Miracle* on the Hudson.
@@eaglescout1984 There is plenty of chance of survival, usually. A plane that loses its engines becomes a glider, it still has control, and it can land in the nearest reasonably flat area. Even helicopters have options, they can autorotate. The "miracle" on the Hudson was no miracle, that's just politician speak. It absolutely was good piloting, no doubt about that, but odds are the vast majority of pilots could have done it. Simulations showed that they probably could have even put it back on a runway, although ditching in the river was the safer bet.
The issue with aircraft is that if the engines are gonna die, then it's likely to happen shortly after the takeoff, in which case the plane doesn't have a lot of altitude or speed to work with, which means they have to land on whatever is in front of them. If it's really unsuitable for landing, then yeah, that's bad, but if you have for instance a lake there, then it'll take some effort to mess it up.
@@wurfyy Oh please. Putting it on a runway was only possible when the sim pilots had prior knowledge of the accident rather than take the time to assess the problem before making a decision. And you're seriously overestimating the amount of "reasonably flat area" that they might be able to reach.
Just hire some folks from McDonnell and you can now have Boeing quality ships. :)
@@AdmiralBlackstar First, I'm not sure that's true. Bear in mind that those simulations were done professionally, for the purpose of investigation. The time it took to assess the situation is something they can account for, perhaps by only giving the pilots control past a certain point.
Secondly, I don't even think trying to put it on a runway would have been a good idea, since it would have left much less margin for error for not much benefit other than monetary. Rather, my point was that even with less than a kilometer of altitude, they already had multiple good options.
Third, the pilots in that situation had loads of options for where they could land their plane. LaGuardia, Teterboro, Hudson, East River, hell, Hackensack in a pinch. And that's just what I can clearly identify as options on the map. Unlikely that the city provided any more particularly attractive options, but I won't rule it out, either. Some of the roads probably could have worked.
And fourth, my point was more broad than just the Hudson case. If the engines cut at altitude, like in the Gimli Glider case, then the aircraft has at least a solid 100km in each direction, which is almost always going to be plenty for finding a reasonably flat place to land. Whilst usually these things happen right after takeoff and the options are far more limited than even in the Hudson case, the statement I was disputing is that if a plane loses all power, then there is no chance of survival. That's patently false, there is plenty of chance of survival - in fact, you're probably going to be fine.
3:55 I like the little attention to detail with the scroll bar shrinking to show the list is expanding off screen
I’d just like to say I don’t think I’ve found interest in a channel faster than here, your explanation of things is amazing and the graphics I feel are what make it the best. Top tier content.
I just can't imagine the pressure put on the chef engineer that day. It remember me the sinking of the Explorer were one engineer Macgyver a hand control fuel pump to restart the generator.
This is the kind of disaster I like: no loss of life, and then no loss of material (rip starboard anchor).
I guess the roll period would be too long for baffles to make much sense, huh? Maybe complicated ones that allowed oil to move to the sump, but not away from it as easily?
Yes, you would think an effective baffling system(smaller holes?) would not be that difficult to design for a ship known to be working the North sea/Atlantic. The "free surface effect"(simply put, liquids sloshing around in tanks) is generally undesirable in any conditions. Granted I'm no marine engineer, but you would think there would be no down side to "tightly" baffled sumps and tanks with some innovative thinking. This obviously has not been the first time a ship has had to deal with such conditions.
Laughed out loud when that unique alarm was logged - nicely done!
Nice to see a new video after a while. Nice secret advertisement of your channel
Don't worry. Be nice.❤.
I worked as a junior engineer on a WW2 iberty ship for the Safmarine corporation in Cape Town South Africa in 1965.........we were docked outside the harbor due to an ammunition ship being offloaded and in the morning we raised stem to enter the harbor. All of a sudden the steam pressure started falling due to the boiler feed pump not getting a water supply from the feed water tank and it was later found that the feed water pipe to the pump was corroded at the water level and allowed air to be sucked into the pump that then failed to deliver water, The result was that the vacuum failed and the boiler shut down to lack of water.....luckily we were towed into harbor by the harbor tugs but if this had happened at sea we would have been dead in the water.
The whole steam cycle relies on the turbines exhausting to a vacuum and if the vacuum fails the boiler shuts down and the turbines (high and low pressure) stop running which also affects the turbo generators and forced draught fans to the boiler.........a simple hole in the feed water pipe would have sunk the ship as there was no back up plan.
Thats because Liberty ships were designed as an almost single use vessel
Love your content mate. You are amazing.
I ❤ only the almighty Allah.
I find it interesting that these engines do not have a complete override mode for such emergencies. I work in the on-highway heavy diesel industry and emergency equipment such as fire engines by pass all emergency shutdowns when they are in emergency mode. Such as fighting a fire. In that mode the control panel will indicate there is a problem such as oil pressure or over temp. However in that mode, no matter the alarm, it will run until it self destructs if you let it.
I see many parallels to modern airplanes and trains. Computers are now everywhere and monitor the systems independently. But such surveillance systems have their own complexity on the one hand, but on the other hand they are just as stupid. It's not the first time that crews have been flooded with 100 or even 1000 error messages, all of which are legitimate but still not helpful for the crew. At this point you need experienced and well-trained crews who can deal with something like this. Things become difficult when such computer systems are designed not only to assist the crew but also to lock people out because the manufacturer assumes that the computer knows everything better, which is perhaps ok under normal circumstances but could even be fatal in certain circumstances
that is the main reasonb why (737 max issues aside) boeing planes are better than airbus
the boeing approache to computers was "pilot should always be able to override easily"
There needs to be an error message priority system. The most serious errors should be at the top.
What a wild recovery! Thanks for sharing this. Super interesting
Damn the overspeed warnings and full speed ahead! Crew put the work in that day.
Thank you CN for making the videos and thank you patrons for paying them!
This was such a great video. I've always wanted to know a lot more about what happened on that trip.
Would baffles in the tank have helped stop the oil sloshing around?
I was wondering about something similar. I can think of many different tank configurations which would be completely immune to any sloshing short of capsizing. The tank could be vertical, or spherical, or an upside-down pyramid, also different setups with multiple tanks, there are loads of options and they went for a setup that's likely to cause problems related to sloshing.
I remember reading about this mess on the news!
Brilliant video dude! Great job. Lube-oil tanks are such an important part of an engine, yet seem so simple to the uninformed, they're often rushed over and taken for granted.
well done by the crew to keep the ship out of harms way. They say safety rules are often written in blood, but I'm glad the regs for oil tank depth can be revised without any
I think for critical components like main propulsion and steering there could be a master override and or redundant auxiliaries to supply minimum necessary function, like for lube oil have a auxiliary oil pump with a deeper pickup location or in its own reserve sump baffle in the tank that keeps a “no matter what” amount of oil in it. Even if the pump can’t supply nominal flow it could at least keep the engines lubricated enough to run for a day. I mean if it’s a choice between running aground because a sensor not seeing the correct pressure/level or rebuilding a couple engines the answer seems clear.
Sensors fail ALL the time in every industry, so for emergency’s everything should have a manual override.
Make using the override trigger a “deadline” at next port until a concern, cause, correction, confirm can happen. So using it doesn’t get abused.
Because I googled it:
1 shackle = 15 fathoms = 90ft = 27.4m
10 shackles = 270m = 2.5 football fields (american football)
One problem with alarms is the noise can addle the brain, preventing clear thinking. We had a blackout on one ship when I was off watch. I went to the engine control room where there were several engineers looking lost due to a continually ringing loud bell that they couldn't silence. It was the telegraph. I pulled it back to stop and the noise stopped. Brains then started functioning.
i don't know for sure but I'm told all the passengers had to pay extra for the value-added excitement!
More to the point you explanation of a complex set of circumstances was superb. I have sub'd.
Thank God that the engineers were able to save the day, and hopefully fix the problems so they never happen again. Hats off to the hard working crew!
Something similar happened to a ferry in the Cook Strait of New Zealand not too long ago where the ship lost propulsion and began drifting towards the rocky coast during bad weather. Luckily, propulsions resumed at the last minute and they avoided a disaster. And now just as I am writing this I see in the news an Interislander has RUN AGROUND but luckily there was no passengers onboard.
Shoutout to Norway though. That was a well executed rescue effort.
The decision-making process, from cancelling port stops to managing the blackout crisis, shows the complexities and pressures faced by ship captains during adverse weather. 🤔🤔🤔
I have a picture of Viking Sky docked at Alta on the 23 march 2019 @ 16:57.
I was on the Aurora which left before them. We did have some bad weather but nothing worth worrying about.
I know that this incident is probably better known as the “Viking Sky incident” but I dream of a world where it’s known as “the Scandinavian Cruise Ship Lube Incident” instead
Very well presented, allowing the landlubber laymen to understand the issues.
0:50 hearing a list of Norwegian ports read in a British accent is fantastic
I've done a little recreational piloting and the design of marine propulsion systems confuses and astounds me. It seems as if the designers have prioritized protecting the engines over protecting the _ship._ I noticed this with the Scott Kay bridge collision too.
An aircraft engine is specifically _designed_ to melt explode and catch fire before it will shutdown. The throttle spring _opens_ the butterfly so that any failure will default the engine to full power. You can keep flying and land safely like this. It's not easy, but it's a lot better than being reduced to gliding with an idling engine. The ignition switch doesn't connect the ignition, because it's _always_ connected. The ignition switch shorts out the ignition so if that fails, the engine will be stuck running until you disconnect the fuel supply. The whole design principle is to force the engine to run no matter what until it physically can't run anymore.
I just don't understand why marine propulsion plants aren't designed based on the same principles, since loss of propulsion on a ship is often very dangerous.
The Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority released a report video in English which Casual Navigation linked in the description for those interested.
It's sort of crazy that a ship with that size and number of people aboard could have such a glaring safety issue built into it's design. I mean even land based machines have baffles built in to ensure that oil, fuel, etc are still available when cornering. Hopefully something was retrofitted to this and other ships with the same design to ensure this would not happen again. Next time might not be so lucky.
The area of sea between Molde and Kristiansund is called Hustadvika and is known as one of the most dangerous stretches of open water in the world. The Bermuda Triangle is a walk in the park in comparison.
The 'reception center' was the local sports hall, manned by volunteers and Red Cross.
the "LUBE OIL" in giant text on the thumbnail is funny
To anyone wondering about how big those waves where. I've worked with a chief officer that was onboard one of the offshore supply vessels that responded to this emergency, he said it was the only time in his career that he observed another supply vessel completely vanish out of his sight behind a wave while up on the bridge.
I wonder about this design of a vast box where everything is just sloshing around. After all, we have invented those anti-sloshing walls for tanks a long time ago and for me it seems like a no-brainer to add some to the oil tanks. On the other hand, it looks like the whole tank design did never really see QA...
Thank you so much for this interesting video. You must have spent weeks on the animations, they are superb!
Well, the Hurtigruten ships that traffic these routes all year around decided prior to this to stay in port. Maybe Viking Sky should have done the same due to the weather
My big question is: why the heck wasn't the crank cases on those units baffled?
What a great visual explanation as to what happened , very interesting . Hope they increased the depth of the oil tanks
Wow - that was a close call! Well done engineers. Respect. 👍🇦🇺
Fantastic video thank you!
Already stressed out when multiple alarms go off on the simulator imagine happening IRL
I read the accident report, where it was written that the watchkeeping engineer acknowledged a LALL sump tank alarm 2 seconds after it sounded which means the engineer didn't even look at the alarm.
In the ship I work at, that wouldn't have happened as we fill the tanks regardless if there is oil or not whenever a LALL alarm comes, just to be sure, and we do manual soundings aswell 3 times a day.
The El Faro had similar issues when it sank. The primary problem was that the Captain said straight into a hurricane.
I find strange you didn't mention the ship was sailing with only 3 of 4 engines in working conditions and that was in direct violation of the new-ish safe return to port requirements. Especially considering the fact that they knew bad weather was coming up.
Where's Bowdow? And how did they get to Kristiansand from Trondheim before stopping in Stavanger?
I'm an automation worker who designs and programs these kind of alarm/supervision systems, and i've worked on three different boats along my career
This video made so anxious, i was continuously trying to find if something like that could happen on one of my programs :|
Thank you fro the great explanation!
Greetings!
Anthony
Excellent video, thank you.
TY, Great work on this, the perfect amount of simple, yet adult blends of imfo. I like it. In Canada we likely made , and sold that lube oil that was lacking in volume in the sump. Canola oil also goes to the US Navy, a big customer since 1912.. The industrial version of Canola (rapeseed) , not the version you eat, and cook with. Great story, Viking sky was lucky.
* The wisdom missed is that if the bilge was sloshing, so too the lube oil in the sump. This will likely be taught in the right circles.
Superb analysis and graphics
I live in Kristiansund, i remember seeing her in the port, she looked tired.
So, what has happened since 2019 in regards to new design requirements for oil sumps and automated shutdown equipment?
Evacuated 400 passengers in 18 hours is crazy. Those pilots must have been knackered.
I was bored out of my mind and you just uploaded. Thanks :D
Lmfao I got a viking sky ad during the video
The Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority also looked into this accident. And they revealed some serious issues ( ruclips.net/video/AnjRoLwcKjo/видео.htmlsi=7GVfMcD0mp_pFjNT ) :
Violation of Safe Return to Port regulations by 1. sailing into a storm with one engine out of four engines out of service 2. not having clear instructions for handling low lube level alarms 3. not having instructions monitoring / refilling lubelevel befor going into heavy seas.
Technical issues the found 1. Poor lube oil tank design, the engine would have sucked air even when filled to maximum level and with maximum roll of the ship 2. lube oil level system was very inaccurate
My company installed 8 gas turbines on an FPSO (Floating Production Ship Offshore) 4 generators and 4 compressor sets. The generators were installed on the stern fan tail and the compressors in the center of the ship. The lube oil sumps on the Generators had a bottom section sump that went 10 feet below the top deck which the unit frames were mounted to. The oil pumps were large screw pumps that had their suctions 1 foot off of the bottom of that sump. Standing next to those units running during a storm was like been on a amusement ride. The fan tail was going up and down 35 to 40 feet on a 765 hull tied to an offloading rotating buoy near the bow. We did not suffer any shutdowns but that amount of action was bending the sensor float rods in the backup level sensors so we pulled that out after the storm and "Caged" the floats in a 6" tube to prevent the oil tank wave action from bending those float rods. The main tank sensor was ultra sonic and the chart from it during that storm was like a roller coaster plot. Fun times to say the least.
The system need to somehow prioritize alarms if there so many.
"Stabilizer malfunction" is such a common problem for fictional spaceships it's refreshing to see it in a real world "wet" ship.