Martin Varsavsky´s Ruminations

When Spanair flight 5022 had its fatal accident in which most passengers died I said in my blog that most likely the accident was because the pilots made the tragic error of forgetting to take off with flaps.  I mentioned that I was a pilot myself and could see how the pilots paid for these horrible mistake with their lives and that of most passengers.  As you can see then some people criticized me with comments like this which argue that I had no business commenting on this tragedy before the official investigation.  

Apeciado Martin,
me defraudas con este post. Con opiniones como la tuya nos evitariamos investigaciones de accidentes tan tediosas y ..sin importancia.
Te crei con algo de “sentido comun”, pero ya sabes lo que dicen, que “el sentido”por ser “comun”, nos toca a muy poco a cada uno.
Un poco de rigor y respeto; y no subir el trafico de tu blog a costa de desgracias de este tipo.
Un saludo, poco cordial.
Q

But after a long investigation I was right.  The pilots took off without flaps which is an incredible mistake to make, but humans are humans and we make mistakes.  Planes should simply not take off without flaps and many don’t. I don’t blame the pilots fully in my post because I think engineering should have prevented this.

Well the same is true with cruise ships.  Engineering should have and could have averted this tragedy.  Ships should also have ways to stop themselves when they are in collision course with land.

Before the investigation this is what I think happened and of course I may be wrong.  I believe that the captain of Costa Concordia was steering straight towards the Island of Giglio.  He was doing what in aviation is called “controlled flight into terrain”.  Something like flying into a mountain unaware that the mountain is there in this case either into the island without knowing the whole island was there or trying to sail very close to the island and ending up on the island only realizing when it was too late. This is the theory of showboating. You can see this from Marine Traffic.  I think the captain lies when he says he hit an uncharted rock.   He collided with the coastline either because he was just not at the helm or having dinner or else because he was at the helm and he wanted to show off his steering skills by going very close to the island of Giglio and came too close.  You can see the coastline in detail if you download a software called Navionics Mediterranean in your iPhone, Android or iPad. I have it because I sail and I am the skipper of my own sailboat. Again, I am no expert in this type of vessels but have sailed enough to understand that somebody could steer a huge ship into an island and that ships should have systems to prevent this.  In this software you can see that there could not be uncharted rocks because of the type of coast. That Island is not like say the coast between Corsica and Sardinia near the Island of Cavallo which is full of rocks and you can very well have an uncharted rock.  That coast line goes deep very quickly, to 100 meters or more.  The island of Giglio is like the top of a hill or mountain and most likely Francesco Schettino the skipper just drove into it either because he was “asleep at the wheel” or because he was trying on purpose to sail so close to the coast that he hit ground.