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The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part II

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Vixen said:
No scientist worth their salt handed a piece of metal that clearly looks like it has been blown to pieces will make a categorical statement at a press conference to that effect.
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No scientist worth their salt would write the following:

Vixen said:
A scientist will use the term 'compatible with' because they use statistical probability to evaluate their results and thus use confidence intervals and ANOVA to calculate the odds on getting their results completely randomly, so it always will be X%/100% as there will always be a degree of freedom.
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What do you think 'a degree of freedom' is? How do scientists/mathematicians/statisticians use the term?

Vixen said:
I don't think my personal information is any business of yours and as a practising professional I am loathe to share my professional credentials on a public chat forum for obvious reasons. You have no authority to cancel out my credentials just because you disagree with me.
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You are not being judged here based on your personal information. No one is interested in doxing you here. When challenged on the erroneous and ill-informed statements you make about science, you often resort to citing your credentials. "I am a scientist". If you are going to claim experience relevant to the topics at hand, don't be surprised if you are challenged on your credentials. You're bringing them up, not us. We are not trying to cancel your accounting credentials, but the idea that your accounting work makes you a 'scientist' is laughable.
 
Axxman300 said:
The one thing in this situation I fully understand is wave action.

I don't care if you're sailing a squid boat or an Nimitz-Class aircraft carrier, there is a wave out there with your name on it. This is where basic seamanship comes into play and where the Estonia's captain failed. From all I've read it's a bad idea to sail headlong into the wind in a storm at flank speed, which is what he did. The other ferries (the ones that didn't sink) were sailing at slower speeds and at a heading which kept the wind slightly to their port beam. The fact that ALL those other ships in the area that night were doing the same thing should stand out as to the underlying cause of the Estonia's demise.

People confuse rogue waves with giant waves, and while most are on the large size it is really about the power and surge pushing that wave. Over past past few years forecasters here in California have added the phrase "Sneaker Waves" to the lexicon which are waves of average height but hit the shore with unusual power that can send them sweeping sixty to ninety meters up the beach.

Couple wave action with a poorly maintained bow section and an incompetent captain and you get big artificial reef.
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So I guess the wave in this case was the 'sucker punch' one?
 
Vixen said:
I am sure a highly qualified Materials Science expert is quite aware of that.
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And it was, in fact, mentioned that the history of the components' exposure to ordinary heat sources would have to be known before concluding what caused the observations. You're the one jumping to the conclusion that it must be a "detonation" (conflating two dissimilar concepts) and opining that fractured metal must have been "blown apart."
 
LondonJohn said:
It's not really a mystery at all.

It's an instance of a captain who took unnecessary risks with his ship and its passengers, who (almost certainly) was derelict in his duty to know if his crew were having any significant problems wrt critical equipment/mechanisms, and who very probably froze and mis-reacted when confronted - for (probably) the very first time in his career - with a major emergency.


The world of air accident investigation is sadly littered with instances of captains and first officers - even highly-commended and highly-experienced ones - who a) had become lazy or negligent wrt sticking to the correct protocols/checklists/procedures/etc; and/or b) panicked or froze or reacted improperly (often making the original problem worse still) when, after having flown for perhaps decades with nothing more than the odd minor incident, they were suddenly confronted with either an immediately-huge or rapidly-escalating problem which required them to think clearly and take the correct course of action. A textbook case in point would be AF447. And I'd argue that airline pilots are, as a general rule, deemed to be of higher calibre than merchant ship captains.
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In such an accident, the aircraft is retrieved and carefully piece together, to find out the cause of it (cf TWA800). Given a diver claimed to have seen a bullet wound to Capt Andresson's head and an unknown person on the bridge, should it not have been declared a 'crime scene' (or potential one)?
 
Vixen said:
So I guess the wave in this case was the 'sucker punch' one?
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Not necessarily. Ordinary, healthy ships are damaged by wave action, but the waves in question are rare. Conversely, if a ship has been exposed for many years to the kind of loading that results in metal fatique, failure will eventually occur under circumstances well within design and operational parameters. Yes, there is a discontinuity -- or nonlinearity if you prefer -- to that kind of behavior. Everything appears all right until suddenly it isn't. But that doesn't mean that some suspiciously overwhelming condition suddenly arose. It doesn't have to be an unusually strong storm wave to precipitate failure under degrading capacity.

Suppose I have an account that must maintain a minimum balance in order to avoid penalty. Let's say I've neglected that account, and a small fee is being levied against it every month that I haven't noticed. When the debit of that fee on some particular day causes the balance to drop below the minimum balance, a penalty suddenly becomes due. That's a sudden change in the state of the account. It's not because the periodic fee was large. It's that it was relentless over time, and eventually reached an enforceable point.
 
Myriad said:
Yes, that seems quite the mystery. How could the person holding this important position of trust and authority have been so incompetent? What could possibly explain it?




Ah, there's the answer! "High-class." That means "able to secure a position of trust and authority (especially if it's either very high-paying or involves receiving frequent ritual gestures of respect from others) without actually being competent to do the job."

It would appear his top officers were similarly "high-class," while most of the rest of the crew, perhaps not very good at their jobs either but at least able to tell the difference between a floating ship and a sinking one, were able to survive. This is often the outcome when incompetent "high-class" leaders face an emergency that doesn't respect their "class" but instead puts their actual abilities to the test.
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Well, the average Estonian back in 1994 was earning something like GBP238 pcm whilst a cruise ferry captain in the Baltic was easily earning €4,000 +, so there would have been immense competition for that type of job. It tends to favour those from wealthier families as they can better afford the long lead time it takes to get the 'captaincy' certificate (six years in Andresson's case) and then vocational qualification actually on the job.

I think the JAIC should have made some effort to understand what happened tp Andresson during this time. Where was he? Why was he not in control of events?
 
Vixen said:
In such an accident, the aircraft is retrieved and carefully piece together...
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No, not usually. Yes, the wreckage is examined, but large-scale reassembly is rare. Examination in situ is often more revealing, and bench examinations of individual recovered components is de rigueur.

...cf TWA800
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That was an anomalous case. That's the only commercial crash in which forensic reassembly was conducted to that degree. The recorders are the highest priority items. When those are recovered and analyzed, then it's determined to what extent inspection of the wreckage is needed.
 
JayUtah said:
Not necessarily. Ordinary, healthy ships are damaged by wave action, but the waves in question are rare. Conversely, if a ship has been exposed for many years to the kind of loading that results in metal fatique, failure will eventually occur under circumstances well within design and operational parameters. Yes, there is a discontinuity -- or nonlinearity if you prefer -- to that kind of behavior. Everything appears all right until suddenly it isn't. But that doesn't mean that some suspiciously overwhelming condition suddenly arose. It doesn't have to be an unusually strong storm wave to precipitate failure under degrading capacity.

Suppose I have an account that must maintain a minimum balance in order to avoid penalty. Let's say I've neglected that account, and a small fee is being levied against it every month that I haven't noticed. When the debit of that fee on some particular day causes the balance to drop below the minimum balance, a penalty suddenly becomes due. That's a sudden change in the state of the account. It's not because the periodic fee was large. It's that it was relentless over time, and eventually reached an enforceable point.
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Yes. It's "the straw that broke the camel's back", revisited.

It seems that there are some participants in this thread who understand both the concept and its application to the matter under discussion. And there are some who don't.
 
LondonJohn said:
By the way, does anyone know exactly which parts of the bow visor were examined in this recent investigation?

Were they, for example, parts of the bottom lock? Or parts of the metal skin of the visor itself? Or parts of the reinforcing struts etc?

The answer to this question has obvious implications in terms of figuring out what actually happened that night.
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You can see this in the Fokus group video here:



They were allowed to go to Karlskrona where the bow visor has been dismantled and kept in boxes, with no allowed access hitherto now. They identified the key parts they had analysed in advance of worthy of further investigation. They then turned to an independent Material Sciences laboratory to analyse the panels.

The atlantic lock, is not available as the Swedish head of the JAIC engineering threw it back onto the seabed claiming it was 'too heavy' for the helicopter.
 
Vixen said:
... Given a diver claimed to have seen a bullet wound to Capt Andresson's head and an unknown person on the bridge, should it not have been declared a 'crime scene' (or potential one)?
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"Given" is a dangerous word to use considering the lack of primary sources being used. Was the diver sufficiently confident in what they think they saw that they reported it to the police?
 
Here_to_learn said:
If you have a survival suite next to you, it's a minute or so to get in it. If it's not next to you, maybe you don't spend the time to go looking for it if you think that what you are doing is important.

The passengers of course does not have that option.

Some crew apparently found it possible. For those that didn't survive, we don't know if they chose not to get in a suite, didn't find one, couldn't for some reason, or did not even understand the situation until it was too late.
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In addition to this, a couple of the surviving crew claimed they were running up and down from deck 0 to deck 7/8, but their cabins were quite high up so if they really were sorting things out on deck 0, they must have taken time out to make their way to their cabins to change into them, not trying to rectify matters. Yet the passengers were in the dark the whole time.
 
Vixen said:
No, it is not the slightest bit impressive.
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I disagree. My grasp of mathematics is probably not good enough to become an accountant without a lot of hard work, and I have done very little training on accounting ever (I have some basic knowledge of accounting software and I'm not innumerate) but I couldn't call myself an accountant.

Being an accountant IS impressive, particularly if you are at the level of US CPA equivalent.

It still doesn't make you a scientist though.
 
JayUtah said:
No, not usually. Yes, the wreckage is examined, but large-scale reassembly is rare. Examination in situ is often more revealing, and bench examinations of individual recovered components is de rigueur.



That was an anomalous case. That's the only commercial crash in which forensic reassembly was conducted to that degree. The recorders are the highest priority items. When those are recovered and analyzed, then it's determined to what extent inspection of the wreckage is needed.
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Bear in mind also that I only brought up air accident investigation in order to refute Vixen's claim that it was a "mystery" as to why the Estonia's master and crew didn't apparently act properly in accordance with procedures as the disaster was unfolding: I was pointing out that there have been many, many air accidents where even highly-rated cabin crew either a) have become somewhat slapdash wrt protocols/processes/procedures, and/or b) have frozen or panicked or acted otherwise irrationally when suddenly confronted with an emergency.

And Vixen's "response" to this was to talk about the reassembly of aircraft wreckage by accident investigators.......
 
Vixen said:
You can see this in the Fokus group video here:



They were allowed to go to Karlskrona where the bow visor has been dismantled and kept in boxes, with no allowed access hitherto now. They identified the key parts they had analysed in advance of worthy of further investigation. They then turned to an independent Material Sciences laboratory to analyse the panels.

The atlantic lock, is not available as the Swedish head of the JAIC engineering threw it back onto the seabed claiming it was 'too heavy' for the helicopter.
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That doesn't really help much at all, I'm afraid.

The only reference to whereabouts on the bow visor these sample pieces are from - as far as I can see from that video - is the self-referencing "These samples are from the area of the bow visor where our experts said an explosion would have occurred".

Is there anything which actually shows, in pictorial/photographic form, precisely where on the bow visor the samples came from?


(Oh and why did you put "too heavy" in inverted commas? Are you trying to imply that the bottom lock actually wasn't too heavy to be lifted by helicopter, but that they invented that reason in order to conceal the fact that they wanted it to remain on the seabed for other, malevolent reasons....?)
 
MarkCorrigan said:
It's not ignorance. You aren't a scientist. That's fine! Neither am I.
Just because your ego can't take being told that you're not a scientist doesn't make you one.
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You don't get to tell me what my identity or experiences are. Nothing to do with ego. I couldn't care less what put downs you sling my way. Praise or criticism is all equal to me.

Note I haven't hurled abuse at you.
 
Vixen said:
You don't get to tell me what my identity or experiences are. Nothing to do with ego. I couldn't care less what put downs you sling my way. Praise or criticism is all equal to me.

Note I haven't hurled abuse at you.
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You aren't a scientist.
1) Having a B.Sc. degree does not qualify you as a scientist.
2) Having written 15 lab reports in school does not qualify you as a scientist
3) Working as an accountant does not mean you are a scientist.
4) You've written countless posts here on ISF demonstrating your ignorance of basic concepts in a broad range of scientific fields.
 
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