MAJOR UPDATE
Commander Matt Weingart, United States Navy, had a very, very bad day on Monday. You see, Cdr Weingart is the Commanding Officer of the 366 foot, 6,300 ton Los Angeles class, fast attack submarine USS Newport News.
The submarine is a part of the the US Navy's Carrier Strike Group 8, which is built around the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. They had been dispatched to the Indian Ocean in support of US operations in Somalia.
When the USS Newport News was transiting the 34 mile wide Strait of Hormuz something clearly went wrong. There are conflicting reports as to exactly what the state of the boat was at the time. Some say it was surfacing, others say it was trimmed-down on the surface, with only its sail visible.
In any case, it hit the 300,000 ton Japanese very large crude carrier (VLCC) Mogamigawa. (It's HUGE). There were no injuries and both ships managed to proceed under their own power. There were no reported oil spills or serious damage.
I've lost count of the number of times I've passed through the Strait of Hormuz. It's a busy place with 40 percent of the world's oil moving through it in some of the worlds largest ships. You have to be really careful in there.
In September 2005 another Los Angeles class submarine, USS Philadelphia, was involved in a collision, in the Strait of Hormuz, with the 54,000 ton M/V Yaso Aysen, a Turkish merchant ship. (It's BIG).
I only have one question: Why are US nuclear attack submarines, operating either in direct support of a carrier group or in any other capacity allowing any ship to get that close to them? The US Navy submarine force ethos is that, regardless of what rules may apply at the time, a submarine is required to turn away from a possible collision 10,000 yards (5 miles) prior to falling into a situation which puts the vessels in extremis.
Trivia note: A prior Mogamigawa Maru sailing under a Japanese flag also had an encounter with a US submarine. The ship was an aircraft transport in World War II and was sunk 19 March, 1943 by the USS Whale, a Gato class submarine.
Important Update: Since my job in the navy involved locating and killing submarines, how to drive them was always a tertiary concern. That said it was great to receive some information in comments from a retired US Navy submarine officer who runs a blog on the subject of... The World of Submarines. Bubblehead, (Hey! It's a term of endearment, and he'll be calling me a "skimmer"), has some excellent detail surrounding this accident and, if you're interested, it's worth making regular visits to get some reasoned assessment of what actually happened.
It looks like USS Newport News may have been zoofed. That is a slang term for having a surface ship pass directly over your dived position. The US Navy is explaining the accident as possibly having been the result of venturi effect. That may sound a little odd to the uninitiated but several things do point directly at that possibility. I've handled a VLCC tanker. They leave a huge hole in the water, particularly when loaded to the marks and up to a typical service speed of 17 knots. That hole gets filled with water rushing into the cavity created at the stern of the ship. In simple terms the water filling the cavity rushes down from three sides and creates a force which moves in the same direction of the ship and operates like a swirling vortex, sucking everything from both sides of the ship down, once it reaches the stern and up and towards from the water column below. At the risk of over-simplifying a description, it's very much like effect of a vacuum cleaner nozzle.
A submarine too close to that vortex, with little warning, would be sucked into the filling cavity and propelled in the direction of the stern of the surface ship. The thing about it is, I've actually seen it happen.
Back in the day when we couldn't paint our ships without a Soviet trawler watching we were in mid-Pacific on a major allied naval exercise. We were plane-guard 1/2 mile astern of US aircraft carrier while she was launching and recovering aircraft. The speed was in excess of 26 knots and the weather was a little rough. There was known Soviet submarine in the area. Suddenly, out of the stern of the carrier, a Soviet Victor Class submarine broached and popped to the surface between us and the aircraft carrier. We were surprized, but that was nothing compared to the shock experienced by the submarine. They were right where they didn't want to be - on the surface, exposed.
That incident occured before the episode in which another (might have been the same boat?) Victor class submarine had a collision with the USS Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan. Although we may never know exactly what happened, it would appear the Soviet boats, (in both cases) were either under the carrier or making a close approach and were either sucked into the stern vortex or were close enough to the ship's bottom to have been dragged into the accelerated water near the keel.
In any case, it's worth checking out Bubblehead's blog for some good information.
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