Dear Mogami, Mikuma, Wakaba and Hatsushimo
I've heard from many admirals that you guys are busy preparing for the upcoming campaign, so if you're too busy to read this, feel free to ignore it because this ain't that important.
Another reason that might motivate you guys not to read this is that I'm going to talk quite a fair bit about the painful memories of your past, which is the time when you collided with someone else. So if any of you can't handle that, again, feel free to throw this into the rubbish bin. Anyway, after all that introduction stuff, it's time to talk about collisions and how we avoid it.
Now, the reason I'm addressing this letter to you four is that you four have extensive experience with collisions. In fact, Mikuma's might be a little too extensive because it led to her sinking, but anyway, to radically oversimplify, the cause of a collision is because you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you're not aware of the fact that someone is going to crash into you (If you're aware, you'd have taken avoiding actions to prevent the collision from happening), right?
Therefore, it is rather sensible to conclude that a collision happens because both sides who participated in the incident failed to maintain visual separation with one and other. So the best solution is to have people on constant alert for any traffic / objects that might lead to a collision, right? But how?
Here, we get to the so-called "See and be Seen" (or See and Avoid) rule in maintaining traffic separation. Basically, the rule of See and be Seen is to have pilots (Because this is a rule in aviation) use their eyes to constantly look for traffic that might have a chance of colliding with the aicraft the pilot is piloting at that moment. Though this is a rule for the aviation industry, I think the concept itself can also apply to ships like you guys as well. I mean, there are traffic and objects in the ocean.
Using See and be Seen to examine the collisions you four had been through at Midway and Kiska respectively, it's rather easy to say that you four failed to See and be Seen as all of you eventually collided with each other, albeit having different reasons (Confusion in Mikuma's case and Fog / Low visibility in Wakaba's case) for colliding and that brought me to the failure of the rule of See and be Seen.
Obviously, in sterile conditions where one person is assigned to only look for traffic that might cause a collision is rather easy because the person can focus 100% of his attention on the job of traffic-looking, but in reality, as in most cases of mid-air and sea collisions, the people involved in controlling the aircraft / vessel is often forced to multitask, which meant they sometimes can't visually scan their environment careful enough to avoid a collision (or by the time they spot an impending collision, it's too late to execute any meaningful evasive actions). That is one of the causes that caused you (Mikuma) to sink because the crew at the time were concentrating on something else (i.e. Turning around) and by the time they spotted Mogami heading towards you, it was sadly too late and you two "kissed" each other with a big bang.
Crew distraction is also one of the factors that contributed to various mid-air collisions like the one over Grand Canyon in 1956 and the one over San Diego in 1978 where, in both cases, more than 100 people died. The Grand Canyon one is generally regarded as a textbook example of the failure of See and be Seen as a rule for visual separation because in 1956, planes could fly at any height and at any course in the sky once they flew far enough from the airport. The thinking behind was that there are so few planes in the sky and so much space for them to fly that the chance for a collision to happen is close to zero and it was, until 30 June, 1956 when two aircrafts carrying 128 people collided with each other, 21,000 ft above the Grand Canyon. The subsequent investigation cited the pilots were simply too busy (in constantly checking the plane's engine and doing various other tasks) to also take care of traffic monitoring while they're flying and several other factors as the cause of the crash. This collision eventually led to the installation of radars all over the US to make sure that air traffic controllers can warn pilots of impending collisions before the pilots can see the traffic with their naked eyes.
However, even with radar in place and with an extra pair of eyes monitoring, maintaining traffic separation with See and be Seen proved to be more challenging than people would otherwise expect because weather conditions and terrain can also lead to the failure of See and be Seen, as in Wakaba's case. Obviously, if the day was clear on the day of the accident, Wakaba would not have collided with her sister, another prove that See and be Seen is less effective than people would think. And even in clear blue skies, the rule could fail, as in September of 1978, when Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182 crashed into a Cessna 172, killing 144 people. The crash is mainly due to the crew being distracted by talking about unrelated stuff when preparing for landing and their failure in communicating effectively with ATC at San Diego. But something rather interesting is that the post-crash investigation also said that the terrain at San Diego made the Cessna harder for the crew to see as the differently coloured roofs of the suburbs would have camouflaged the Cessna, making the pilots of the PSA flight harder to spot and thereby avoid colliding with the plane.
So that's the problem with See and be Seen, but did we tried to alleviate the issue? Yes.
Following the collision over San Diego (but not a direct result of it), the US invented another extra pair of eyes to assist pilots in spotting traffic known as the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) in 1981 and since TCAS had been invented, mid-air collisions had become a rarer sight.
However, ambiguities over the use of TCAS meant that mid-air collisions would still happen decades after the device's invention, as in the collision in 2002 over Uberlingen which killed 71 people. And in 2006, another 154 people were killed when two planes collided 37,000 ft over the Amazon Forests, that was partly caused by one plane's transponder being accidentally turned off, causing another plane's TCAS unable to detect the plane, hence leading to the collision.
So, what's the takeaway from these collisions (including yours)? Apart from the fact that See and be Seen, as a rule, is not quite effective in traffic separation, it could also be said that we're constantly overestimating our senses, in this case our eyes. The sentence I'd use to conclude this letter is one said by an aviation expert that "We've been under See and Avoid, but we can't see, in most cases, even to avoid."
Anyway, I hope you all can do well in the coming campaign and not have any collisions, even though I don't quite benefit from the work that your fellow friends and you had done so far
Best Wishes,
Ray
怎麼樣也好，在這裡再說一遍，祝各位提督武運昌隆，在夏活攻略順利。
ReferencesSee and Avoid
See & Avoid: Does it Work?Why See and Avoid Doesn't Work Mayday Air Crash Investigation Season 2 Episode 4: Deadly Crossroads
Mayday Air Crash Investigation Season 5 Episode 10: Phantom Strike
Mayday Air Crash Investigation Season 11 Episode 8: Blind Spot
Mayday Air Crash Investigation Season 12 Episode 6: Grand Canyon Disaster
Seconds From Disaster Season 4 Episode 4: Collision at 35,000 ft
創作內容
【English Channel】【KanColle】See and be Seen (A Letter to Mikuma and Wakaba)
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