…He said the crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure…
Hows that for a work story… I’ve had some bad days at the office, but they have not resulted in the loss of a $100 million dollar piece of equipment.
I think a well designed system should have a reminder alert that rings if autopilot is enabled and then the controls get moved around a lot.
Given that this was also a factor in the grounding of one of the Interislander ferries recently, I’m thinking autopilot systems are much more complex than they need to be.