The HMS Bounty and Winlink Rescue Story

Back on October 29, 2012 the tall ship HMS Bounty sunk off the coast of North Carolina while trying to sail through rough seas caused by Hurricane Sandy. Shortly afterwards the ham radio community was treated to stories heralding Winlink as being used by hams on the ship to contact the Coast Guard for their rescue when supposedly nothing else worked.

The problem was the stories and hype around this incident raised some legitimate questions by those familiar with how such rescue communications would normally play out. You could say the headline sounded good at first, but the details tended to keep the Bravo Sierra meter busy. Then odd and dismissive behavior by some in Winlink leadership to reasonable inquiries didn’t help with story credibility.

While some of the stories and postings seem to have interestingly “faded away” over the last few months, you can read this November 1, 2012 news story from the ARRL news feed titled “Robin Walbridge, KD4OHZ, Missing at Sea after Sinking of Tall Ship Bounty”  Of particular note are the details in the following paragraph which are pretty much the substance of the other stories:

“Faunt told the ARRL that the Bounty crew tried various methods, including a satellite phone, to call for help, “but we got nothing when tried calling out on HF. We tried calling the Maritime Mobile Net, but nothing was out there. We had Winlink on the ship that we used for e-mail and accessing the Internet to post to blogs and to Facebook, and we finally found an e-mail address for the Coast Guard. As a last-ditch effort, we used Winlink to e-mail the Coast Guard for help. Within an hour, we heard a C-130 plane, and later, a helicopter overhead.” According to Faunt, it was Walbridge, as master of the ship, who sent out the distress messages.”

While some questioned how the ARRL got the story posted so fast, others wondered why some pretty obvious questions were not asked before posting it. I don’t know about the timing angle, but with everything else going on around that time (TS Sandy) I tend to let them slide on questioning some of those details and assume they just posted what they were told.

 

From the radio side of the story, one could say many things were kind of hard to believe. A few of the fairly obvious questions?

1.  HF data was functional, but no answer on any of the HF voice (4, 6, 8, 12 MHz) distress frequencies? Considering that they were in range of multiple U.S. Coast Guard HF sites, a very good question.

2.  There was nobody on the east coast chatting on the amateur HF bands where they could simply break in and ask for help/relay? They were in easy HF range of a good chunk of the east coast and midwest.

3.  Some stories said a satphone call (to whom? the USCG?) went unanswered? Did they try a 2nd time?

4.  Some stories said they emailed the Coast Guard. That was particularly interesting since those familiar with how to contact the U.S. Coast Guard in an emergency know that they DO NOT provide an email address for that. In fact, they officially advise AGAINST using email for such needs. This is for a long list of reasons including that today there are just too many places for emails to get delayed, filtered, or otherwise lost. Plus a properly equipped vessel should have several far better options available.

5. What about EPIRB activation? If you are about to sink and needing rescue, then activating a manual EPIRB would be among the very first things you do. You simply may not have the time to do anything else if the situation is that dire.

6. What about marine VHF CH 16 (combined with EPIRB activation)? Yeah they were a good ways offshore, but they were not exactly way out in the far Atlantic either. Plus, there could always be other ships in VHF range that could relay for them.

 

Even putting the radio angle aside, the whole incident raised many questions. Just days later an official investigation was ordered by USCG Rear Admiral Steven Ratti. The results of this investigation would turn out to be very interesting.

In early 2014 the official NTSB report on the incident came out and boy did it raise some eyebrows!  It can be found in PDF format here.

Compared to the story sold to the ham radio community, the NTSB report paints a very different picture of how things transpired. Many details and timings conflict with previous stories and it appears Winlink’s “only thing working” Hail Mary role in things was (to be kind) greatly exaggerated.

Regardless of previous hype out there, it appears that no “mayday” (or any) Winlink email message was ever sent to the Coast Guard from the ship. No indication of ANY “mayday, mayday, we’re in trouble, no one knows we are in trouble, nothing else is working, we are out of time so let’s try email” type of scenario played out. It also appears that considerable communications and distress signaling gear was still functional on the ship and at least some of it worked just fine when they chose to use it. Not exactly the story we were sold eh?

Yes, one could argue that one of the many emails to the vessel organization hours earlier helped get things rolling when the need for rescue finally came around. Problem is there is no indication that Winlink was chosen due to all other options not working and it was far from a “mayday, mayday, we are sinking” last ditch effort to get a distress message out. Frankly this email seems relatively casual when stating along the lines of “we are okay for now, but we may be in trouble by the morning.”

As you read the NTSB report there is plenty of indication that email was just how they normally communicated back and forth with their business office. That is fine as long as their non-emergency business communications were not being done over amateur radio spectrum which would likely violate FCC Part 97 rules. We will touch on this topic later.

From reading the report it’s pretty clear that at least one of the EPIRB units worked just fine when they choose to deploy it. I’m pretty sure the Coast Guard crews would tell us the EPIRB activation was more than enough for them to respond and that the “scene assessment” aircraft was vectored against it.

Later on the “we are abandoning ship” communications were done via radio up to the aircraft that had been standing by on-scene for SEVERAL HOURS. I am going to assume that the aircraft to ship communications were done on VHF marine radio which was apparently still functional too.

The report also makes no mention of the ships existing communication gear failing. In fact it reveals that a wide variety of communication systems were still working. All indications are that they had plenty of time to communicate, make preparations, and coordinate evac plans with the Coast Guard C-130 overhead. Things only got extremely “hairy” in the final minutes and that had nothing to do with radio communications not working.

As you read over the sequence of events you get the picture of a bad situation for sure. That said, there is no indication that they were frantically scrambling to get a mayday message out, no one knew they were in trouble or their location, and no other communications were working. It seems to paint a picture of the exact opposite.

The NTSB report leaves plenty of room to question a lot of the decision making on the ship up to and during the incident. Out of respect for the dead and the tragedy as a whole, I’ll leave that portion of things alone.

The report further opens the door to suspicions that Winlink may of been abused for routine commercial communication purposes on the ship prior to the emergency. Some would argue that would sure help explain the dodgy and dismissive behavior of some in Winlink leadership anytime the details of this story were questioned. Remember those emails supposedly went over amateur radio airwaves and as such they are not subject to any expectation of privacy.

Judging by the report, there were several operational emails flying around between the ship and its business office prior to the incident. One is left wondering what email system were those “business emails” being sent over? There is plenty of room to speculate that Winlink HF email may have been the “default” communication method on the ship and thus they just used it out of habit.

Yeah I admit that I’m biased against Winlink, but I don’t loathe it to the degree that many others do. I have friends that use Winlink and don’t think any less of them for it. Thankfully most of them are starting to shy away from it or are at least rethinking how they use it. All that said, I would gladly tip my hat to Winlink had this story been even half of what the hype tried to sell us. Ham radio success stories are fine, but we don’t need exaggerations (I’m being kind) like this one.

I actually ran a HF/VHF/UHF gateway for years. I got out of it for a variety of reasons including lack of visibility into exactly what was flowing over my system, lack of real usage, growing security concerns, Winlink’s deteriorating reputation, never ending software quality issues, and far better approaches to remote/portable email becoming available. In years past I could see some value in Winlink for some special remote email needs, but not in today’s world.

Back to the analysis…..

So you say “Jeff you’re doing a lot of speculating in portions of the above?” Okay, but whose fault is that? Hey, you don’t have to agree with my opinions at all. Just go read the official NTSB report and form your own opinion regarding what really happened off Cape Hatteras on October 29, 2012 that resulted in the death of two people, several injuries, and the loss of a multimillion dollar ship. I found it to be 15 pages of interesting reading and some lessons can be extracted from it.

Again, you can find the official NTSB report here:   http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/MAB1403.pdf

This is a good lesson in looking back at news stories regarding an incident like this and then comparing those stories to the facts discovered during an actual professional investigation. Simply read over the NTSB report while noting the sequence of events and visualize the scene on the ship that it lays out. Then go read the ARRL story and the Wikipedia entry on the incident. Kind of hard to reconcile a lot of it with what is detailed in the NTSB report. Enough said.

 

WA4ZKO

© WA4ZKO and The Kentucky Packet Network (KYPN) Blog, 2008-2015. You may reuse content found here ONLY if full and clear credit is given to the author, a link to the original content is provided, and you do not alter the content. Fair enough?

Comments are closed.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.