So I want you to picture a very specific kind
of failure. Oh, this is going to be good. Right.
Because usually when we talk about disasters
on this deep dive, we imagine something physically
breaking, like an engine exploding or a catastrophic
mechanical flaw. A wing snapping off. Exactly.
But today, we're looking at a disaster where
almost every single piece of billion dollar technology
was working perfectly. and it still resulted
in this massive pile of scrap metal sitting at
the bottom of a freezing fjord. It really is
the ultimate paradox of the modern age. I mean,
you have one of the most advanced warships in
the world, right? A Fritjof Nansen -class frigate.
Built to hunt submarines? Hunt subs, track supersonic
missiles, survive high -intensity warfare, and
yet it gets taken out by a slow -moving oil tanker
on a totally calm, clear night. It sounds like
a bad joke, or like a massive plot hole in a
movie. But it's real. It is entirely real. This
is the story of the H &O MS Helgingstad and the
oil tanker Solitis. Welcome back to the deep
dive. Glad to be. Today we're combing through
the official accident investigation reports,
the court transcripts from the Norwegian legal
system, maritime logs all to figure out how this
happened. And honestly, the how is terrifying
because it's just so deeply human. Yeah, that's
our mission today. We aren't just looking at
a boat crash. We're unpacking this this perfect
storm of. cognitive bias, invisible design flaws,
and communication breakdowns. It turned a routine
navigation exercise into a total loss for NATO.
A total loss. So let's set the board. We have
two massive players here. First up, the victim.
if we can call it that. The Hel Ingstad. Right.
The pride of the Royal Norwegian Navy. She's
134 meters long, valued at nearly 5 billion Norwegian
kroner, just unequipped. Which is astronomical.
And much, much more once you add all the weapon
systems. She had just finished this massive NATO
exercise called Trident Juncture. So you've got
a crew of 137 people, highly trained, coming
off a really high -tempo operation. And she's
fast. Very fast, capable of roughly 26 knots.
She's designed to be sleek, agile, and stealthy.
Yes. Stealthy is a key word here because it plays
a huge role in the setup. They weren't just sailing
normally. No, they were navigating the Hiltiff
Jordan, which is a super busy shipping lane north
of Bergen. And they were doing it in what's called
passive mode. Meaning they had their AIs switched
off. AIS being the Automatic Identification System.
Right. Think of AIS as like a digital name tag.
Every commercial ship broadcasts its name, speed,
heading, position to everyone else. It pops up
on digital charts. But the hell Jinxtad turned
that transmit function off? For training purposes.
They wanted to practice navigating without giving
away their position, just like they would in
an actual war zone. So they can see everyone
else on their screens, but to the digital systems
of the other ships, the frigate is effectively
a ghost. To the digital systems, yes. Right.
I mean, they still show up as a blip on raw radar,
but there's no data attached, no name, just this
anonymous echo moving through the dark. OK, so
we have a ghost ship doing 17 knots through a
busy fjord. Who is in the other corner? The heavyweight
champion. A Maltese -flagged oil tanker. And
this thing is a Leviathan. 250 meters long, almost
twice the length of the frigate. And fully loaded
with 625 ,000 barrels of crude oil. That is just
a massive amount of massive momentum. It's basically
a freight train on water. And it's being escorted
by a tugboat. the 10X, they had just pulled away
from the store terminal. Now usually when a tanker
leaves a terminal, it's this slow, loud, very
obvious affair you'd think would be impossible
to miss. And yet we're here discussing a collision.
Exactly. This is where we need to get into the
head of the bridge crew on the frigate. The investigation
talks a lot about an optical illusion. How do
you get an optical illusion with a giant lit
up tanker? This is the psychological pivot point
of the whole disaster. The Sola TS had left the
dock, right? But the crew hadn't turned off their
deck floodlights yet. These are incredibly bright
industrial halogen lights used to illuminate
the work deck so the crew can see what they're
doing while leaving port. OK, but it's super
bright. Shouldn't that make it easier to see?
You would think so. But from the angle the halogen
stod was approaching, those bright deck lights
totally drowned out the tanker's navigation light.
The red and green ones. Right, the lights that
actually tell you which way a ship is moving.
Even worse, the tanker was still physically very
close to the terminal it just left. Ah, I see
where this is going. The terminal has lights
too. The stir terminal is lit up like a Christmas
tree. So when the crew on the frigate looked
out the window, they didn't see a ship moving
toward them. They saw a cluster of bright lights
that blended perfectly with the background lights
of the terminal. Object constancy. Their brains
just decided that is a stationary object. Precisely.
They identified the tanker as part of the dock.
They thought they were looking at a stationary
extension of the land. And once that mental model
locks in, it becomes incredibly hard to break.
But wait, there are other safeguards. What about
the traffic control center? The FedGVTS? They're
watching the screens, right? Like the air traffic
controllers of the sea. They are. But remember
that AIS issue? The passive mode? Right. The
traffic controller sees a blip on his radar moving
south. But because the frigate isn't broadcasting
its ID, he has no idea it's a warship. He doesn't
know it's the Helgingstad. So the frigate thinks
the tanker is a dock. The tanker sees a blip
but doesn't know what it is, and traffic control
is looking at an anonymous echo. Everyone is
operating in this fog of partial information.
And the clock is ticking. We can actually trace
the radio logs, the VHF recordings, and it is
just agonizing to listen to. What happens? About
three minutes before impact, the Sola TS pilot
calls up traffic control. He sees this fast moving
echo on his radar coming straight at him. He
asks, who is this ship coming towards me? A totally
reasonable question. What does FEDGY say? The
traffic controller says, I don't know. Wow. He
literally couldn't identify the target initially.
That has to be chilling for the tanker pilot.
You have a collision course target, and the authorities
don't even know who it is. So the tanker tries
to signal physically. They use an Aldus lamp,
which is a powerful Morse signal lamp, and they
flash it directly at the bridge of the oncoming
frigate. Like flashing your high beams on the
highway to say, hey, wake up. Exactly. But think
about the confirmation bias we just talked about.
The frigate crew thinks they're looking at the
terminal. Right. If you see a flashing light
on a quote unquote stationary terminal, what
do you think it is? I don't know. Someone working
on the dock. A flickering floodlight. Exactly.
They didn't interpret it as a warning signal.
They interpreted it as background noise that
just fit their existing theory. This is the danger
of a strong mental model. It just filters out
everything that contradicts it. So at some point,
they must have gotten on the radio. They did,
but it was too late and way too confused. The
traffic center finally deduced it might be the
Helgingstead. So the pilot on the tanker gets
on the radio. He is very clear. He says, turn
starboard immediately. Varon Wright, get out
of the way. Standard evasion. And the officer
of the watch on the Helgingstead replies, no.
He refuses. He refuses. He says, if I turn starboard,
I'll get too close to the blocks. The block.
He means the shore. Remember, in his head, the
tanker is the shore. He thinks the pilot is telling
him to drive his ship onto the rocks. Oh, man.
That is tragic irony. The move that would save
them is the one move he thinks will destroy them.
He actually says they will wait to turn until
they have passed the object. He thinks he can
squeeze between the object and his port side.
He doesn't realize the object is moving toward
him at seven knots, and he's closing at 17 knots.
That's a closing speed of almost 25 knots. And
then impact. 401 AM. And it wasn't a head -on
crash. It was a side swipe, which in maritime
terms is often way worse. Why is a side swipe
worse? Because the tanker has these massive steel
protrusions on the bow called anchor cleats.
They're basically giant steel horns. And against
the sleek steel of a frigate. It acted like a
giant can opener. It caught the starboard side
of the Helging stud and tore a 45 -meter long
gash right along the hull. 45 meters? It shredded
the side of the ship, opening up the crew quarters,
the canteen, and critically, the generator room.
What about the tanker? Barely scratched. Just
kidding. Some paint scraping, minor bow damage.
It's a double -hulled supertanker. It barely
felt it, but the frigate spun out of control.
They lost steering, lost engine power. OK, but
here's where I get confused. This is a warship.
It's designed to take a missile hit. It has watertight
compartments, bulkheads. It's like an ice cube
tray, right? If you puncture one cube, the others
stay dry. Why did a single gash sink the whole
ship? This is where the story shifts from human
error to an incredible engineering failure. And
this is the part that triggered massive lawsuits
later on. Theoretically, the Helging Stard was
designed to survive flooding in any two watertight
compartments. OK. The collision opened up two
or three. It really should have floated. But
it didn't. No. And the reason was hidden deep
inside the mechanics of the ship, the propeller
shafts, the long tubes connecting the engines
to the propellers at the back. On this specific
class of ship, those shafts were hollow. Hollow.
Why does that matter? Well, the collision flooded
the generator room. The propeller shafts ran
right through that room. The water filled the
room, found its way into those hollow shafts
and used them like a secret tunnel. Wait, you
mean the water traveled inside the spinning shafts?
Inside the shafts. It bypassed the watertight
bulkheads completely and just poured out into
the gear room and the engine rooms further back
in the ship. So the bulkheads were doing their
job holding the water back, but the water just
went straight through the pipes running through
the bulkheads. Exactly. It completely defeated
the entire compartmentalization strategy. Suddenly,
the crew wasn't fighting a localized flood. Water
was appearing in rooms that hadn't even been
touched by the collision. That sounds like a
catastrophic design oversight. The investigation
board certainly thought so. They called it a
critical safety issue not just for the ship but
for the entire class of frigates. But we can't
lay it all on the design either. There is total
chaos on board. The human element again. Right.
As the ship was flooding, the crew evacuated.
And in the panic, and keep in mind, it was pitch
black, freezing water, screaming metal everywhere.
They didn't close all the watertight doors and
hatches behind them. They left the doors open.
Several of them. The investigation found that
progressive flooding occurred through hatches
left open during the evacuation. So you had water
tunneling through the shafts from below and water
spreading through open doors from above. The
ship just didn't stand a chance. But the captain
did try to save it, though. I remember seeing
photos of the ship up against the rocks. Yeah,
he made a split second decision to run the ship
aground. He pushed it onto the rocky shore to
literally stop it from sinking into the deep
water of the fjord. And for a few days it just
sat there leaning precariously. It became this
massive public spectacle. And this leads us to
the salvage operation, which, from the reports,
sounds like it was a disaster in its own right.
It was a slow -motion car crash. You have a multi
-billion kroner asset teetering on the rocks.
The Navy and salvage crews rushed in. They tried
to secure the frigate to the shore using heavy
steel cables to pin it in place. Secure it so
it wouldn't slide down the underwater slope.
Exactly. But this operation was heavily criticized.
The Green Warriors of Norway, which is an environmental
group, were watching closely. They publicly called
the cables sewing thread. Sewing thread. That
is not what you want to hear about the gear holding
up a billion dollar warship. Were they right?
Tragically, yes. On the morning of November 13th,
so a few days after the crash, the cable started
to smoke. Smoke from the tension. Friction and
tension. And then snap. One by one, the cables
burst. The ship slid down the embankment and
sank almost completely underwater. Only the very
top of the radar tower was left sticking out
of the fjord. That image is seared into my brain.
A top tier NATO asset totally submerged in freezing
water. They did eventually raise it, though.
They brought in these massive crane ships, the
Gulliver and the Rambiz. They lifted it out and
barged it to a naval base. But, you know, saltwater
is the ultimate enemy of electronics. After sitting
underwater for months, the ship was toast. So
let's talk numbers. What is the final bill for
a mistake like this? Astronomical. When they
finally assessed the damage, the repair estimate
came in between 12 and 14 billion Norwegian kroner.
And what's the cost of a new ship? About 11 to
13 billion. So it is literally cheaper to buy
a brand new destroyer than to fix the wet one.
Correct. The Ministry of Defense declared it
a total loss. They stripped it for spare parts
and sold the metal for scrap. I'm almost afraid
to ask, what's the scrap value of a 5 billion
kroner frigate? About 15 to 18 million kroner,
it's pennies on the dollar, a 99 % loss of value.
That brings us to the accountability side of
things. Because in the military, usually if you
lose a ship, heads roll. Who took the fall for
this? This is where it gets legally very messy.
The Accident Investigation Board, the AIBN, was
very careful. They concluded that this wasn't
the fault of one single person. It was systemic.
How so? They blamed training deficiencies. They
blamed the confusion caused by the tanker's lights.
And they heavily blame the passivity of the traffic
control center. So nobody went to jail? Will
the state fine the Ministry of Defense 10 million
kroner for corporate negligence? Wait, the Ministry
of Defense is the state? So the government basically
fined itself? Essentially, yes. It's a way of
formally acknowledging institutional failure.
But they did go after one person, the officer
of the watch. the young officer in charge of
the bridge that night. A guy who said no to the
turn command. Him. He faced criminal prosecution.
The argument was that despite the confusing lights,
despite the systemic issues, he had working radar.
He had instruments. He failed to use them and
relied solely on his eyes. Navigating by sight
when you have millions of dollars of sensors
available right in front of you. Exactly. The
court ruled his actions were clearly unjustifiable.
He was sentenced to 60 days of suspended imprisonment.
He appealed, but as of late 2023, that sentence
was upheld. It just feels like a very heavy birdie
for one guy to carry. When the VTS failed, the
tanker lights were blinding and the ship had
a hidden design flaw. Speaking of which, what
happened with that hollow shaft issue? Did the
Navy just eat that cost? Oh, absolutely not.
The Norwegian government turned around and sued
the shipbuilder, Navantia. A Spanish company.
This is a massive lawsuit. 13 .3 billion Croner.
They want the full replacement costs. Yeah. They
argue that the ship shouldn't have sunk. They
say if the shafts weren't hollow or if the seals
had worked properly, the ship would have just
been damaged, not lost. And what does Devante
say? You crashed it. You bought it. Pretty much.
Navantia fights back hard. They argue that the
hollow shaft design is standard for that class
of ship and complied with all the regulations
at the time. They also point out that the Norwegian
Navy was operating with unaddressed deviations.
Meaning the Navy knew about certain maintenance
or safety issues and just ignored them. Or that
the crew wasn't trained well enough to close
the watertight doors. Navantia's stance is essentially,
you drove it into a tanker, you left the doors
open, and now you want us to pay for it. That
trial is looming for late 2025. So even years
later, the ripples of this crash are still hitting
the courts. It's fascinating because it starts
with such a simple thing, a light that was too
bright, and it ends with international litigation.
It really exposes the fragility of these high
-tech systems we rely on. We surround ourselves
with radar, AIS, collision warnings, automated
barriers. But in the end, the safety of that
billion -dollar vessel came down to a 20 -something
-year -old looking out a window and seeing what
he expected to see rather than what was actually
there. Confirmation bias. It's the bug in the
human operating system that no amount of technology
seems to fix. And that actually brings us to
the scariest statistic from the report. They
found that out of 88 identified safety barriers
that should have prevented this accident, 53
were violated or failed. 53 out of 88. Yeah.
That is a staggering failure rate. It's not even
a Swiss cheese model anymore. It's just a giant
hole. It is. And it leaves us with a provocative
thought for everyone listening to mull over.
We live in a world where our cars break for us,
our planes practically fly themselves, and our
ships have digital eyes. But does that safety
net actually make us less safe? Because we stop
looking. Because we outsource our survival instinct
to the machine. The crew of the Helgeinstadt
assumed the system would catch them. They assumed
if there was a real threat, the radar would scream
or the VTS would call. They stopped actively
interrogating reality. That is a thought that
will keep me up at night. Are we asleep at the
wheel because we think the car is driving itself?
A huge thank you to our expert for walking us
through this incredible, expensive, and really
tragic story today. Thank you. It's a lesson
definitely worth learning. And thank you to everyone
for listening to this deep dive into the Helding
-Stodd collision. Stay curious, stay skeptical,
and always double check what you see out the
window. We'll see you on the next deep dive.