Blackout In Rough Weather - What Happened To Viking Sky?

In this video we investigate what caused the blackout on Viking Sky, almost resulting in one of the worst maritime disasters of modern times.

✩ABOUT CASUAL NAVIGATION✩
I am a former maritime navigational officer and harbour pilot, with a passion for animation. My hobby is presenting educational stories and interesting nuggets from the maritime industry and sharing them on social media to keep them freely accessible to everyone.

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➼ Audio used under license from Epidemic Sound

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All content on this channel is provided for entertainment purposes only. Although every effort has been made to ensure the content is accurate and up to date, it remains the responsibility of the viewer to determine its accuracy and validity. The content should never be used to substitute professional advice or education.

[Obsdarkside]

With so many maritime horror stories, it's great hearing one where the crew acted professionally and diligently.

[Vivi-yweu]

It feels nice to hear about such emergency situations where crew do everything they could right and in the end things turn out good. I liked watching Mayday for same reasons, alongside of the technical explanations of what went wrong.

[hatsjer]

I haven't been able to confirm this, and I've only heard my mother say it, but allegedly: The people on board this ship "enjoyed" (for a lack of a better word) this emergency situation because of how organized and structured it was. There was no confusion amongst them, and everyone did their job effectively. The people were surprised by the hospitality of the emergency responders. Acted almost like this wasn't an emergency at all. Just another day at work.

[LtBob]

Lubrication professional here: you don't know how often people just ignore lube oil alarms, whether they're in system or from the analyst that lube is being sent to to be tested

[FerroequinologistofColorado]

That “subscribe to casual navigation” alarm at 10:28 on the IAS made me crack up pretty hard.

[JohnFallot]

10:27 Truly, the most dreadful alarm of all 😱

[indeedgrasshopper]

Many military systems (generators, vehicles) have something called a battleshort that essentially overrides some things that would ordinarily shut down an engine. In normal operation, you'd want to shut down an engine to protect from overheating or loss of oil pressure but in a life-or-death situation, motor life becomes far less important than human life. It's interesting that the ship doesn't seem to have a last-effort "override everything just make the engines run" switch.

[MajesticDemonLord]

As an IT engineer who has done on-call, your description of how transient alerts are handled rings many alarms...

[michaelimbesi]

Having too many alarms go off when something goes wrong is definitely a major issue. I sailed as an engine cadet on board a steam-powered LNGC. We could burn boil-off gas, fuel oil, or a combination of the two. Our plant was steam turbine propulsion and two steam-powered SSTGs, and one diesel SSDG for times that the boilers were offline, as well as the diesel emergency generator. Once, while coming into an anchorage after loading cargo, we had a fuel oil return valve fail on one of our two boilers. That failure triggered a cascade of failures that took the entire plant offline except for the SSDG. We got so many alarms that it took us 2 hours to figure out what happened and get one boiler back online. All this time, the cargo was still boiling off and the pressure in the tanks was increasing. We needed a boiler so we could burn that boil-off gas. I estimate we were half an hour to an hour from venting a bunch of natural gas to the atmosphere when we finally got one boiler working again.

[alexlowe]

3:52 This is like, literally my nightmare. As someone who deals with production systems, suddenly having a thousand different alarms when I'm trying to diagnose the problem is the stuff of nightmares. All while dealing with a problem that can't be fixed, as passengers are taking emergency evacuations. That situation went on for 18 hours. Truly, a nightmarish situation.

It's insane that the engine oil tank had such a huge design flaw, especially considering that everyone knew about the risks.

[foxarocka]

I cant even imagine how stressful it must had been to go through that, good grief, I'm glad it didn't end in a disaster

[chanute]

Shout-out to the helicopter pilots hoisting passengers in 60 knot winds. I'm a private pilot with ~125 flight hours flying small two-seat and four-seat planes, and landing those planes in even a 15 knot cross wind can quite challenging. I can scarcely imagine the skill required to fly in a north Atlantic storm with winds at 60 knots only a couple hundred feet above the water, next to a ship that would create a ton of unpredictable turbulence, and doing all that while keeping the helicopter stable enough to hoist passengers by rope from a ship that's also rolling and pitching. Not only that, but the pilots were able to do that again and again, for hours on end, in the middle of the night. The sheer skill required to do a rescue like that is astonishing, and as a relatively inexperienced pilot I am truly inspired by the work that they and other rescue pilots do.

[DrangeDragRacingTeam]

And to top it all Off, a log carrier Got a blackout too just a few hundred meters from viking sky, giving the rescue team Even more pressure.
As a Norwegian, I remember this like it was yesterday

[ENCHANTMEN_]

It's a simple thing, but I really like the visualization of the alarm screen. It helps contextualize what the issue looked like to the crew

[arttops]

Why aren't stories like this turned into short or even feature length films? This would be a great watch from the pov of the captain, crew, passenger and rescue workers!

[pokrec]

The deepened oil inlet should have been in the center of the tank, not on it's side. It would make the system much more resilient to rolling. Even 90 degrees of roll would not make the inlet dry when the tank is at least 50% full.

[HATECELL]

A function to warn engineers when an alarm persists for a certain time would also be a useful feature, to tell sloshing and actual low levels apart

[sage]

If you have 1000 alarms going off at once, you alarm system needs a redesign. Task saturation is absolutely a thing, and if the alarms are going off that often, they WILL be ignored

[theisraelilocomotive]

railroad enthusiast here, ehm, running out of oil is a well known occurrence for us, it used to be such a common occurrence we coined the phrase "hotbox" for whenever an axlebox would run out of oil and run hot. evidently, the most we get is a stalled train and a small fire, and im sure we haven't been so thankful to hear that as opposed to the ship based alternative

[MegaEmmanuel]

3:55 I like the little attention to detail with the scroll bar shrinking to show the list is expanding off screen