I’ve been seeing on the tube, and reading about how the bad guys can potentially take control of planes, trains and automobiles, through the onboard Com Pewter. Now, the evidence seems against it in this case, but what about the Korean airliner that just missed sticking its landing in San Fransisco, and the Southwest airliner that landed nose down in New York? Could somebody have fussed with the controls with a black box on the ground at just the right moment to “screw the pooch?” That’s something to think about.
When a ship can zig-zag all over the ocean, cut donuts and create all manner of havoc, while the onboard electronics remain clueless, showing on course and speed, that’s gotta give you pause.
This is the reason that all of my Skippers insisted that the Quartermaster’s Mates and Navigator shot the stars at sundown and dawn, and took noon and moon sights. “The stars don’t lie,” they said. We also turned off the onboard automatic navigation systems. “Too many things to go wrong,” they said. Those systems, while not as sophisticated as the ones in use today, supposedly could take us from pierside, out the channel, across the ocean, up the next channel and put us alongside the assigned pier. We may have tried it out, just to see if the damn thing worked, but never while I was on watch.