GCN July 13, 1998
Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
By Gregory Slabodkin
GCN Staff
The Navy's Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service contends.
Although PCs have reduced workloads for sailors aboard the Aegis missile
cruiser USS Yorktown, software glitches resulted in system
failures and crippled ship operations, according to Navy officials.
Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in reducing
manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy began running
shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that fewer sailors
would be needed to control key ship functions.
But the Navy last fall learned a difficult lesson about automation: The
very information technology on which the ships depend also makes
them vulnerable. The Yorktown last September suffered a systems failure
when bad data was fed into its computers during maneuvers off
the coast of Cape Charles, Va.
The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a
database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to
Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical
Support Center in Norfolk.
"We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain and,
when it fails, results in a critical failure" DiGiorgio said. It took
two days of pierside maintenance to fix the problem.
The Yorktown has been towed into port after other systems failures, he said.
Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September
experienced what they termed "an engineering local area network
casualty" but denied that the ship's systems failure lasted as long as
DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the water for about two
hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be towed in.
"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion
casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997,
when software configuration was frozen" Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander
of the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Surface Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.
Giffin wrote the memo to describe "what really happened in hope of
clearing the scuttlebutt" surrounding the incident, he noted.
The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers
were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The
Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero
into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program.
That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and
miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.
[ snip ] fourni par RDrake2@ix.netcom.com