Crew of New Zealand navy ship that sank off Samoa lacked training and experience, inquiry finds
A lack of training, qualifications and experience among the crew on board a New Zealand navy ship that ran aground, caught fire and sank off the coast of Samoa have been identified by a military Court of Inquiry in a final report released Friday as contributing to the disaster.
The deficiencies were among a dozen failings of the crew, ship and New Zealand's Navy that contributed to the loss of the HMNZS Manawanui in October 2024, the 120-page report said. An interim report last November had already divulged that the ship's crew didn't realize the vessel was on autopilot and believed something else had gone wrong as it plowed toward a reef.
All 75 people on board evacuated to safety as the boat foundered about 1.6 kilometers (a mile) off the coast of Upolu, Samoa's second largest island. The ship was one of only nine in New Zealand's navy and was the first the country lost at sea since World War II.
What went wrong?
Officials did not immediately know the cause of the sinking and the Court of Inquiry was ordered to find out. Insufficient training, lack of qualified personnel on board and inadequate risk management, were among a raft of problems uncovered in its findings released Friday.
The report also underlined the so-called hollowness of New Zealand's navy — which prompted the organization to 'take risks' to meet demands 'with a lean and inexperienced workforce,' its authors wrote.
'It's an indictment on the fact that our navy was left in quite a perilous state,' Defense Minister Judith Collins told reporters in Auckland Friday. The whole of the country's military needed a 'serious uplift,' she added.
The state of New Zealand's aging military hardware has prompted several warnings from the defense agency, which in a March 2024 report described the navy as 'extremely fragile,' with ships idle due to problems retaining the staff needed to service and maintain them.
What will happen next?
The Court of Inquiry could not make findings of guilt, it said, and suggested a separate disciplinary investigation for individual members of the crew who were not named in the report. Their suggested offenses were redacted.
The report included a dramatic transcript of what unfolded on the bridge, with one crew member saying to another that the ship was 'not really doing what I want it to do" as they tried to change the vessel's course.
'It's a bad day for the navy,' said Rear Admiral Garin Golding, the leader of the navy. 'Our reputation has taken a hit.'
The navy would 'learn from' the episode and ensure it wasn't repeated, he added. Friday's findings, however, also urged recognition for those involved in the decision to abandon ship, who the report found saved lives during the evacuation.
What happened to the ship?
The specialist dive and hydrographic vessel had been in service for New Zealand since 2019 and was surveying the reef that it ran aground on. Its sinking provoked alarm, demands for compensation and fear of environmental catastrophe for Samoan villagers living on the coast where it capsized, who say they fear permanent damage to the fragile reef ecosystem.
A no-fishing zone around the vessel was lifted by Samoa's government in February.
New Zealand's military said this month that it had completed months of work to remove diesel fuel and other pollutants from the ship, which remains where it sank. Salvage work to retrieve equipment and weapons continues.
Seawater and marine life in the area are 'uncontaminated', the military said, citing Samoa's scientific research agency. A decision about whether the ship will eventually be removed has not been made.
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NBC News
3 days ago
- NBC News
After a jet crashed into their neighborhood, some survivors say their emotional recovery is stunted by living so close to a busy airport. Ariana Drehsler for NBC News; AP U.S. news A jet crashed into their neighborhood. Now they live in dread below an active flight path. 'We hold our breath now every time a plane goes over,' said Srujana McCarty, who was sleeping when the private jet hit her family's San Diego home.
June 8, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT By Melissa Chan Srujana McCarty shields her head with her hands when an aircraft flies overhead. It's an involuntary reaction now, much like how her neighbors Aislyn Maupin and Renee Rivera freeze up and fixate on passing planes and jets until they're out of sight. They know it's improbable for an aircraft to plummet from the sky above them. But one did two weeks ago as they slept. On May 22, a pilot attempting to land a private jet at an airport nearby struck power lines and crashed into their San Diego military housing neighborhood, killing all six passengers on board, officials said. While the lives on the ground were spared, the disaster displaced dozens of families and shattered their sense of safety. McCarty's and Rivera's children still see the phantom flames down their hallways and streets. 'It's a new fear unlocked,' McCarty said. The survivors are trying to recover. But they live below an active flight path about 2 miles from the airport. About every 30 minutes, an aircraft roars above and brings them back to the morning fire roused them out of bed. 'It terrifies me knowing that we have planes coming over here all day, all the time,' Rivera said. 'It's a lot to be reminded of every single day.' 'Everything on fire all at once' On the night of the crash, before McCarty and her husband, Ben, went to sleep, they tucked in their two young sons, put their dogs in crates, locked their doors and set the alarm. 'Everything was set up for their safety,' said Ben McCarty, 33, who has served in the Navy for 13 years. Stillness fell over Murphy Canyon, home to more than 4,900 Navy families in one of the largest military housing complexes in the world. Then, just before 4 a.m., a Cessna 550 Citation jet slammed into the front yard of the McCartys' home, partially collapsing their roof and thrusting one of their trucks into the living room. Waves of heat from the fire instantly penetrated their bedroom, jolting them awake. 'The impact rushed over me,' Ben McCarty said. 'I felt like this strong wind or force, the heat.' Srujana McCarty, 32, let out a nightmarish shriek. But outside, the deafening booms from exploding cars and the panicked voices of other neighbors screaming to find their children drowned her out. The couple grabbed their sons, ages 2 and 4, and their dogs. The path to the front door was blocked by fire. The wall where their wedding photos hung was crumbling and burning, so the family fled out the back. Next door, Maupin was in a deep sleep when her 14-year-old daughter barged into her bedroom, screaming about a fire outside of her open window. In disbelief, Maupin looked outside and found a hellscape. 'The whole street was just in flames,' she said. Jet fuel snaked down the street, setting every vehicle in its path ablaze, law enforcement officials said. 'Everything on fire all at once,' San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl told reporters. 'It was pretty horrific to see.' Maupin said people were knocking on doors, telling people their homes were on fire. 'People were pushing us and telling us we had to go this way,' she said. Maupin and her daughter helped their neighbors evacuate, each taking a baby to safeguard. Maupin remembers seeing a young woman, standing alone in the middle of the street, paralyzed in fear. 'People were screaming, 'Where are my kids?'' she said. 'Things are exploding everywhere.' Nearby, Rivera heard banging on her front door. She had seen the light from the explosion but thought it must have been lightning. 'I never in a million years thought a plane hit the ground,' she said. Half asleep, Rivera, 28, herded her 2-year-old asthmatic daughter, grandmother, two dogs and two guinea pigs into a car. As she drove away, she thought of all the children in the neighborhood. Her heart sank, thinking there was no way everyone in the neighborhood would survive. But miraculously no one on the ground was killed. 'Seeing it happen firsthand right in front of you,' she said, 'it changes everything.' McCarty replays each moment of her family's escape when she suddenly wakes up every morning around 3:45 a.m. at roughly the time of the crash. The sleepless nights are hard, but so are the days when planes seem to be constantly flying overhead. 'We hold our breath now every time a plane goes over,' she said. The McCartys are staying in a temporary house in the same military housing community until they're able to move into a new unit in about a week. They had only one plea for those tasked with their relocation. 'We asked to get out of the flight path,' Ben McCarty said. 'It was the No. 1 priority for both of us — anywhere away from the flight path.' Their neighbor, Thomas Lawrence, said his three young children had the same request. 'We had to change streets because they didn't want to live close to the scene of the crash anymore,' he said. 'It was unanimous. Even I didn't want to go back either.' Life under a flight path The Navy families live in the shadow of Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport, which primarily serves small aircraft and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to its website. The airport sees more than 386,000 takeoffs and landings a year. The six passengers aboard the private jet were headed there from New Jersey, the National Transportation Safety Board said. Their cross-country flight was about 2 miles southeast of the airfield when, amid dense fog, the jet struck high-tension power lines and went down around 3:47 a.m., officials said. There were no survivors aboard. Music talent agent Dave Shapiro, 42, was killed, as were two employees of his Sound Talent Group, Kendall Fortner, 24, and Emma Huke, 25, according to the city's medical examiner's office. The crash also killed Daniel Williams, 39, a drummer for the band The Devil Wears Prada; Dominic Damian, 41, a software engineer; and Celina Kenyon, 36, a photographer. The cause of the crash is under investigation. A spokesperson for the NTSB said the agency expects to release its preliminary report in the next few weeks. In the immediate aftermath, it displaced about 100 residents, Wahl, the police chief, said. About 39 families were temporarily relocated, and two homes were significantly damaged, according to Gail Miller, chief operating officer of Liberty Military Housing, which provides homes for the families. Miller said the housing provider worked closely with the families to determine their preferences, recognizing that many would not want to return to their original units. Today, Miller said, 31 families have either returned to their original home in Murphy Canyon or have accepted a new home in the same community or elsewhere. The crash was the latest in a string of deadly aviation accidents this year that has sparked fear and unease. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said the skies are safe, pointing to 35 million annual flights that occur in the U.S. with very few incidents. An NBC News analysis of federal data also shows that incidents and deaths on flights have not been rising compared with previous years, and that the number of deaths aboard aircraft in the U.S. is also on the decline. Still, for survivors triggered by the sight of an aircraft, the statistics do little to ease anxieties. In the aftermath of some cases of aviation trauma, constant exposure to planes and jets can be helpful in overcoming fears, but for others, the overexposure can prevent recovery, said Jessica Auslander, a North Carolina-based psychologist with the Centre for Aviation Psychology. 'The brain becomes hypervigilant for any other future signs of danger, to protect ourselves,' she said. 'It has basically learned, hey, this is possible. How can we keep ourselves safe?' Symptoms are most intense in the first few weeks after the incident but generally ease within one to three months, Auslander said. To help get the families back on their feet, the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society said it has provided more than $80,000 in emergency assistance to more than 80 families affected by the crash. The funds have gone toward insurance deductibles, uniform replacement, temporary housing costs, food and household essentials, said retired Navy Rear Adm. Dawn Cutler, the nonprofit's chief operations officer. 'It's going to be a road to recovery,' Cutler said. For the families beginning to settle into their new homes, the emotional healing comes next. Maupin grew up in the area by the airport, desensitized to planes. Now, when one passes, she says, 'everything stops and I just dissociate.' 'It's hard to conceptualize knowing you were so close to no longer being here anymore,' she said. Rivera closes her eyes when she has to drive by the scene of the crash to leave the area. But her 2-year-old daughter stares directly at it. 'She says there's fire, there's fire everywhere,' Rivera said, adding that her daughter will begin seeing a therapist. The McCartys, too, said they plan to seek counseling. 'We've somehow shut down and went numb just so we can move on,' Srujana McCarty said. Her husband said the crash has left him feeling helpless. When they were looking for their replacement home, he said, his family's protection was the only thing that mattered. 'We didn't look if the kitchen was big,' he said. 'We looked in the backyard and said, where is the escape route?' Melissa Chan Melissa Chan is a reporter for NBC News Digital with a focus on veterans' issues, mental health in the military and gun violence.
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Remembering D-Day: Veteran, 100, offers first-hand account of D-Day
Tolley Fletcher, at the time a 19-year-old Navy gunner's mate, remembered the rough seas and the treacherous landing troops at Utah Beach had to make in 3- to 4-foot waves, each carrying about 60 pounds of gear on their backs and descending on rope ladders from larger ships onto smaller landing crafts. "I felt for those soldiers," Fletcher, now 100 years old, told USA TODAY. "In my mind, that was the worst part, other than people getting hurt." Fletcher, who joined the Navy at 17 in late December 1941, said he and his shipmates were fortunate to be mostly out of the line of fire. "There was some shelling, not really a lot, and luckily we didn't get hit. "Maybe halfway in, we started seeing lots of bodies in the water," said Fletcher, who now lives in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, area. "I was asked (later) what we did about it. We didn't do anything about it - we had a job: to escort those troops to the beach." On D-Day, "that's what these guys faced," said Peter Donovan Crean Sr., vice president for education and access at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. "They knew they were in the presence of history. Soldiers, sailors, Marines - they knew what they were doing was going to go down in history, which also meant they knew the danger involved. "Guys who were 18, 19, 20 years old were faced with the possibility of their death, but they did it anyway." As we mark the 81st anniversary of D-Day, here is a look at what happened on the beaches of Normandy, the men who fought knowing they might not survive to see victory and the way it affected the Allies' fight to defeat fascism, genocide and tyranny. What happened on D-Day? In order to defeat the Nazis in Europe, the Allies knew they'd have to take France, under German occupation since 1940. Operation Overlord saw a mobilization of 2,876,000 Allied troops in Southern England, as well as hundreds of ships and airplanes, in preparation for a ground invasion, the largest the world had seen. Weighing conditions including the weather, disagreements among other military leaders and strategic uncertainty, Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for the operation to begin before dawn on June 5, 1944. If things didn't go well for the Allies, Eisenhower wrote a note accepting responsibility. The following day, nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed along the 50-mile stretch of French shoreline. More than 9,000 Allied troops were killed or wounded, and 100,000 troops would continue the slow, bloody journey to Berlin, the center of German power. Why was it called D-Day? According to the U.S. Army, D-Day was "simply an alliteration, as in H-Hour." Some believe the first "D" also stands for "day," a code designation, while the French say the "D" stands for "disembarkation." The Army's website says that "the more poetic insist D-Day is short for 'day of decision.'" Asked in 1964, Eisenhower instructed his assistant Brig. Gen. Robert Schultz, to answer. Schultz wrote that "any amphibious operation has a 'departed date'; therefore the shortened term 'D-Day' is used." What happened after D-Day? D-Day was not the only decisive battle of the European theater, Crean said. "It was a crucial battle but there were more ahead," he said. "They had 700 miles of tough road ahead to get to Berlin." The Battle of the Bulge, waged over 41 days in December 1944 and January 1945, required 700,000 Allied troops. "It was a tough slog for another 11 months," Crean said. Victory in Europe - V-E Day - would come on May 8, 1945, nearly a year after D-Day. The war wouldn't end until the Japanese surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. How many World War II veterans remain in the U.S.? There are about 66,000 surviving World War II veterans in the United States, Crean said, and while that may sound like a lot, it's a tiny fraction of the 16.4 million who served their country in the conflict. "So to be able to talk to and thank one veteran now is a gift for any of us," Crean said. The National World War II Museum's mission "is more critical than ever ... so more people will understand what they did and continue to be inspired by their sacrifices," added Crean, a retired colonel with 30 years' service in the Army. The museum has had oral historians travel the country to record more than 12,000 personal stories from World War II veterans. They've conducted extensive interviews with veterans, Holocaust survivors and homefront workers and, using artificial intelligence, created a way for visitors to have "conversations" with them and ask questions to learn about the war effort. And they offer virtual programming, teacher training and a student leadership award. Fletcher, the Navy gunner's mate, said he's uncomfortable with the idea of being considered a hero. Asked about his role in history, he said, "I really didn't think about it then, and I don't think about it now, though it's been impressed upon me quite a bit. "When I think about what I went through, and what all the Army and the other men who were mixed up in really tough situations, it makes me feel a little bit guilty."
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Abandoned wartime village frozen in time where empty terrace houses rot
The whole village of Tyneham in Dorset was evacuated during the World War II, but today the abandoned village still remains and visitors can explore its deserted street and the memories left behind Tucked away on the Dorset coast lies a village where time stopped in 1943 and never restarted. Tyneham in Dorset was evacuated during World War II in December 1943, when the War Office took over the land to make space for Army training. Around 225 people were told to pack up and leave their homes within days. The residents believed it would only be temporary and they would return one day. Residents left a note on the church door reading - "Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.' Despite the war ending in 1945, the residents were never allowed to reclaim their homes, and Tyneham remained under Army control - and it still is. The village became part of a British Army training site, used to test tanks and weapons. To this day, it's owned by the Ministry of Defence and forms part of the Armoured Fighting Vehicles Gunnery School. However Tyneham isn't the only local village absorbed into a Army training ground; Worbarrow Bay and Lulworth ranges are grounds that remain active to this day. The land is still used for the Armoured Fighting Vehicles Gunnery School, a live fire training school - which is why the area is only open to the public on selected weekends and bank holidays. When they allow visitors to explore what remains of the village, it's like stepping back in time. Although many of the buildings have crumbled, there are still preserved fragments of Tyneham's past. The old schoolhouse and church have been carefully restored and today holds exhibitions about the people who once lived there with photos and letters. A row of terraced cottages, known as The Row, still stands near the church. Some buildings have crumbled, but others remain hauntingly still - like they're waiting for their owners to come home. There's also a restored farm area with picnic benches, surrounded by broken walls and fading signs of village life. Tyneham is often called 'Dorset's lost village', and it's easy to see why. It's quiet, eerie, and frozen in the past - a snapshot of a community that vanished almost overnight. Tyneham is more than a village lost to war. It's a time capsule - a stark reminder of the sacrifices of war and what's left behind when history moves on without you. For those planning a visit, it's best to check the opening times online. The village, nearby Worbarrow Bay and the Lulworth Ranges are all part of a live military zone. The exact dates are listed on the Government website. If you're after a day out that's a little different and don't mind a few goosebumps - Tyneham offers a rare glimpse into wartime Britain, frozen in time. Although visitors often say it gives them goosebumps, especially when reading notes left behind by children or seeing the school's original blackboard.
