Mjacob wrote:Tom,

It is not unprecedented for the whole crew, or at least the responsible ones, to be absent from the bridge leaving it unmanned. I seem to remember a Greek ferry crashing when everyone who could steer it was watching a football match. I have left the verb as unmannned rather than unpersonned as woman would surely have more sense.

I fear that your appeal to await the inquest has fallen on deaf ears. The captain has been arrested and another rumour is that he was showing off to a male friend on the shore.The ship we are told is fully automated so complacency doubtless came into it.

Best regards

Matthew

The Captain has admitted that on the night of 13 January he was not using the ship's computer navigation system: "I was navigating by sight, because I knew those seabeds well. I had done the move three, four times."[28] Costa Cruises confirmed that the course taken was "not a defined [computer programmed] route for passing Giglio."[29] Costa Cruises CEO, Pier Luigi Foschi, explained that the company's ships have computer-programmed routes and "alarms, both visual and sound, if the ship deviates by any reason from the stated route as stored in the computer and as controlled by the GPS", but that these alarms can be "manually" overridden