Sub case consumes safety board member

He was in Los Angeles at about 2 on a Friday afternoon preparing for a week of aviation safety meetings when word came that a fast-attack submarine out of Pearl Harbor had slashed through the hull of a Japanese training vessel, causing it to sink within minutes.

John Hammerschmidt, left, of the National Transportation Safety Board, confers with James Scheffer, the chief investigator in the sinking of the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru. Advertiser library photo

Nine of the 35 people aboard the Ehime Maru were missing, and John Hammerschmidt was on the Federal Aviation Administration’s Gulfstream IV jetliner the next day, headed for Honolulu.

For the next 10 days, he would be the face — and voice — of the National Transportation Safety Board, which was in charge of figuring out the seemingly unfathomable: Why did the crew of the USS Greeneville, one of the most sophisticated warships in the world, not realize that there was a vessel nearby when the submarine undertook a rapid ascent that would send it rocketing into the much smaller ship above?

Nine NTSB investigators, divided into three teams, worked 12- to 18-hour days on average, weekends, even a holiday, devouring information like locusts in their search for information.

The investigators’ primary tools are pens, notebooks and laptop computers. Good interviewing techniques are essential.

"We want to know who said what to whom, what was each of the crew members doing at the time prior to and including the collision," Hammerschmidt said. "Were there procedures in place to account for the crews’ actions and were they following the prescribed procedures? Those are the things we look for."

The three teams each pursued key aspects of the accident — survival and vessel factors and human performance — and gathered for progress meetings at the end of the day.

Typically, the meetings would start at 6 p.m. in a small room just off the lobby of the Waikiki Beach Marriott Hotel. James Scheffer, a retired merchant marine captain and the NTSB’s chief investigator on the Ehime Maru case, would ask the chairmen of each investigation team to report on their findings for the day.

Hammerschmidt, one of four members of the safety board and not an investigator himself, took "pages and pages" of notes at each of the meetings so he could later brief the media about what investigators were learning.

Progress meetings often lasted until 8 or 9 p.m., and Hammerschmidt said that he waited until the end on most days to eat his first real meal.

Rail-thin and built like a marathon runner, he shopped mostly at an ABC Store near the hotel for dinner.

"I’d get a cold sandwich and a can of Pringles and take them back to my room," he said.

He went to bed most nights at about 1 a.m. and slept until about 6:30 a.m., when his pager would awaken him with requests to call NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C., or one of the investigators in Hawai‘i.

He tried to find time each day to squeeze in a 20-minute jog at Kapi‘olani Park, an effort, he said, to burn off the fatigue and the tension that come with a high-profile investigation and having to deal with the local, national and international media.

Keeping a can of Mountain Dew at each press briefing, Hammerschmidt would take slow, deliberate sips, especially after underscoring certain bits of new information: Crew members of the Ehime Maru sat in the life rafts and watched the submarine, wondering why it didn’t offer help. (Sip.) Civilians were, in fact, at the submarine’s controls when it struck the Ehime Maru. (Sip.) Navy analysis of archived data shows the Greeneville’s sonar picked up the Japanese ship prior to the collision. (Sip.)

First time in sub

Hammerschmidt was the go-team safety board member who drew the assignment two years ago when a sightseeing plane crashed on Mauna Kea, killing the pilot and all nine passengers.

He was the duty officer last month when a small commuter airplane crashed into a field in Colorado, killing all 10 people aboard, including two members of the Oklahoma State basketball team.

And he worked the Alaska Airlines crash that killed all 88 people aboard when it plunged into the ocean off Southern California a year ago.

But, he had never been aboard a submarine until four days after the Greeneville collided with the Ehime Maru.

He spent the better part of two weeks in Hawai‘i, a testament, he says, to both to the accident's huge international profile and the complexity in trying to gather the facts that will help in figuring out what happened.

For the most part, the Navy has been nothing but helpful, Hammerschmidt said.

"The Navy has been supplying maximum information and helpfulness for whatever we have been seeking," he said. "They have gone out of their way to try to explain any piece of equipment and answer questions as expeditiously as possible."

Safety recommendations key

One of the few exceptions, Hammerschmidt said, was the way in which information surfaced about civilians being aboard the submarine at the time of the crash — information that has since turned into a huge public relations nightmare for the Navy, whether or not it contributed to the accident.

Hammerschmidt has steered clear, almost with a fervor, of attaching significance to any information NTSB investigators have collected so far, no matter how hard he has been prodded by network TV reporters and Japanese journalists to do so.

The next public information to surface from the NTSB will be various "factual reports" about the sinking of the Ehime Maru, which should be done in three to six months.

The analysis and conclusion phases will take place much farther down the line, with a final NTSB report due in about 15 to 18 months.

And what Hammerschmidt describes as the NTSB’s "most valuable work product" — safety recommendations — will be generated by the investigation.

"Of the thousands and thousands of safety recommendations made in the history of the NTSB, roughly 85 percent of them have been adopted," Hammerschmidt said.

Ultimately, the Navy will decide for itself whether to adopt the recommendations.

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