New Zealand navy ship worth £61m sank after crew left autopilot on

29 November 2024, 17:57

A series of human errors caused a New Zealand navy ship under the command of a former senior Royal Navy officer to plough into a reef off the coast of Samoa, where it caught fire and sank.

The findings of a military Court of Inquiry into the disaster found the crew of the HMNZS Manawanui did not realise autopilot was engaged, believed something else had gone wrong with the ship, and did not check whether it was under manual control as it maintained course towards land.

All 75 people on board the vessel evacuated safely as the boat foundered about a mile off the coast of Upolu, Samoa, in October.

The ship was under the command of Yvonne Gray, a former Royal Navy commander who emigrated to New Zealand with her wife in 2012 and joined the Royal New Zealand Navy. She took command of the vessel in December 2022.

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The ship was one of only nine in New Zealand's navy and was the first the country lost at sea since the Second World War.

Officials did not know the cause of the sinking at the time and Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Garin Golding ordered a Court of Inquiry to investigate.

"The direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors which meant the ship's autopilot was not disengaged when it should have been," he said in a statement on Friday.

The crew "mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure," he said.

Several contributing factors were identified, he added, although he did not say what they were.

The Court of Inquiry is expected to continue until the first quarter of next year.

Rear Admiral Golding said that given human error was identified as the cause, a separate disciplinary process would begin after the inquiry.

"I want to reassure the public of New Zealand that we will learn from this situation and that it is on me, as the Chief of Navy, to earn back your trust," Rear Admiral Golding said.

In the days after the sinking, New Zealand's defence minister Judith Collins gave stinging rebukes of "misogynistic" online commenters who directed abusive comments at the ship's captain claiming she was only appointed because of diversity requirements.

After taking command of the ship in 2022, Gray, originally from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, told a New Zealand defence publication: “When I’ve really enjoyed a job it’s because I’ve made a difference, where things are a little bit better than they were before.”

The ship had been in service since 2019 and was surveying a reef when it ran aground.