Baltimore Bridge

I'll be honest, I have no idea how common/uncommon these things are. In both cases though surely port authority pilots would have been onboard?
The Pilot can only give the crew orders. If the crew don’t or can’t follow them (whether through incompetence or mechanical issues) despite the pilot yelling at them, there’s not a lot he/she can do about it.
 
These ships are not "piloted" they are largely autonomous, the course is plotted and the ship navigates on its own, very little manual navigation is done, even less so on vessels this large.

If the ship lost power multiple times, navigation would have failed or the ability for the ship to correct its course would be why it hit the bridge.

Look at how large its turning circle is to leave the port, your talking almost a kilometre to just turn. So just a few seconds of navigation failure would have been enough considering its heading, speed and the sheer mass of the vessel.
 
This is a realtime video and starting a bit earlier than the second vid in OP. You can see the lights go off a few times before it hits the bridge. Still not sure I agree with the "aim for the bridge" - this could likely be the most awful coincidence of power going out and the rudder getting stuck.

EDIT: The smoke coming out of the funnels also only starts after the first lights out - backup generator coming online?

That does sound like the most plausible explanation tbh... some sort of electrical failure and the crew sadly losing control of the ship/rudder and unable to divert after regaining power.

Other explanations on twitter of course are:

Chinese hackers
Terrorists
Woke Diversity Hire - 'cos Baltimore etc..
 
These ships are not "piloted" they are largely autonomous, the course is plotted and the ship navigates on its own, very little manual navigation is done, even less so on vessels this large.

AFAIK they will still make use of pilots as the posters mentioned above, that they're largely autonomous doesn't necessarily negate having a little boat sent out with a local "pilot" to navigate in various ports or through specific narrow areas etc..
 
These ships are not "piloted" they are largely autonomous, the course is plotted and the ship navigates on its own, very little manual navigation is done, even less so on vessels this large.

If the ship lost power multiple times, navigation would have failed or the ability for the ship to correct its course would be why it hit the bridge.

Look at how large its turning circle is to leave the port, your talking almost a kilometre to just turn. So just a few seconds of navigation failure would have been enough considering its heading, speed and the sheer mass of the vessel.

Where obstacles such as that bridge are involved they'd still likely have a pilot on board or, if a regular visitor then the crew may be allowed to pilot it themselves.
 
Woke up to this... not good. What a terrifying scenario to play out. This is normally stuff that we would see happen in China/Russia etc. What a mess.

1) Loss of life, vehicles in water :(
2) Port is basically closed I assume, so this will have knock on effects. (Obviously this isn't a 'sensitive' comment).
 
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So more details starting to come.

Vessel tried to slow its forward heading by backing down, they had deployed the aft anchor as seen in some helicopter footage which appears to have been dragged along trying to slow down. The issue is when a vessel this large backs down being a single prop ship, they tend to career off course.

There were no tug boats nearby to assist, in the 3-4 minutes it took for the vessel to go off course and hit the bridge. The had contacted the port and notified them of an emergency on board.
 
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I saw a couple of videos from a channel What is going on with shipping? (Which seems like a good channel) and it showed they were slowing.
Reading the comments… :/ I weep for mankind.
 
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