US aircraft carrier collides with merchant ship

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman was involved in a collision with a merchant ship near Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea on Wednesday night, a US Navy spokesperson said Thursday.

It’s not clear what caused the collision between the US warship and the Panamanian-flagged vessel Besiktas-M, but the spokesperson said it did not result in any flooding on board the Truman and its nuclear propulsion plants were unaffected.

No injuries were reported on either vessel, though the merchant ship sustained some damage, a Navy official said.

An investigation is ongoing to determine how they collided, but the official noted that the area they were in near the Suez Canal is typically very densely packed with ships.

The Besiktas-M, a 617-foot (188-meter) long bulk carrier, had exited the Suez Canal and was heading to Romania, according to tracking website Marine Traffic.

The Truman, a 1,100-foot-long Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, was heading toward the canal, tracking data indicates.

Marine expert Sal Mercogliano, a professor at Campbell University, said in an X Spaces conversation that the area where the collision occurred, near an anchorage off Egypt’s Port Said, had around 100 ships in it at the time of the incident.

Former US Navy captain Carl Schuster, an instructor at Hawaii Pacific University, said such conditions leave little room for error.

“There is not a lot of room for maneuvering in a restricted seaway and both ships require about one nautical mile to stop,” Schuster said.

Small navigation mistakes, misreading of the other ship’s intentions or delayed decision-making from the crew of either ship could have put them in danger quickly “with very few viable options,” Schuster said.

Last week the Truman was in Souda Bay, Greece, for a “working port visit” after two months of combat operations in the Central Command region, a Navy statement said. During that time, it conducted multiple strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen and launched airstrikes against ISIS in Somalia, the Navy said. The Truman is one of 11 aircraft carriers in the US Navy fleet.

Accidents involving huge ships and commercial vessels are rare as the carriers usually travel with a strike group, protected by a screen of destroyers.

But ships entering the Suez Canal must travel in single file, which could make them more vulnerable to a collision, experts said.

The last known time a US carrier collided with a merchant vessel was on July 22, 2004, when a dhow, a sailing vessel common in the Middle East, struck the former USS John F. Kennedy in the Persian Gulf, according to maritime outlet USNI News.

Two US Navy destroyers were involved in fatal collisions in 2017. Seven sailors died after the USS Fitzgerald struck a cargo ship off Japan in June that year, and 10 sailors were killed when the USS John S McCain collided with a tanker off Singapore and Malaysia two months later.