Farewell to the touch screen: the US Navy control your warships with buttons and buttons

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The touch screen is a technology that has managed to prevail in many areas of everyday life. It has managed to penetrate the vehicle interior, as is the case with the huge central screen of the
Tesla electric vehicles and also reached the control center of the United States Navy destroyers. However, far from being an improvement, this interface was the cause of several accidents and that is why the army decided to return to the old buttons.

Everything seems to indicate that those responsible for these accidents were provoked, at least in part, by the confusion created by the touch screens of the control center of the huge destroyers of the US Navy.

In August 2017, the
US destroyer John S. McCain struck the Liberian tanker Alnic ™ off the coast of Singapore. according to
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations were triggered by a lack of training on the controls available on the attack vessel's touch screens.

The incident resulted in the death of 10 sailors and about 48 wounded in the ship John S. McCain. Earlier, in June, another ship, the USS Fitzgerald, had also been involved in a similar accident, in which 10 crew members had died after a collision with a merchant ship.

According to NTSB investigators, the collisions were caused by the confusing interface of the touch screen systems. In turn, the crew has disabled guided navigation to use a manual control mode, a modality that further complicates navigation by duplicating orders sent from different control desks available in the destroyer.

For this reason, the US Navy will reuse traditional systems known to the crew until the arrival of touch screens on warships. In this way, the buttons, dials and mechanical levers will again be the old new control controls of the most advanced destroyers of the US Navy.