Three Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN) officers have been charged in connection with the grounding and capsizing of the hydrographic and dive support ship HMNZS Manawanui off Samoa in late 2024.
The Daily Mail said Commander Yvonne Gray, a 20-year RNZN veteran who was Manawanui's captain at the time of the incident, will be court martialed along with two other officers after an investigation revealed they had failed to switch the ship's autopilot off just prior to the October 5, 2024 grounding.
"The direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors [that] meant the ship’s autopilot was not disengaged when it should have been," said Rear Admiral Garin Golding, who had stood up the court of inquiry in order to understand the facts of what occurred.
"The crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, as a consequence, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure."
Golding said that, having mistakenly assessed a thruster control failure, standard procedures should have prompted ship’s crew to check that the ship was under manual control rather than in autopilot. This check did not occur, and remaining in autopilot resulted in the ship maintaining a course toward land, until grounding and eventually stranding.
Gray, who had taken command of Manawanui in late 2022, has also been charged with failure to properly assess the risks of undertaking hydrographic surveys in uncharted waters near reefs.
Gray's barrister Todd Simmonds said she has denied the charges, which, if proven, will result in imprisonment for a maximum of two years.
