Originally Posted by
RAT 5
This I understand was the route cause of the collision by the Titanic. This was during the transition from tiller control to wheel control of the ship...
Sorry to say, but what you have there is an urban legend. A quick check shows me that steam ships had been using wheels and telemotors for around 50-60 years by April 1912. The British maritime practice was still using "tiller orders", however (this continued until 1933) - so a "starboard" order involved turning the wheel to the left and a "port" to the right. What may have caused some confusion is that the attempted evasive manoeuvre was known as a "port around" (which has nothing to do with the direction you're steering in).
The man at the wheel was Quartermaster Hichens, and the man who gave the order was Second Officer Murdoch - both of whom were very experienced and respected. The orders given were "Hard A-Starboard and Full Astern", indicating a left turn with the engines put into reverse. Once alongside the 'berg, the wheel was ordered to port (turned hard right) to use the remaining momentum to swing the stern of the ship clear. One of the investigations had White Star take Olympic (Titanic's sister ship) out to demonstrate the turning response to those orders, and the findings to this day indicate that it was a reasonable thing to attempt - turning the other way would have been just as risky. The only other option was to ram the 'berg head-on, which would have in all likelihood prevented the ship from sinking but would have certainly caused a significant amount of damage and an equally significant number of injuries and fatalities.
To get a bit more on-topic I remember having fun trying to master coordinated turns in the Air Cadets, as I discovered I had a natural tendency to extend the opposite leg to the direction in which I was turning with the column (as my instructor noted, cadets and sideslips shouldn't mix).
[EDIT : Going back to the maritime thing and how it connects to aviation, I reckon it's interesting how the latter seemed to have exactly the same kind of "growing pains", though at a significantly accelerated rate. Ultimately what doomed Titanic was a combination of complacency and retention of "traditional" practices which with the benefit of hindsight were massively inappropriate (namely the tradition whereby westbound mail steamers were discouraged from slowing down for anything except immediate danger). Identical aircraft types with the systems wired differently for each airline also sounds like a bonehead move from a perspective of 50 or 60 years down the line.
I suppose that with the frequency of civil airliners taking flight expanding massively faster than was possible with ocean liners (journeys taking a number of hours rather than a number of days or even weeks), it follows that the dodgy practices were weeded out more quickly - however the shadow of complacency never goes away, probably by its very nature. ]