Good News/Bad News: The Tugboat's Black Box

A tugboat on the Mississippi River drifted off course and slammed into the bank, damaging a local business.

Our client, the property owner, asked us to examine the "Black Box" kept by the navigation system on the boat. We first discovered that the Black Box was merely an ordinary computer hard drive. Unfortunately, someone had already removed it from the tugboat. Eventually, the tugboat company released the drive to us for forensic examination. We made a forensic image of the drive and began a forensic examination of its contents. The drive was password-protected and would run only under an older version of a Windows® operating system. Using forensic password-cracking software, we extracted the password. We then installed the required operating system on a lab machine, and mounted the image.

At that point we found that the navigation software required extensive electronic maps of the river for reference. Those maps were not on the Black Box. We contacted the original author of the software who provided the necessary maps.

At that point, we discovered that the navigation software included a "Replay Voyage" feature that would allow you to view all the actions in a particular voyage. However, the feature had been turned off nine months before the incident.

A conference with counsel revealed that they believed the Captain had been impaired at the time of the incident and probably wasn't even at the helm.

We used the software and electronic maps to make a demo to show what a "normal" passage would have looked like on the navigation display and a demo of what the Captain would have seen had he been at the helm.

The case settled.

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