Probing the events leading up to last week’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, investigators started by focusing on the actions of one person who was aboard the ship that crashed into it: the pilot.
The Maryland pilot in control of the Dali had at least a decade of experience in his role, Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots Association, said last week. Investigators probing what led the 984-foot container ship to slam into the bridge early on March 26, causing it to collapse into the Patapsco River, have not given any indication that the pilot acted improperly.
In fact, the pilot’s “experience shows, when you consider what he did” in the frenzied few minutes between the Dali’s apparent power failure and the cargo ship’s ultimate collision with the bridge, Diamond said.
The crews of cargo ships involved in international trade are required to be joined by a local bay pilot as they head up the Chesapeake Bay to the Port of Baltimore — a particularly long, and thus expensive, route for the shipping companies, which pay pilotage fees starting at just over $325 per hour for smaller ships.
The pilots serve as local guides to a ship’s crew, navigating the difficult quarters of local waters and communicating with authorities, as they are often the only native English speaker on board.
Before the Key Bridge collapsed last Tuesday and blocked the approach to the Baltimore Harbor, the 1.6-mile span served as the landmark where bay pilots would hop off and docking pilots, who bring ships through the narrowest parts of their routes to berth at a port, would hop on.
Both are elite seafaring jobs, requiring years of intense training and apprenticeship to learn every detail of local waterways and how to navigate them.
The job itself can be tricky, guiding massive cargo ships through channels just deep enough to accommodate them. Mistakes can lead to the ships being grounded or worse disasters. Storms and fog make it more difficult.
But the hard work pays off — with a waterfront view at work, as well as high compensation. Pilots for a port like Baltimore’s can expect yearly earnings starting at $175,000 a year, up to around $500,000 annually after several years of experience, said Kevin Calnan, an assistant professor of marine transportation at California State University Maritime Academy.
In Maryland, pilots ultimately make their earnings by dividing up what their association takes in pilotage fees, though that amount will likely start to drop with port traffic now cut off by the bridge wreckage.
All pilots in the state are members of the Association of Maryland Pilots, which has not commented publicly since last Tuesday beyond a brief statement that said the thoughts and prayers of its roughly 70 members are “with the families and friends who lost loved ones” in the collapse. The six construction workers who were filling potholes on the bridge are either presumed or confirmed to be dead.
“Our thanks and deepest appreciation go to all of the first responders for their selfless efforts,” the AMP said.
Diamond, who has been in contact with the state pilots association, said that the pilot helming the Dali did everything he could after the ship lost power — he ordered for the ship to drop anchor, alerted authorities and called for the 248-million-pound vessel to be steered as much as its rudders could muster without a functioning engine. Those actions delayed the impending collision, Diamond said, giving authorities enough warning to shut down bridge traffic and the time to do it.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board later gave a preliminary account of the events leading up to the crash that was in sync with Diamond’s account.
The board’s lead investigator for the crash, Marcel Muise, said last week that information recovered from the Dali’s voyage data recorder was “consistent with a power outage,” capturing several audible alarms going off on the ship as the vessel’s sensor data went offline. The data recorder then continued to capture audio of the crucial moments in the ship after it presumably lost power. The pilot, whom officials have not identified, could be heard making steering commands and rudder orders, reporting the loss of power, ordering to drop an anchor, calling for tugboat assistance and giving a “mayday” signal that officials have said ultimately prevented more casualties.
The NTSB said there were then about 33 seconds of audio “consistent with” the ship hitting the bridge and the bridge collapsing over top of it. Six seconds later, the pilot reported to the U.S. Coast Guard that the bridge was down.
Diamond said that the pilot in control of the Dali was accompanied by an apprentice, a mariner who has already made it through an arduous selection process but is in the midst of a five-year training period during which they must undergo hundreds, or thousands, of journeys in the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltimore Harbor and the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.
To even be considered to become a pilot-in-training, the Maryland Department of Labor’s State Board of Pilots requires applicants to have a license to captain a ship of any size, which usually takes over a decade, from attending a four-year maritime institution through passing each step of the U.S. Coast Guard’s licensing process. A Maryland license requires a minimum of five years working as a licensed master or mate, with at least two years captaining a harbor tugboat.
Mariners who are chosen — only a few out of hundreds of qualified applicants make it to the pilot-in-training stage — then go through at least five more years working under the supervision of fully licensed pilots and other training before they get their own full license. They have to pass a Coast Guard test for their local area; in Maryland, that test requires drawing nautical charts of the Chesapeake Bay on a blank piece of paper, completely from memory.
“It’s quite intense,” Calnan, the professor, said. “It takes years and years to prepare for that exam.”
Pilots continue their education after they earn their full licenses, with most pilots associations sending their members to annual trainings.
But despite the rigorous amounts of training, Maryland pilots have still been under scrutiny.
A Maryland pilot, Steven Germac, was suspended in 2022 and later permanently surrendered his license after a U.S. Coast Guard report blamed the grounding of the Ever Forward container ship on his “failure to maintain situational awareness and attention.” The pilot was using his cell phone for nearly half of the March 2022 voyage that ended with the ship being grounded off the coast of Anne Arundel County, according to the report. That ship was refloated after multiple attempts to get it out of the mud, where it was stuck for 35 days.
A committee under the state’s Board of Pilots is legally charged with reviews of complaints filed against pilots as well as “incidents” like the Ever Forward’s grounding or the Dali’s collision with the bridge, though they will likely wait for federal authorities to complete their probe of the collapse.
