Sunardi, Aleik Nurwahyudi, Eko Sulkhany, Heri Supomo, Putu Sindhu Asmara
This study examined the causal pathways underlying passenger-ship sinking and capsizing/listing accidents in Indonesia during 2018–2021 using the official National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) maritime accident database. Of 1,635 recorded incidents across all vessel categories, 586 involved passenger ships, including Roll-on/Roll-off (Ro-Ro) ferries; among these, 265 cases (45%) ended in sinking/capsizing and constituted the analytic dataset. A mixed-method content-analysis design was employed by integrating the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System for Maritime Accidents (HFACS-MA), the Casualty Analysis Support Method for Effective Training (CASMET), and the Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) into a three-domain codebook covering technical/equipment, human/operational, and environmental factors. Cross-case coding of the full passenger-ship sinking/capsizing subset (n = 265) showed that a large share of records contained insufficient narrative detail to assign a specific initiating trigger (T0; n = 127, 47.9%). Among cases with an identifiable trigger, adverse weather/wave/current trigger was the most frequent category (T6; n = 45, 17.0%), followed by hull breach/water ingress/structural failure (T3; n = 32, 12.1%) and instability/cargo shift/capsize without prior mechanical trigger (T7; n = 28, 10.6%). Power-related failures, including blackout/power loss (T1; n = 8, 3.0%) and propulsion/engine/steering failure (T2; n = 3, 1.1%), were less frequent but remained operationally significant as potential initiating triggers in high-consequence accident sequences. However, the KMP Yunicee reconstruction showed that such failures can become highly consequential in high-current corridors by eliminating maneuvering control and narrowing the response window. The dominant pattern was a cascading pathway from an initiating technical trigger to maneuvering-control loss, environmental loading amplification, stability loss, and ultimately sinking/capsizing. These findings indicate that maritime safety interventions should prioritize technical resilience, enforced maintenance and redundancy standards, and condition-based operational limits rather than geographically localized responses alone. © 2026 The authors. This article is published by IIETA and is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Department of Marine and Fisheries Resources Utilization, Fisheries and Marine Science Faculty, Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, 60145, Indonesia; National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), National Transportation Department, Jakarta Pusat, 10110, Indonesia; Department of Naval Architecture, Faculty of Marine Technology, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Surabaya, 60111, Indonesia; Department of Shipbuilding Engineering, Politeknik Perkapalan Negeri Surabaya, Surabaya, 60111, Indonesia
