Hmm but to Western standards, 4 men loss and 13 more missing (not sure if any of them have been found yet) is quite a loss.
Eg, even though the US SSN (some Los Angeles class) collided with another ship (?) i think one guy died (?) but anyway the point is those losses were quite low even though the submarine suffered quite a collision.
The ship's survivability...yes then it is quite a tough tub especially a collision with an 18,000 ton ship (though judging from the pictures, i think it wasn't full head on collision, but more of a severe side scrape). Well if the Houjian 774 scraped along side the huge ship, any man caught between would have been crushed, so I guess 4 dead is kind of low...but 13 missing...wonder how effective SAR was...
A few things i can point out from personal opinion out of this
NEGATIVES
1) Another collision! Considering one of the Jianghu III class also took a collision with a smaller ship...this shows that PLAN still have a training weakness in the areas of steering a ship or traveling too close to another causing unnecessary risks.
2) Radars were working? At least some kind of navigation or short range detection device would have been operating at the time. This was the same question asked of that Jianghu III.
3) Is the vision of a PLAN ship so bad? No crewmen spotted this huge beast prior to collision, though it does depend on weather conditions and where in the ocean this happened.
4) Lastly, the loss of any personnel like this is quite tragic and is another negative.
POSITIVES
1) I would give credit to the men's bravery and damage control efforts. With such a beating there would have been probably some hull breaches, and I mean the captain could have ordered abandonment for complete safety reasons, but they managed to stay (or at least return shortly afterwards) and save the ship.
2) Not as many men loss as you'd expect. In the past PLAN disasters have been quite severe in loss of personnel, and though this was quite a severe collision, the bulk of the crew survived. Credit to training I suppose.
3) A testament of engineering. The small ship survived this collision (though it is not the smallest of all FACs, coming close to a corvette sized ship).
4) Finally, it is a matter of learning...the PLAN probably learnt heaps from the Ming 361 accident, and I am sure that submarine safety and training was a given priority after that incident. This was without doubt the first (or last) PLAN collision. But hopefully the navy can only evaluate its training and radar systems (especially in bad weather) to further mitigate against any severe accidents. They are not avoidable...but future lessons that are applied can curb the number of collisions.
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