Steve from Costa Mesa emailed:

What are your thoughts on the captain of the Costa Concordia?

Does the captain have a huge PR problem on his hands? Yes. How do you ever recover from saying you tripped and fell into the lifeboat? But mark my words: If you actually track his performance that night, I’ll make you a bet that he comes out looking pretty good. He was on a course that was approved by the shipping line. And you may have heard this, but it was reported incorrectly: “Ship sinks after running aground.” Not true. It didn’t happen that way. The ship hit those rocks and then the captain intentionally ran the ship aground in order to save the ship. He did what any professional captain would do given the choices he had. The cruise line wasted no time dumping on the captain. This makes no sense at all until you start interpreting it.

Name another publicly held company—an airline, a cruise line—that has a disaster. What do they normally do in the first 24 hours? They put out a statement that says, “We extend our condolences to the families. We are actively participating in the investigation. We have nothing further to say at this time.” What did the Costa folks essentially say within 24 hours? The captain sucks. You do that if you want to deflect liability.

The liability of this will be heard in court, whether it’s in a U.S. or Italian court. You know the lawyers are scrambling to have this heard in U.S. court because the maximum liability in wrongful death cases in Italy is only $160,000 per person. Every lawyer is trying to get to Florida because the parent corporation is Carnival. They’re not going to prevail. I think those cases will be heard in Italy and they will be able to dump it on the captain. Which is unfortunate because Lloyds of London, the chief insurer, already wrote out a check for $480 million. They use very specific GPS to track the course on every ship they insure—they need the evidence. The course they were tracking on this ship was a course that this ship, and its sister ships, had sailed before with express permission of the line itself. The captain wasn’t derelict. He was given permission to do it. So watch this space…we’ll report as the events evolve. Now, does the captain have a PR problem? Yes. Will he be sailing anytime soon? Probably not. But the bottom line is, in terms of his own actions, he will be relatively vindicated.

For more information on the Costa Cocordia, read Peter’s two travel detective blogs, Marine Salvage & the Costa Concordia and Beyond the Headlines of the Costa Concordia.

By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio