The USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier collided with a merchant ship near Port Said off the coast of Egypt, the Navy said.
The shock collision occurred late Wednesday evening as both ships were sailing in waters near the port, but the incident did not cause any damage.
The Navy said there are no reports of flooding or injuries as a result of the crash, and there was no damage to the aircraft carrier’s propulsion systems, the military branch said in a statement.
A defense official told The Independant that the merchant ship, the 617-foot Besiktas-M, was also not damaged in the incident, and none of its crew were injured.
It is not clear what caused the collision and the military launched an investigation, however an official told CNN that it occurred in an area near the Suez Canal that often sees congested shipping traffic.
The nuclear-powered, 1,100-foot USS Harry S. Truman is typically based in Virginia, but was deployed in September to the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Its last port call before the collision was reportedly a week ago in Souda Bay, Greece.
The USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier collided with a merchant ship near Port Said off the coast of Egypt late on Wednesday
The Besiktas-M, which sails with the Panamanian flag, had sailed through the Suez Canal shortly before the collision.
The vessel was on route to Romania before the incident, according to ship monitoring website Marine traffic.
At the same moment, the USS Harry S. Truman was sailing toward the Suez Canal when it crossed courses with the merchant ship.
Former US Navy captain Carl Schuster, an instructor at Hawaii Pacific University, told CNN that heavy shipping traffic around the Suez Canal can leave little margin for error.
‘There is not a lot of room for maneuvering in a restricted seaway and both ships require about one nautical mile to stop,’ Schuster said.
He said issues such as misreading of another ship’s course, delayed decision making from the crew or minor navigational mistakes would have left the aircraft carrier ‘with very few viable options.’
The last known collision between a US aircraft carrier and a merchant vessel occured over two decades ago on July 22, 2004, when the USS John F. Kennedy struck a sailing vessel in the Persian Gulf.
In 2017, two aircraft carriers struck cargo ships, first in June of that year when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off Japan.
Two months later, 10 sailors were killed when the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker off Singapore.