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A crew member has reportedly gone overboard from the Majesty of the Seas last night according to several passengers on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship.

This morning shortly before 8:00 a.m., we received the following message from a guest on the cruise ship:

“We are on the Majesty of the Seas. It was just reported that we will be late to get to port today because a crew member went overboard. No other information has been given to us. They said we assisted in the efforts last night to look, but no one was found.”

Another guest contacted us on Facebook around 7:00 a.m stating:

“Currently on Royal Caribbean majesty of the seas … search and rescue underway with coast guard for crew member that threw themselves overboard.”

The following information was also posted on Twitter:

Local news stations are reporting that the crew member is 26 years old. There is an active search and rescue operation underway around 37 miles east of the Miami area.

Two Royal Caribbean crew members and one officer from a Celebrity Cruises ship have gone overboard in the last two months. All three apparently decided to end their lives.

A Royal Caribbean crew member, also 26 years of age, went disappeared from the Adventure of the Seas at the end of November of last year.  He was subsequently identified as Jack Daniel Ackroyd, from Cotgrave (near Nottingham) England, who worked on the ship’s sports deck.

Another Royal Caribbean crew member, a performer identified as Arron Hough, age 20, of the United Kingdom went overboard from the Harmony of the Seas the day after Christmas.

A young Celebrity Cruises officer, Anton Ilichev hung himself on the Celebrity Millennium, on December 6, 2018.

It again appears that this Royal Caribbean cruise ship was not equipped with a modern auto man overboard system, which would instantly send a signal to the bridge and then track the overboard person in the water even at night.

Like other cruise lines, Royal Caribbean claims that it does not believe the available overboard detection technology is “reliable,” a conclusion refuted by numerous experts and manufacturers of state-of-the-art MOB systems.

Royal Caribbean CEO Richard Fain was quoted in an article in Quartz by Rosie Spinks titled People fall off cruise ships with alarming regularity. Can anything be done to stop it? He stated that MOB technology “is not yet at a viable stage,” despite effective systems like this and this.

As I have stated before, it never ceases to amaze me that a cruise line that collects over 8,000,000,000 (billion $$) dollars a year tax-free, and builds billion dollar Genesis class cruise ships like the Oasis of the Seas, Allure of the Seas,  Symphony of the Seas and the Harmony of the Seas, refuses to invest in such life-saving technology.

We have written before about Royal Caribbean’s dismal attitude about MOB systems and procedures relative to crew members – Royal Caribbean Unreasonably Delays Reporting Overboard Crew Member from Vision of the Seas.

During a period of less than three years between December 2009 and October 2012, at least twelve crew members jumped overboard or simply disappeared from cruise ships operated by Royal Caribbean/Celebrity Cruises. I wrote about the problem in an article titled “Is Royal Caribbean Working Its Crew Members to Death?”  The grueling schedule and long hours crew members are required to work 7 days a week, 30 days a month with no days off over the course of a 6 to 10 month contract, for far less than the U.S. minimum wage, often leave ship employees, who are already isolated from their families, exhausted and demoralized.

After a 22-year-old Serbian crew member, Nikola Arnautovic, a Carnival crew member on the Carnival Fascination, hung himself last year, a petition was started on Change.org – Save lives! Make psychologists compulsory for Carnival Cruise workers and 1 day off a week.

Just a few days ago, a crew website, the Crew Bar, published an article titled The Crew Need Your Help… which addressed the problem of crew member suicides and proposed significant changes to address the problem of crew member working conditions.

According to cruise expert Professor Ross Klein, 335 people have gone overboard from cruise ships since 2000.  26 people went overboard from cruise ships last month – an average of two a month.

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Read: Misery Machines and Crew Member Suicides.

January 25, 2019 Update: The crew member is Enis Mahic from Montenegro.