Shore-based Voyage Planning

The objective of the thesis was to describe the voyage planning process and factors that influence it to see how the process could be adapted for being performed shoreside. The thesis is a qualitative study written from the voyage planning officer’s point of view concentrating on the appraisal and planning stages. Regulatory framework was defined using IMO and British Admiralty publications. Carnival Corporation’s SMS policies and Holland America Line’s voyage planning routines were used as examples of the process. As there is not much research available on voyage planning and new developing technologies, interviews and internet sources were used. The amount of work put into a voyage plan varies greatly depending on a ship type and trade area, but generally it is a time-consuming process, partly because the information needs to be gathered from multiple sources and is not always easily available. The concept of e-navigation is aimed to improve connectivity between different systems and stakeholders allowing new types of services and information dissemination across the industry enabling the navigators to receive relevant information in time and often automatically with no need to request the information separately. Also automated ship-to-ship information exchange will become possible. AI-aided planning software and government provided passage plans can be of assistance in the voyage planning officer’s work, but their scope is still quite limited. In the future when the technology develops, and especially if all information can be accessed from a single window, time spent on appraisal and planning stages will decrease considerably and most of the process could be done shoreside leaving the officers on board more time for other tasks. Autonomous vessels and augmented reality are the future, and as the technology develops shore-based voyage planning will become more common

Exploring technical and non-technical competencies of navigators for autonomous shipping

The emergence of autonomous ship technologies has attracted a growing body of academic studies, regulatory discussions and exploration endeavours in recent years. With the introduction of new technology comes the need for the seafarers to be trained in its use. The purpose of this paper is 1) to examine the suitability of the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) Table A-II/1 competence framework for navigators under Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) operations, and 2) to propose future technical and non-technical competencies that will be needed in autonomous shipping era. A mixed method approach was adopted with collection of both quantitative and qualitative data through a survey instrument developed on the basis of the literature and current STCW Table A-II/1, in which the 66 Knowledge, Understanding & Proficiency (KUP) requirements for navigators were converted into measurement items. Statistical analysis of the data has aided in identifying a list of key technical and non-technical competence requirements for the navigators under MASS operations. The results can be used as an input for revision of the STCW competence requirements and to facilitate the preparation and implementation of novel training frameworks for autonomous shipping

Investigation of advanced navigation and guidance system concepts for all-weather rotorcraft operations

Results are presented of a survey conducted of active helicopter operators to determine the extent to which they wish to operate in IMC conditions, the visibility limits under which they would operate, the revenue benefits to be gained, and the percent of aircraft cost they would pay for such increased capability. Candidate systems were examined for capability to meet the requirements of a mission model constructed to represent the modes of flight normally encountered in low visibility conditions. Recommendations are made for development of high resolution radar, simulation of the control display system for steep approaches, and for development of an obstacle sensing system for detecting wires. A cost feasibility analysis is included

Making the ocean : global space, sailor practice, and bureaucratic archives in the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire

textThis dissertation is about the long-distance navigators who constructed a global marine world as agents of the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire. The hard-won pragmatic and empirical expertise on which they relied developed in an uneasy tension with the priorities of the bureaucracy centered at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. In the Atlantic, bureaucratic standardization driven by the Casa made commercial ocean travel increasingly routine, while exploratory sailors, particularly in the Pacific, continued to apply their expertise in unknown and unpredictable waters. The quotidian and the pragmatic defined these long-distance mariners’ relationship to their environment. They organized space into networks of knowable pathways that connected places identified by names and markers that communicated the sailors’ experience to future navigators; they interpreted local conditions based on inferences from distant stimuli and ocean-scale systems; and they introduced their natural and human surroundings to metropolitan and colonial scholars and administrators. The resources and instruments developed by the Casa informed these practices, but voyages of discovery always remained outside of direct institutional control from Seville. This relationship—between the local, individual, and contingent on the one hand and the universal, bureaucratic, and synthetic on the other—not only defined the dynamics of intellectual authority governing scientific endeavors under the Spanish monarchy, but also shaped strategies for projecting imperial claims across areas of uneven and limited physical control, whether marine or terrestrial. Reevaluating the balance between marine and terrestrial territorial claims recasts the Americas as a waypoint into the Pacific and beyond for the globally-aware westward gaze of Spanish imperial ambition. More fundamentally, it highlights the multicentric and networked arrangement of power in the early modern period by refocusing our attention on those islands, whether literal or figurative, of physical Spanish presence surrounded by spaces of hypothetical control. The Spanish empire’s maritime orientation during the sixteenth century developed the intellectual, political, and institutional strategies to balance and resolve these tensions between embodied and archival knowledges, local contingencies and universal frameworks that defined the distribution of power under the Spanish monarchy.Histor