by Michael Grey Lloyds List
Thursday 24 November 2011
THE constabulary in my part of the country has been on the track of distracted road haulage drivers recently, arming themselves with a rented HGV, the better to peer into lorry cabs to see if the driver is concentrating on the job in hand.
They have discovered some very curious things going on, far beyond drivers chatting on mobile telephones. Drivers on laptops, others watching TV, or playing electronic games, rolling cigarettes with both hands off the wheel and reading books, have all been pulled over. I usually put all that weaving about down to crosswinds, but maybe there are other explanations.
Ships tend not to have police launches alongside, peering into wheelhouses, but as we have known for quite some time, distractions can cause accidents. This matter of distracted watchkeepers is the subject of the London P&I Club’s latest StopLoss Bulletin, along with some choice examples of the sort of diversions that some employ to make the watch pass faster.
Vessel Data Recorders provide valuable evidence after accidents happen and that after a recent pollution event, which showed the watchkeeper listening to a news bulletin on Skype on his laptop, and ignoring a closing radar echo and a VHF warning call, before the accident happened, demonstrated a lamentable ability to multitask.
It is not difficult to be distracted. There is a delightful current TV ad which shows a harassed mum mixing up the meals for the baby and the dog, and I suppose all of us have done similarly stupid things. Most of the masters I sailed with were pretty fierce about the watchkeeper not becoming preoccupied by paperwork and requiring chart corrections to be done off watch. But they didn’t have to put up with officers with iPods and personal entertainment devices, computer games or people chatting on their mobiles when they should be investigating that ship on a steady starboard bearing.
A few years ago I sailed in a brand new Italian ferry which had a sound system on the bridge most of us would have died for, and the OOW and I spent a very happy hour sitting in our leather, “posture-perfect” chairs listening to opera at a volume that must have been audible on the mainland ten miles away. It was navigation, but not as I had known it.
Distraction, of course, can take many forms. There was the mate of the bulker off the Barrier Reef a few years ago, getting such an earful on his mobile from his wife that he missed the alter-course position. I recall a mobile-phone-assisted grounding in the western Solent with the master yelling down the phone at the agent, and oblivious to the entreaties of the third mate telling him they were running out of the channel.
There are people ashore who think that they have a God-given right to ring up the master of a ship and demand instant answers to silly questions, getting terribly angry if the poor Old Man is trying to filter his ship through a crowded anchorage, or swinging the ship off the berth, and is too busy to talk. People from charterers’ departments, I’m told, are particularly guilty and need to be told firmly to get off the line. Mind you, I have heard of masters being distracted by urgent bleeps on their phones, only to discover it is some salesman from British Gas, or Orange, offering some exciting deal just as the ship was closing the quay. “The use of such equipment at inappropriate moments” notes the London Club “may distract crew from the navigation or operation of the ship”.
I think you can probably make a reasonable case for banning mobile phones and such devices from the bridge with the ship in motion. Mind you, it also makes a very good case for the return of the radio officer who, in another age, would have handled all this extraneous messaging.
Bureaucracy can be a serious distraction, when it interferes with the priority task of safe navigation. Most of us will recall the spectacular crash off the Thames between a cruiseship and a container vessel, contributed to by the preoccupation of the cruiseship’s watchkeeper with the urgent task of completing the garbage return form. There was a rather ironic report from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch some time ago which suggested that the officers on a ferry were so preoccupied with their pre-arrival checklist that they didn’t realise the ship had actually arrived and crashed into the quay.
The London Club points to the risk of officers being exposed to excessive information, “and simply being unable to process it all”. The all singing, all dancing integrated navigation equipment, it suggests, “can confuse, rather than clarify”. A sad example illustrated in the Bulletin tells of an OOW using the Automatic Radar Plotting Aid to track 99 different ships when transiting a crowded anchorage, then overlaying the radar image with Automatic Identification System Data. There was so much gubbins on the screen that he not unsurprisingly failed to note than one of these targets was actually homing in on him and would eventually collide.
Maybe he should have looked out of the window, which I am told is sometimes rather distained by modern e-navigators, but can prove efficacious.