This paper, which was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held in London on 19 November 1980 with the President in the Chair, first outlines the arguments for simulators for use in training and research. The technical problems encountered in simulating ship behaviour are discussed, and the various engineering approaches which have been used for actual simulator construction are described. An account is given of experience to date with ship simulators in the UK, and the future prospects for marine application of simulator methods are discussed.

When measurements and observations are made using a radar simulator, the researcher assumes that mariners behave in the same way, whether they are handling a simulator or a real ship. This paper, which was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held in London on 22 April 1980, investigates whether this is a reasonable assumption.

Human error is a contributory factor in many accidents at sea. To explore some of the variables involved, a study of simulated ship-handling was undertaken. This investigated the possibility of predicting behaviour at sea from the personality of the individual ship-handler. Results indicated that, in particular, the scores of the seafarers on one simple test correlated with the distances at which they took avoiding action, and that, in general, the relationships between personality factors and ship-handling behaviour was a promising line to pursue.

When vessels are required to adhere to a routing scheme involving long segments of one-way traffic, as in the Dover Strait, the overtaking of one ship by another can result in some degree of hazard and nuisance as well as loss of time. The frequency of such manoeuvres would appear to depend on a number of factors, such as the density of shipping in the lane, the domain size of individual vessels and the speed and lateral-distribution profiles of the traffic. From general considerations it seemed likely that the manner in which overtaking manoeuvres are made, with regard to the presence of other ships in the vicinity, might have some effect on their frequency and extent. It therefore seemed worthwhile to investigate theoretically any change or reduction which might result if overtaking ships were to take account of the presence and location of other vessels in the vicinity when the decision whether to pass to port or starboard of a ship being overtaken was about to be made.

The total loss statistics for 1979, published in the Casualty Returns of Lloyd's Register of Shipping, provide further evidence of the increasing disparity between the safety records of vessels operating under different flags. Statistics of total losses are likely to be almost completely accurate, especially for ships of over 1000 tons gross, and can be used as the most reliable indication of trends in serious marine casualties. This review of recent total losses will be restricted to trading ships of over 1000 g.r.t.

The literature of the recent past concerned with the collision avoidance regulations cannot be regarded as the model of rational scientific discussion. Subjective arguments based on personal experience of particular situations and very general mathematical analyses are pitted together without any generally accepted criteria by which to judge them. Obviously both mathematics and experience have great relevance to this geometrically simple, but operationally involved, problem. One step nearer a rational optimization of a set of regulations defining action during collision avoidance would be a formalization of the criteria a successful rule of the road must meet, and of the operational difficulties it faces. The present regulations, for instance, suffer from several logical inconsistencies which are difficult to describe in simple mathematical terms.

Mr Hopkin, Senior Principal Psychologist at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine, discusses the human implications of recent advances in the automation of data processing and display as affecting both the role of the navigator and the safety of navigation. This paper was presented in London on 11 December 1980 at a joint meeting of the Institute and the Nautical Institute.

Thirty years ago, in the April 1950 issue of this Journal (3, 133) J. E. D. Williams published a paper ‘Loxodromic distances on the terrestrial spheroid’, in which inter alia he provided a table of latitude corrections to allow for the varying length of a minute of latitude. In the present paper R. Williams tackles the same problem more directly and proposes a table of ‘latitude parts’.

The title, the gift of Frank George, derives from The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton, E. G. R. Taylor's masterly edition of narratives relating to one of the less successful of Elizabethan adventures. Fenton's voyage of 1582, to China and Cathay, was a total failure. But the tale endures.

This paper, which was presented at a meeting of the Bristol Channel Branch of the Institute in Cardiff on 23 April 1980, describes Squadron Leader Cyster's solo flight from Dunsfold to Sydney in a vintage Tiger Moth in 1978.

Various methods of standard, or stored, flight planning are in use throughout the world and have some degree of success, but on occasions they are too rigid to accommodate changes to routes or in weather patterns. A standard plan should eliminate the individual differences between manually computed flight plans by two pilots for the same route in identical aircraft. It should be in real time, flexible enough to allow route changes by ground control and capable of taking advantage of fuel-saving tail-wind components. All four requirements are inextricably linked.

‘A labourer works with his hands.

A craftsman works with his hands and his head.

An artist works with his hands, his head and his heart.’

In this paper, by T. Degré and X. Lefèvre of the Organisme de Recherches Informatiques et Opérationnelles appliqués à la Navigation (ORION), the authors outline the principles of a proposed collision avoidance aid based on the concept of a ship's ‘room to manoeuvre’ in the presence of the vessels' or hazards to navigation and a corresponding bridge display.

The University of Bergen chartered the Norwegian ice-breaker MS Polarsirkel in early December 1977 to conduct oceanographic experiments at the Polar ice-edge north of Spitsbergen. Figure 1 indicates the working area. The aims of the experiment were to study the structure of the upper layers of the water column in the vicinity of an ice-edge in winter and to search for wind-generated upwelling along the ice-edge. In this connection we took current measurements in the open upper layers. Figure 2 shows the open area (polynia). At the time of the experiment the air temperature was about − 26°C and the sea surface temperature − 1 °C.