This paper, by the Assistant Chief Electro-dynamic Engineer of the British Aircraft Corporation, was originally presented at the Annual General Technical Meeting of the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators in September 1976.

This paper discusses a programme being carried out jointly by the British Aircraft Corporation and Hawker Siddeley Aviation into the design of flight decks for civil transport aircraft scheduled to enter service in the 1980s. The flight decks of today have evolved as a result of experience gained since manned flight began; it would be foolhardy to ignore this background and in applying new technology care must be exercised in preserving, as far as possible, conventions and practices which have long been established.

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.

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.

From a weather forecasting viewpoint the situation of the sailing yacht at sea is unique. The yacht is small and entirely dependent on one meteorological element, wind, for its motive power. It is a device where an increase in that power increases the safety factor of speed by a very small margin while at the same time it increases the danger factor to a much larger degree. This is mainly because the increase in wind speed is accompanied by wave building and the latter increases with wind speed, time and, very dangerously, with approach to the shallow water that must often be traversed before safety is gained. It is not only wind speed that puts yachts in danger, but the combination of wind speed and attendant seaway. However seaway is not an element predicted in weather forecasts; it is a branch of seamanship left entirely to the skipper on the spot.

The introduction of the Mark 10 Decca promised certain advantages over existing types and it was therefore deemed expedient to examine the potentialities of the equipment, its operational accuracy and general suitability for airline operation. The Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation in conjunction with British European Airways were subsequently involved in two series of tests which began in early 1957 and continued into 1958. These tests were designed to determine the operational suitability of the Mark 10 Decca receiver and, in addition, provide a direct comparison between the performance of Mark 10 and Mark 7 equipment. All the flights were made, by day and night, on B.E.A. routes within the cover of the English chain. Ample opportunity was afforded to study the equipment under typical service conditions.

This paper, which was presented at the Institute Conference on navigation equipment and training standards held in Cardiff on 2–3 April, reviews the recent creation of international safety standards for shipborne electronic navigational aids and the new institutional framework in which these are being generated at IMO, IEC and ISO. It suggests that these safety standards, where they exist, are very similar to those needed by shipowners for efficiency of shipoperation.

The paper which follows, by Moore and Page, was also presented at the Conference, an account of which appears in the Record.

Captain Scott went to the pole over the Ross Barrier, up the Beardmore Glacier (Fig. 1) which is about 100 miles long, and then on to the south pole, coming out by the same route. The great Norwegian explorer Amundsen went in from the other side over the shelf, up one of the glaciers and on to the pole. Admiral Byrd flew in and out again in 1929. Apart from these expeditions very little has been done in Antarctica and nearly all of it, apart from the fringe, is untouched.

Inertial navigation systems have for many years been mechanised as a cluster of gyros and accelerometers mounted in a servo-controlled gimbal system which isolates the cluster from the motion of the carrying vehicle. Until the spectacular advance in computer technology over the last decade no other mechanization was really feasible, but serious consideration is now being given to strapped-down systems. This paper compares the two mechanizations, outlines some of the advantages of strapped-down systems, and considers some of the contenders for rate-sensing in such systems.

Navsat is a civil satellite-navigation system which was presented by the European Space Agency. It is still at the system definition phase as distinct from the pre-operational stage, but since the original presentation it has been the subject of studies which have included analysis and synthesis of the main parameters.

The underlying principles of the concept as initially described by Rosetti remain unchanged but sufficient progress has now been made to predict the capability of the system in satisfying a number of objectives in the civil fields of navigation, position fixing and survey.

Although meteorology probably has a greater influence on marine and air navigation than any other individual science, many users are not fully aware of the problems of present-day forecasting, nor do they make full use of the services available. This paper is intended to give some idea of the value of observers' reports, the importance of communications, and the problems of present-day forecasting. In particular, attention is drawn to the rapid increase in upper air soundings and the interdependence of surface and upper air observations in predicting the elements for all marine and aeronautical services. Arising from the application of upper air data to surface forecasting, the paper emphasizes the value of applying comprehensive analyses and of marine forecasts prepared by weather centrals ashore; in areas where facilities are not available to the marine user, however, knowledge and experience of single-observer forecasting are still needed.

Mobile satellite communications and navigation are, historically and technically, intertwined. This paper offers a historical perspective on this interrelationship to see if the past provides some guidance to the future.

H.M.S. Challenger is one of Her Majesty's surveying vessels. She is a ship of 1140 tons and carries a complement of 96 officers and men. Built in 1931, she is named after her illustrious predecessor in which the wellknown world oceanographic cruise was made in the years 1872–6. This expedition brought back a great wealth of chemical and physical data, and a huge collection of plants and animals from the oceans. These were checked and analysed and eventually, under the guidance of Sir John Murray, who had been a scientist on board, the results were published in fifty folio volumes known as the Challenger Reports. These reports still form, the starting point for the study of the oceans and marine life.

In the next decade there will be an increasing demand for more accurate self-contained navigation systems due to more stringent air traffic control requirements, particularly with the introduction of the supersonic transport. Although inertial systems have been fairly widely used in military aircraft and missiles, the only self-contained systems in service in civil aircraft are dead reckoning systems based on measuring the aircraft's velocity and heading and drift angle. A big improvement has been effected in the measurement of velocity and drift angle by the introduction of doppler radar. The accuracy achievable with doppler is not matched by the accuracy of existing heading reference systems and the overall accuracy is, at present, inadequate for future requirements.

An inertial navigation system is a possible alternative but its cost will be two to three times that of a doppler heading reference system.

The least spherical distance between two points on the surface of a sphere is that along the minor arc of the great circle on which the two points lie. It is an easy matter to demonstrate this using a cord stretched between two points on a small globe; noting that the circle whose plane coincides with that of the cord contains the centre of the sphere and that it is, therefore, a great circle. It is a little more difficult to prove the fact analytically. The practice of sailing along the shortest route on an ocean passage—sometimes known as ‘orthodromic’ as opposed to rhumbline or ‘loxodromic’ sailing—would require the course to be continually changed (except, of course, in cases in which the rhumb-line and great circle arc coincide). This would clearly be impossible; the term ‘approximate great circle sailing’ is sometimes used to describe the techniques of following a great circle route as closely as practicable.

Although the Royal Navy has used various bridge designs during the past 20 years it has chosen a readily recognizable layout for its Type 23 frigate. This conservatism is not the result of a wilful disregard for changes being made elsewhere in the marine world but arises from the particular requirements of a warship's bridge and considerable differences in manning. The most significant changes to layout, in recent years, have been the siting of the quartermaster on the bridge, the introduction of the versatile console system (vcs) of instrument display, the provision of engine controls at the quartermaster's console and the siting of a radar display at the bridge front.

This paper formed the 1988 Anderson Memorial Lecture, and was presented to the Boscombe Down Branch on 17 March.

Wing Commander Anderson, in addition to his many distinctions connected with our Institute (a Founder Member, President, Gold Medallist, Honorary Member and frequent office holder) was above all an indefatigable worker for the science and artistry of navigation, which he regarded as a basic activity of all mankind. In 1939 he was headmaster of a school and by 1945 had become one of the most outstanding operational navigators in the Royal Air Force. In that year he was chosen as navigator of the research aircraft, Aries I, for those epic flights over the North geographic and magnetic poles, investigating compass performance in high latitudes.