The authors of this paper are the three General Lighthouse Authorities (GLAs) of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. It was presented on their behalf at the RIN-96 conference by Captain Turner. The paper gives a brief overview of the policy of the GLAs (i.e. the Corporation of Trinity House, the Northern Lighthouse Board and the Commissioners of Irish Lights) regarding the provision of an aids to navigation service with emphasis on the future prospects of traditional aids to navigation over the next 25 years. The three GLAs have recently carried out a consultation exercise on marine aids to navigation into the 21st century. The results of this consultation exercise are discussed. It should be noted that, for clarity, the General Lighthouse Authorities (GLAs) refer to the systems that they provide as ‘aids to navigation’ (AtoN), to differentiate their provision from the equipment carried on board ships for navigational purposes which are referred to by the GLAs as ‘navigational aids’. This paper therefore in the main deals with AtoN.

The coastlines within the GLAs' areas of responsibility rank with the most heavily trafficked and dangerous in the world. The coastlines vary from isolated rocks and the steep, Atlantic coastline, to the low-lying relatively featureless coastline of south-east England, off which are shifting sandbanks and channels. The tidal range in GLA waters is significant and tidal streams can reach 10 knots or more in a number of places.

The principles of radar beacons (racons) are described and their significance for navigation discussed. Developments in radars which may affect the operation of racons are considered and ways of meeting the requirement to locate and identify aids to navigation on a radar display are considered. The developments in non-radar band transponders are reviewed to determine whether they might present an alternative to racons in the future.

This is a condensed version of a seminal paper which was first published in the Journal in 1952 (Vol. 5, p. 103). It is followed by comments from John Parker. The numbering of the figuresand tables, some of which are omitted, follows that of the original paper.

In recent years, the most striking development in the philosophy of navigation has surely been the change in attitude towards errors. Ten years ago an error was regarded as something that just did not happen in the best navigational circles; today we accept it as the normal concomitant of observation, and we study to reduce it.

This paper is the sixth chapter of a series on the history of air navigation systems which have appeared from time to time in the pages of the Journal since 1988. Part II of this chapter will appear in the next issue of the Journal.

The author acknowledges the assistance of Bath College of Higher Education and, in particular, Dr Terence Rodgers, The Royal Aeronautical Society, The Royal Air Force Museum, and Philip Saxon of the Royal Air Force Historical Society.

The development, present status and likely application of Radar Target Enhancers are discussed. Their role in improving the effectiveness of aids to navigation and enhancing the safety of small craft is considered and their likely further development assessed.

The Radar Target Enhancer (RTE) is a device which automatically transmits a signal in response to an interrogating signal received. The response from an RTE has no identifying code. The RTE only amplifies and retransmits the radar signal received, so that it has the same appearance on a display as a passive return, but is more consistent. The purpose is to improve the radar returns from navigation marks and to improve radar detection of small craft, to reduce the risk of collision.

One of the definitions of Navigation that gets little attention in this Institute is ‘communication by canals and rivers’ (Oxford English Dictionary), and which our French friends call La Navigation. I have always found this subject fascinating, and have previously navigated the Rivers Mekong, Irrawaddy, Hooghly, Indus, Shatt-al-Arab, Savannah and Rhône. During the middle of 1995 I travelled by barge from the North Sea to the Black Sea via the River Rhine, the Rhein—Main—Donau—Kanal (RMDK) and the River Danube, a distance of approximately 4000 km. This voyage has only recently become possible with the opening of the connecting RMDK at the end of 1992, but has been made little use of because of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

This paper was first published in 1957 (Vol. 10, p. 398). It is followed by comments from David Page.

With the comparative absence of navigation aids in the earlier days of flying, up to about ten years ago, the navigator was constantly engaged in associating observations, calculations and chartwork in what was essentially a high-class guessing game. The low speeds (just over 100 knots on flying boats and just under 200 knots on landplanes) provided enough time for this rather intriguing exercise to be carried out in a fairly relaxed atmosphere, conducive to an individualistic approach that could be justified by results. The navigator's performance was largely (at that stage of aviation) judged on the neatness of his plotting, the accuracy of ETA'S and the absence of late course corrections before arriving at destination or a check point. If there is anything in the view that navigation is an art, this particular yardstick certainly induced considerable artifice in the navigator.

The views expressed in this paper are personal to the author, and not intended to represent official policy of the UK Hydrographic Office.

With the ever increasing use of electronic charts in the small craft sector, this paper is designed to give some background to developments at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. Included is a short review of the state of the market, with the author's view of possible future progression. The various formats of data are discussed, with a summary of the legislative background within the commercial market. This discussion is relevant, as it will ultimately shape the future market for small craft users

In the early sixteenth century, Portuguese navigators on voyages outside the tropics ran into an unexpected problem in navigating with the plane chart since the latter took no account of the convergence of the meridians. Voyages between Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope were accomplished much faster than the chart led them to forsee. To overcome this problem, were Portuguese pilots of the first half of the sixteenth century using globes to set their courses with on great circle courses? The general opinion is that they were not. Yet the mathematician Pedro Nunes (1502–78) describes in a short treatise entitled Tratado que ho Doutor Pedro Nunez fez sobre certas duvidas na navigação (published in 1537, but probably written in 1534) how the navigator Martim Afonso de Sousa, on his return from the east coast of Brazil in 1530–2, had asked him to solve several problems of navigation encountered on the voyage.

This paper was originally published in Vol. 34 of the Journal (p. 286). In its reprinted form, it has been reduced in length by Robin Payne. It is followed by comments from Stuart Quarrie.

Captain Illingworth's paper was read to an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held at the Royal Geographical Society on 17 March 1950. Introducing the speaker, the chairman, Captain G. C. Saul, said that Captain Illingworth's name was familiar to anyone who had had any connection with ocean racing, and to most people who were interested in sailing. He was Commodore of the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) and of the Royal Naval Sailing Association, and was a member of the Council of the Yacht Racing Association.

He had had many years' experience of long distance racing and had won his first championship in 1929. In 194; he had won the Sydney—Hobart race in Rani and in 1947 won the Fastnet and the Channel Race in Myth of Malham (Fig. 1). In 1948 he took part in the Bermuda race in Myth of Malham and then sailed back across the Atlantic to compete in the Santander and Belle He races. In the latter race he beat the whole ocean racing fleet boat for boat. In 1949 he again won the Fastnet Cup and also won the points championship over the whole season.

This paper summarizes the results of Phase 3 of the Arctic Tanker Risk Analysis Project (ATRA) which provided a prototype Tanker Navigation Safety System (TNSS). TNSS is a ship-board risk management system capable of route planning and decision support based upon a knowledge database. The objective of the project was to provide timely risk assessment information to a mariner or decision-maker in a system capable of integration with existing ECDIS or shipboard PC systems. The historical information was to include: accident location, frequency and type, ice, wind, visibility, environmental sensitivity and other factors. The specifications of the TNSS prototype were expanded so that risk could be assessed for each track in a route plan by applying a predictive accident model patterned after the navigation and collision avoidance process.

The past 10 years have seen an explosion in the use of high speed marine craft. This explosion has been in most sectors of operation, leisure, passenger carrying and military, and is now poised to expand into the cargo carrying sector. The sizes of the new generation of fast craft can range from small 60 knot, 7 metre leisure craft up to fast ferries which are 140 metres long with speeds of 40 knots. Future developments encompass 40 knot large cargo ships, 100 knot passenger and cargo vessels and very high speed military craft. Added to this galaxy of high speed concepts is the 200 knot wing-in-ground (WIG) craft, which, because it flies close to the sea surface, will interact with other marine traffic.

This paper was first published in the Journal in 1947 (Vol. 1, p. 118). Sections 1 and 2 are summarized in order to save space. Sections 3, 4 and 5 are reprinted with only a little abridgment. The paper is followed by comment from the original author.

The original paper gave a comprehensive account of the development of navigational radar in the United Kingdom from the beginning of World War II up to the time of writing.

The use that was made of the very early radars was mentioned and the improvements brought about by the introduction of the PPI (Plan Position Indicator) and centimetric radar were described. An account was given of how radar assisted the Normandy landings, and of the techniques employed including the use of radar predictions of the Normandy coastline (produced in great secrecy) which were optically superimposed on the PPI. Also shown on the predictions were the planned approach tracks to the shore. An example of one of these predictions compared with the post-invasion radar photograph is shown in Fig. 1. This superimposition of geographical information on the PPI was to become of great significance in later years.

This paper describes an advanced method, and the corresponding algorithms, which could provide a high precision Wide Area Differential GPS (WADGPS). The service would be suitable for single or dual frequency users, and could be introduced with very few reference stations. The two main components of the service are a precise, near real-time orbit determination of the GPS satellites, and an accurate estimation and modelling of ionospheric and tropospheric effects. Broad principles of the processing algorithms and results of both simulation and real data tests are described. User positioning accuracies of better than 2·5 m (r.m.s.) in plan and 3·0 m (r.m.s.) in height are achieved by both single and dual frequency scenarios.

Wide Area Differential GPS (WADGPS) is being developed to overcome the main drawbacks of conventional or Local Area Differential GPS (LADGPS), where positional accuracy of a user degrades as the reference-to-user separation increases. The spatial decorrelation of the error sources, notably the atmospheric propagation and satellite orbital errors inherent in GPS, are the main causes of this accuracy degradation. Several organizations are involved in WADGPS research, and different conceptual approaches have been suggested. The proposed methods all share a common basic assumption: that the error sources which affect the system are broken down into individual error components and are modelled separately. The variance between the different techniques comes from the way in which the different error components are modelled.

This paper was first published in 1960 (Vol. 13, p. 127). It is followed by comments from John Kemp. The paper has been abridged, including the omission of section 5 which described a proposal for a new radar display.

When the problem of collision in the air is discussed, it is usual to start by pointing out the enormous closing speed of two modern aircraft meeting head-on, and to conclude from this that avoidance on the ‘see and be seen’ principle has ceased to be possible. The fact is, however, that the great majority of mid-air collisions (about 85 percent) occur within five miles of an airport and the typical case is not the head-on one, but the case in which the two aircraft crab into one another from a direction which may be anywhere around the whole enclosing sphere. Since the field of view of the aircrew covers only about 20 percent of the enclosing sphere, the aircrew of colliding aircraft seldom see each other. It would seem, therefore, that the ‘see and be seen’ principle never did afford much protection, even when speeds were low. In other words, the fact that the number of mid-air collisions in Europe has hitherto been small is not primarily due to seeing and evading, although this sometimes happens, but to the fact that the airspace is very large compared to the volume of all the aircraft in it at any given time. However, as traffic densities go up, the risk rapidly increases, and in congested airspace, such as that around New York, the problem of avoiding collision has already become acute. In the period 1948–57, there were 159 mid-air collisions in the United States, and many of these made headlines in the world press. One can imagine the public outcry if two large transports were to collide over a housing estate; but unless something effective is done, something like this will presumably happen eventually. At very high altitudes the ‘see and be seen’ principle certainly fails, by day, because the speed will be high, and in addition, the range at which a pilot can see an object the size of an aircraft may be less than 1½ miles due to what is sometimes called ‘high-altitude myopia’.

Part I of this chapter was included in the January 1997 issue of the Journal, Vol. 50, p. 65.

The Smith Brothers, 1919. Captain Ross M. Smith, of the Australian Flying Corps based in Palestine, flew a Handley Page 0/400 late in 1918 on a special flight to Baghdad and beyond, carrying as passenger Major General W. G. H. Salmond, the RAF's Middle East Commander. Flying as co-pilot was Brigadier-General Borton, Commander of the Palestine Brigade. Smith had been flying, in support of Lawrence's forces, another 0/00 which Borton had brought from England.

This paper was presented at the NAV '90 conference and was first published in the Journal in 1991 (Vol. 44, p. 25). It is followed by comments from Christopher Querée.

The future shakeout and consolidation of vehicle navigation technologies and systems approaches will occur primarily in the vehicle location, mobile data communications, and man/machine interface areas. Digital maps will not be directly affected because, although there is still a dearth of formal standards, there is already a high degree of uniformity among approaches being pursued in all parts of the world.

This paper is based on a presentation at a seminar on the History of Navigation in the Royal Air Force, held at The Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, on 21 October 1996. The seminar was organized by the Royal Air Force Historical Society in Association with the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators and the Royal Institute of Navigation. The complete proceedings of the seminar are being published in 1997.

The feasibility of using a genetic algorithm to optimize a fuzzy fixed rule based autopilot is considered in this paper. Simulation results are presented to show the applicability of the approach. It is concluded such a procedure gives more credence to the resulting design than can be achieved by totally heuristic methods.

As a result of the general recognition given to the robustness qualities of fuzzy control algorithms, studies have been undertaken in the marine field to develop autopilots based on this approach. Indeed, a fuzzy autopilot was recently installed in a small leisure vessel and very successful fullscale sea trials were undertaken. In the past, the main problem in designing a fuzzy autopilot, or any other fuzzy controller, has been the reliance on purely heuristic methods to obtain an optimum solution. To compensate for such shortcomings in the design cycle analytical approaches are now being proposed.

There is a recent trend amongst oil companies or oil field construction companies to leave Quality Control (QC) to the survey subcontractor. Increasingly they do not put their own survey QC representative on survey vessels they hire. This may be a mistake, although at this point the author, being himself an offshore QC representative, must confess to a vested interest.

Quality assurance is a term which is often misunderstood. Even people who use the expression are vague about what it actually means in any given industry or how it should be applied in any particular situation. The confusion is compounded because the quality assurance ‘bible’ (BS5750/lSO 9001 documentation), was written primarily for the manufacturing industry, and needs expert translation to apply to a service industry such as the commercial marine survey business.