This paper summarizes recent measures to improve the safety of navigation in the Channel, particularly in the Dover Strait area, and gives the point of view of one administrator involved in these efforts. Much of the material in the paper is already well known and indeed the paper relies heavily on work published by the National Physical Laboratory. The views and opinions in this paper are of course the author's and not necessarily those of the Department of Trade and Industry.

In 1960 Dr. Calvert published a paper in the Journal (13, 127) which proposed a fundamentally new conception of how to avoid collision between single craft at sea or in the air, based on work carried out by the Mathematics Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Later Hollingdale (14, 243) published a rigorously mathematical explanation of Calvert's ideas. The following paper to some extent draws together the arguments that have ranged so widely over this subject during the last ten years or so.

The chief criticism which has always been made against the existing Collision Regulations and is now being made against the revised ones, is that, except for the end-on encounter, no directives are given as to how a vessel should manœuvre to ‘keep out of the way’. Their role, it has been said, is not so much to prevent collisions as to enable lawyers to apportion blame after collision has occurred. The explanation usually given is that ‘the infinite variety of encounters which may arise at sea does not yield to a uniform treatment’.

The existence of marine science is commonly believed to date from the great Challenger Expedition which sailed in 1872. Indeed John Young Buchanan, the Expedition's chemist, held that oceanography started on one particular day in 1873, the day of Challenger's Station I when she first dredged in the depths of the North Atlantic south of Tenerife. In fact, as anyone who has read Margaret Deacon's Scientists and the Sea knows very well, marine science has grown gradually over the centuries, at rates depending on individuals and the environment in which they found themselves.

Looking at the practical training for operators of future ships we are confronted with a wide range of sub-systems which may at some future date be grouped in a central ‘operations control’ point. The array shown in Fig. I is by no means exhaustive. The selection, education and training of personnel for the conduct of international shipping is of world importance and the United Kingdom has a wealth of experience which is respected by other maritime and would-be maritime nations. In this paper it is only possible to take a narrow and rather short-term view of requirements within the present manning and training structure.

In the matter of marine traffic in confluence and approach waters we are, it seems, in a state of modest confusion. Society and the ecologists demand protection from pollution and coastal catastrophe. Operators of ships do not want to be put to inconvenience and expense, which in their view may not be justified. Their Masters, on the other hand, are largely in favour of some changes, even approaching compulsion, in areas where they know from long experience that something needs to be done to improve the safety factor. The underwriter does not seem to involve himself directly in safety. His business is, after all, in the accurate prediction of total risk, not its elimination. The statistician cries out for facts which nobody seems to want to give him, in response to the plea that his art may throw up some unseen lead. Governments and the shipping industries in so many countries seem loath to step in any positive direction, being so sensitive to the lobbies and interests that support them.

The present deadlock between Western Europe and U.S.A. reflects a difference in emphasis on motivation largely traceable to the space technology gap. The problem is to establish institutional and work sharing arrangements bridging U.S. desire for early commercial space exploitation and European desire to promote its industrial space techology. The European approach is compatible with I.C.A.O. and I.A.T.A. preference for a non-operational experimental first phase Aerosat programme, and unless a compromise with U.S.A. is reached the best solution may be a European E.S.R.O. programme able to cater for the experimental mobile satellite communication system requirements of both aviation and shipping. The paper was presented at the Conference on Aeronautical and Maritime Satellite Systems held in London on 13–15 March and sponsored jointly by the Institution of Electrical Engineers with this Institute, the Institution of Electronic and Radio Engineers and the European Space Research Organization.

Operational experience to date has shown that while inertial navigators are more consistently accurate than some pessimists predicted, this accuracy is only achievable given correct pilot handling before take-off. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the operational considerations involved in pre-flight handling and to indicate some engineering developments which promise to ease the pilot's task and thus contribute to the overall utility and accuracy of inertial navigation.

The object of this paper is to describe how anticollision simulation is employed at H.M.S. Dryad, the Royal Navy School of Navigation. The methods described are those used in the Navy but this paper has no specific military slant, nor do the anti-collision problems studied at Dryad spring exclusively from the naval environment. Ship safety is one of the fundamentals of seamanship where the naval and mercantile problem is the same; the Navy does not however suffer the same manpower limitations on board ship.

The Royal Institute of Navigation has in its possession a remarkable set of works by its late Honorary Member Vice-Admiral Francisco Radler de Aquino. An interesting feature of many of the items of this set is the large number of annotations, made by Aquino, which throw light on the development of his short-method tables—a development which continued throughout Aquino's long career as a distinguished navigator.

The civil aviation problems in training navigators may appear simple compared with those of our marine colleagues, and possibly also in comparison to the military side of aviation. In civil aviation we are concerned with tactical problems but not to the same extent as in marine and military aviation, but there are those amongst us who can recall the halycon days of flying boats when we too were concerned with the tides and the state of the water. Since the end of the war there have been far reaching changes in civil aviation and navigation. The object used to be one of getting from A to B and battling a great deal with the unknown—long night hauls across the North Atlantic, Shannon and Keflavik, icy cold arrivals at Goose and Gander, pressure pattern flying and so on, with the minimum of navigation equipment, poor weather forecasting and limited range aircraft. Nowadays civil aircraft range is not the problem it used to be, although some such problems still exist, navigation equipment is more sophisticated and the A.T.C. requirements much more stringent. It is not so much getting from A to B as staying as close as possible to an assigned A.T.C. track.

This paper examines the problem of those ship collisions which are associated with infringements of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. Experimental evidence indicates that there are classes of encounters which lead to indecision and uncertainty on the part of ship's officers. It is suggested that the identification of these classes of encounters is the first step towards eliminating the difficulties associated with them.

In the summer of 1972 my intention had been to sail up the west coast of Greenland to Baffin Bay (the North Water of whaling days) to land somewhere on the south-east coast of Ellesmere Island and if possible climb a mountain. As the great Von Moltke used to remind his staff, few plans withstand contact with the enemy, and this plan had to be dropped. Since ice conditions in the Canadian Arctic were severe this forced change of plan should have been welcome but in fact it proved fatal.

The heart of the B.O.A.C. Navigation Procedures Trainer (NPT) is a general purpose digital computer (Elliotts 905) and the programs have been contained within a memory store of only 16,000 words. There are fourteen cubicles for the pupil navigators and one for the instructor. At each cubicle is the usual chart table and stowage for manuals; navigation information appears on a CRT screen in the form of letters and numbers. Requests for radio bearings, astro sights and so on are conveyed to the computer by means of a typewriter keyboard and some simple codes which are shown on a plaque to the left of the CRT. Only a few of the keys are special ones.

This paper is a report on some early findings of a long-term study which has the ambitious objective of suggesting better alternative solutions to the general problem of controlling a collection of aircraft. The study aims to answer questions about the optimum division of responsibility between the aircrew and ground A.T.C., about the way in which the A.T.C. tasks are shared between a number of controllers and A.T.C. computers, and about the fundamental principles on which traffic flow is organized.

It is generally felt that by causing aircraft to follow accurate climb and descent paths the flow of traffic in terminal areas can be improved. This paper, which was presented at a meeting of the Institute held in London on 29 November 1972, with the President, G. E. Beck, in the Chair, discusses the special constraints involved in vertical plane navigation. These arise from difficulties in the accurate measurement of position, and the limitations of aircraft response. The need to fly at differing speeds and in various configurations, while minimizing passenger discomfort and external noise, is also considered.

The paper outlines a method used for forecasting the growth in aircraft movements between city pairs and at terminal areas, region by region, by 1985. It also determines the year by which this growth will have been achieved if the rate of growth is higher or lower than assumed. These results are examined in relation to the magnitude of the task which can be expected to face the industry in the mid-1980s. The paper was presented at the 19th Technical Conference of I.A.T.A., Dublin, October 1972.

In order to have any meaningful discussion on the handling of air traffic in the long-term future it is essential to have some idea of what will be the traffic volume. For the purposes of this paper the period of the mid-1980s has been chosen for the following reasons. Firstly there is a need to establish long-term system objectives; in the past we have tended endlessly to patch up existing systems without any clear idea of where we wanted to get to. The motto ‘evolution not revolution’ is important but it is meaningful only if we have a clear target for the evolutionary process. Secondly the period chosen, fifteen or so years hence, is far enough ahead to permit airlines and governments to amortize existing investments and should permit discussions free from inhibitions of an industrial nature such as fears of redundancy.

To judge from literature and verbal statements made in recent years, it is probable that among those who read the title of this paper, a substantial proportion will already hold strong views on the relative merits of the two types of system, that these views will reflect a wide range of incompatible conclusions and that they will not all agree on the precise definitions of the two terms themselves. The terms have not been formally defined which has, of course, contributed to the confusion and this is unfortunate because, in the opinion of the author, the terms do lend themselves to logical definition. Furthermore many of the attributes of the two types of concept do confer obvious penalties or advantages which are not seriously in dispute among the contending parties.

The system of winds and currents in the North Atlantic rotates in a clockwise direction so that, crossing from east to west in the northern part of the ocean, the winds and currents will be predominantly foul. This means that a sailing vessel making her way, for example, from the Channel to New York will be likely to cover a distance something nearer 4000 than the nominal 3000 n. miles—more or less according to her windward ability. Alternatives to the direct route have thus grown up over the years from considerations as to which 4000 miles or so is likely to prove the most advantageous and swift. An earlier paper gave an account of the generally accepted routes and the principal sources from which they have been derived.

No. 6 Flying Training School at R.A.F. Finningley trains all R.A.F. ab initio navigators as well as refreshing the failing memories of its ageing qualified navigators, tasks which have been helped over the last 18 months by the introduction of an air navigation simulator based on a digital computer. The simulator can seat 15 students in three banks of 5, each bank being controlled by an instructor seated at a control console. The diagram on p. 267 shows the layout of one self-contained bank of 5 cubicles. In front of each console is a track display unit (TDU) on which the briefed route is traced drawn in ink on a ground glass screen. The students’ cubicles are instrumented to simulate the Dominie advanced navigation trainer but there are additional facilities so that Varsity sorties may be flown by students in their basic phase of training.

This paper proposes that the navigation and control of all airliners should be automated from take-off to landing. Each aircraft will fly according to a prescribed flight plan, to be fulfilled in position, altitude and time within prescribed tolerances. The optimal flight plan is elaborated by a central air traffic control station and transmitted by data link to an airborne computer which monitors the navigation of the aircraft. The navigation itself is based on an integrated Inertial/DME/DME system. Separate airways are proposed for the general aviation. The paper was presented at the 19th Technical Conference of I.A.T.A., Dublin, October 1972.

The permanent growth of air traffic demands rigorous regulation. The most efficient form of regulation is the careful elaboration of a flight plan, taking into account the total air traffic in the area and the rigorous fulfilment of this flight plan. The flight plan will be elaborated at a central air traffic control station by computer, taking into account both air traffic and the meteorological conditions, especially wind. This flight plan is transferred by radio to the computer in the aircraft and comprises essentially the three-dimensional coordinates of take-off point, destination and way points as well as the corresponding times; also the precomputed values of ground speed, rate of climb and rate of descent.