Early in 1967, a few months before the restored Meridian Building of the Old Royal Observatory was opened to the public by Sir Richard Woolley, the Astronomer Royal, I received a visitor in my office then in the Meridian Building — later, I was to move to the west summer house of Flamsteed House. My visitor was Colonel Humphrey Quill, Royal Marines, Master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers that same year and author of the hook John Harrison, the Man who Found Longitude, which has become a standard work. He brought with him some manuscripts written by the subject of this lecture — Nevil Maskelyne, fifth Astronomer Royal, who lived in Flamsteed House for 46 years from 1765, making most of his important astronomical observations in the very building in which Col. Quill and I were sitting.

On 18 June, 1914 Lawrence, son of Elmer Sperry (founder of the Sperry Gyroscope Company) flew over a crowd assembled at Argenteuil, near Paris (Fig. 1). His aircraft was a Curtiss C2 flying boat and the purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the Sperry Gyroscopic Stabilizer in a competition organized by the Aero Club of France. It was a dramatic demonstration. On the first pass over the crowd Lawrence Sperry stood up and held both hands in the air whilst his mechanic, Emile Cachin, walked out on the wing and stood holding one of the struts. The lateral stability of the aeroplane was undisturbed, but the spectators were able to see the ailerons move to compensate for the engineer's weight. This performance was repeated several times and Sperry also demonstrated the automatic ‘volplaning’ function of the system which caused the aircraft to dive and regain speed in the event of an approach to the stall. The company was awarded a prize of 50000 francs as winner of the competition.

Commander Paton's paper, which was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held in London on 13 March, discusses the implications for navigation and safety at sea of the ever intensifying search for energy resources from the sea-bed. Commander Paton, who is Chairman of IMO's working party on ships' routing, serves at the moment in the Marine Directorate of the Department of Transport. The views expressed, however, are entirely his own.

Some results are here described of research carried out in the Netherlands with regard to marine traffic problems on the Dutch part of the continental shelf with emphasis on the preliminary results of the ‘Nautical Questionnaire North Sea’.

The North Sea is a busy and interesting area, often presenting a challenge to the professional and amateur mariner, and to government bodies who have to see that people operating there do so in a responsible and safe manner. Figs 1 and 2 give an impression of the various types of activities on the Dutch continental shelf and of the collision and grounding positions of vessels in the North Sea over the period 1973–7. To reconcile the claims of all operations has become increasingly difficult as offshore activities have multiplied.

The title of this paper could possibly be misleading in that it suggests that we already have a solution for a problem which is still open or at least a conclusion from an investigation which is still under way.

Accordingly, we should define straight away, subject to subsequent elaboration, (a) what we mean by an ‘advanced terminal area’, (b) what in such a context could be envisaged in terms of advantages for the aviation community, namely both the airspace users and the air traffic authorities, and finally (c) what new tools, both in the air and on the ground, would be desirable or essential in order to achieve a given degree of progress.

In order to navigate and thereby survive in a hostile environment the Inuit have developed a sophisticated body of knowledge that makes travel possible even during a blizzard or white-out. This unique skill was developed from a thorough understanding of the properties of snow and local meteorology. Problems of space, time and distance are also taken into account by Inuit navigators but this is done with minimal use of quantification and abstraction. However this highly practical form of navigation in which the Inuit deal directly with their environment is none the less scientific and empirical.

In 1971 the author attempted a single-handed sailing of the North West Passage and in 1973 completed a crossing of Arctic North America by dog team.

The aim of this paper is to summarize the contributions made by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich that led, almost inevitably, to the choice of the Airy transit circle to define the zero meridian for the measurement of longitude and the beginning of the universal day. Although astronomical considerations were not of direct relevance to the deliberations of the 1884 conference, they formed the essential background to the navigational and civil interests which were dominant.

This paper outlines some of the results being achieved by the UK research programme on civil avionics which is based at RAE Bedford. Acknowledgments are therefore due to members of the civil avionics team and UK industry from whose work these examples are drawn, and not least to the Department of Trade and Industry who fund the programme.

No attempt is made to define ‘flight management systems’. The concept, originating in the complex outer loops of autopilots, has now come to include all the detail involved in managing the flight deck systems as well as planning and controlling the aircraft's progress from ramp to ramp. As this paper will hope to demonstrate, the concept is still growing.

This paper was presented in an elaborated version at a seminar on Safety in European Waters and Progress in the COST-301 Project sponsored jointly by the Institute and the Nautical Institute n i London on 12 December 1984. It reports on the preliminary findings of an independent ‘pilot’ study carried out for the Commission of the European Communities on the legal implications of implementing Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) systems in Western European waters. In particular, it seeks to contribute to wider understanding of the legal position of the VTS authority with respect to the giving of information, advice or instructions to ships, and to assess the possible consequences for legal liability.

It has been recognized for some time that calculations of potential encounter rates based on the speed and lateral distributions of ships using sea routes provide only a partial estimation of the actual collision risk, as all encounters are usually given equal rating, and no attempt is made to include factors such as the degree of domain penetration or the relative speed of the ships. One possible solution to the problem consists in attempting to weight the calculated potential encounter rates according to the most relevant factors, and thus replace the calculated rates by weighted values to provide a relative estimate of collision risk. Goodwin, Lamb and Kemp reported a first attempt at such a procedure in their calculation of weighted encounter rates based on the observed traffic distributions and flow rates in the Sunk Lightship area in the neighbourhood of Harwich. A two-part index was used in the work; the first part employed a weighting factor based on the ratio of the time required for the completion of a manoeuvre involving a specified angle of course change, to the time available as measured from the ‘decision-distance’ at which the manoeuvre was deemed to commence. The second part used a factor based on the time required to pass and draw clear after completion of the manoeuvre.

The term flight management system (or FMCS, flight management computer system) is used to cover some equipment types which have been coming into service in recent years. In this context, it is taken to mean a system for handling horizontal and vertical navigation by various means (as distinct from purely performance management systems).

Such an FMS consists of a computer or computers fed by data from a variety of services, and outputting information and control signals. In horizontal navigation, inputs may be inertial sensors and/or ground-based radio navigation facilities. For performance optimization, data are fed from a number of aircraft systems. This type of system is capable of independently computing several parameters and ‘pooling’ their information to provide a ‘best estimate’. Cockpit information in INS configuration is confined to specific digital displays and data input is, in the main, manual and limited to numerics. FMS goes a number of stages further and provides ‘pre-loaded’ storage of navigational information, and the ability to gain access to this information through an alphanumeric keyboard. It also handles, either directly or through a thrust management computer, the vertical profile of the flight. This includes both climb and descent, and cruise control.

Alexander Dalrymple was not appointed as the first Hydrographer of the Navy until 12 August 1795. Until this time, and indeed for at least twelve years later, individual commanding officers of British warships were expected to buy whatever charts they could find – and could afford. Apart from Greenvile Collins's Coasting Pilot, no official chart was generally available although the East India Company (of which Dalrymple was allowed to remain Hydrographer when taking up his naval appointment) had produced many reliable charts of the Indian Ocean and East Indies.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were over a dozen different initial meridians for longitude on navigational charts, and a much greater number in use for time-reckoning. The need for a single internationally agreed meridian was recognised in the resolutions of the first International Geographical Congress held in Antwerp in 1871. They proposed that the meridian through Greenwich should be adopted, recognizing that this was already the choice of the vast majority of users, and linked this with a second resolution recommending the adoption of the metric system. This was partly a recognition of the intrinsic merits of the metric system, and partly as a concession to the French as compensation for the adoption of Greenwich rather than Paris. Although not widely used, the Paris meridian had some claim to consideration since the observatory through which it passed had been in existence several years before that at Greenwich.

During the XIIth International Hydrographic Conference, held at Monaco in 1982, Anderson and this writer discussed Communication of the Nautical Chart. In that paper they traced the historical development of the nautical chart, noting how it had evolved and that features of the chart today had resulted more by evolution than by actual design. They noted, for instance, that although present-day charts are often produced by computer and make limited use of colour, they are not significantly different from charts produced some two hundred years ago. Computer methods have been used primarily to copy the work that was carried out so skilfully by the draughtsmen of earlier years. The authors after examining the historical development of the chart then touched lightly on some particular Canadian problems and went on to discuss the first principles of chart design. In particular they suggested that modern cartographic communications research might offer some help in developing the future design of the nautical chart. This paper is therefore a sequel to that work and is directed to presenting some ideas and furthering the discussion.

The advantages of being able to process marine radar imagery in an on-line computer system have been illustrated by study of some navigational problems. The experiments suggest that accuracies of the order of 100 metres may be obtained in navigation in coastal regions using map overlays with marine radar data. A similar technique using different radar imagery of the same location suggests that the pattern-recognition technique may well yield a position-keeping ability of better than 10 metres.

During the century since 1884 there have been fundamental changes in the principles on which timekeeping is based; nevertheless, almost all countries now base their civil timekeeping on a time scale which is the standard time of the Greenwich meridian and which remains within 1 second of the time envisaged at the Washington Conference. The system of time zones, in which universally valid hourly markers were given longitude-dependent labels, spread rapidly under the influence of the railway systems, with legislation usually following established practice. Daylight saving time, first introduced in many countries in 1916, is a form of mass self-deception which provides extended summer evenings in the temperate zones but causes inconvenience to the travel industry and confuses its customers.

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.

In the history of navigation, the subject of Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) is a comparative newcomer. Nevertheless, it has and is generating interest, controversy and discussion analogous almost with the change from sail to steam or the advent of radar at sea. Interestingly though, much of the VTS debate has taken place within the industry itself—i.e. amongst the nautical professions, shipping companies and governmental marine regulatory agencies. This has resulted in a deservedly strong technical emphasis on the subject which, after all, is primarily concerned with marine safety. Legal questions have so far been sidelined or reduced to background interest. Legal problems relating to accident liability have been rarely discussed and when they were, have often been distorted.

By Air Traffic Management or ATM is meant the totality of the processes used, in the air and on the ground, to ensure safe and expeditious movement of all air traffic using controlled airspace. Computers are used on a large scale to support human planners in the management processes. Flight management computers in the aircraft, together with radar and flight-plan data processors on the ground, are conspicuous examples. Decision processes remain tasks for human controllers, although off-line computer models of traffic flow provide a background for the longer-term management decisions.

Traffic separation schemes and other routing measures have now been established in the coastal waters of many countries and new schemes are being introduced each year. Traffic separation was originally intended to reduce the risk of collision between ships proceeding in opposite directions but this paper explains how routing measures are now being used mainly for coastal protection. Improvements in navigational aids may lead to more extensive routing schemes in the future with increasing restriction on the movement of shipping.

The first traffic separation schemes adopted by IMCO (now IMO) in 1965 and 1968 were based on proposals made by the Institutes of Navigation of France, the Federal German Republic and the United Kingdom. In the report submitted to the Organisation by the Institutes in 1964 it was stated that ‘the object of any form of routing is to ease the congestion and lessen the likelihood of end-on encounters by separating opposing streams of traffic …’.