Consumer Electronics and Maritime Applications

On an everyday basis we are being bombarded by consumer electronics. My coffee machine has gone from the manual ‘make it myself’ version to the push button error free espresso. I drive a multi stage diesel injected vehicle and I can’t even tell if it’s getting a bit warm, as technology has moved passed the need for me to monitor its cooling temperature – something I find very unnerving. My phone is so smart the hardest thing to do on it is make a phone call. I can video conference, Skype, answer my emails, paint a picture, and find my way when I am without directions.

To be a participant in this technological revolution I now just need to be an experimenter. Educators would say that it is active learning and that we have become very comfortable with this. I will trial one button after the other to find what works for me. This has been elevated as many electronic devices have instructions on the web these days, and who wants to read material when we can discover the route ourselves!

This may be all great when to comes to coffee machines and mobile devices but are we in great danger in the maritime industry of accepting our new technology as it comes along just like a new smart phone or tablet, without question, without reference to the manual or guide and with little recognition of its limitations. I feel we are becoming conditioned to the age of electronic inundation and are leaving some of the practicalities of the traditional operations behind.

A sound knowledge is still required of practical navigation, seamanship and collision avoidance. If we are to compliment these with electronic aids we need a sound knowledge of their use, and the limitations of their use, or the aids themselves become detrimental to the safety of the vessel. Examples I have seen recently include persons changing the default GPS settings without knowledge of what they were altering, or knowledge of its effect on the vessels position. In reality the GPS would have given better positions if the operator had not unknowingly manipulated the settings. Worse still were the nautical charts of unknown source downloaded on a tablet device to replace the ‘paper ones’ that had become ‘tatty’.

The use of electronics in safety critical applications, such as navigation and collision avoidance, requires underpinning knowledge of the function of these electronics and an appreciation of their operational limitations. We must guard against a complaisant mindset brought about by our comfort and familiarity with general electronics in everyday life. We have accepted electronics as part of life.

In moving towards safer practices we must not forget the disproportionate difference in consequences of failing to use a device correctly. In general non maritime settings, misuse may result in the failure to send an email, a wrong turn on a roadway or the loss of a document. Failure to utilise electronics correctly in a maritime environment has the potential to be far more costly, impacting on property, the environment and people.