Trimming operational costs
Fairplay, 13th May 2010 (subscription required)
Optimising energy efficiency calls for informed decisions onboard and fleet-wide analysis ashore. Reducing fuel consumption is an effective way of controlling operating costs, as slow steaming has shown, and also benefits the environment. How effectively owners and operators translate that fact into practice could depend on their ability to measure the actual performance of individual vessels and compare them across their fleets.
Drowning in Paperwork
Lloyd’s List, 13th May 2010 (subscription required)
It’s hard to pin down how fatigue affects safety, because of the accumulative effect that weariness has on alertness and judgment. Who is to say that an error in navigation is definitively incompetence or fatigue? In our world of quantified management any condition without a number becomes suspect to land-based bean counters. Fatigue then becomes a grey area connected with the unforgiving economics of modern crewing.
Imtech introduces new ECDIS
The Digital Ship, 14th May 2010
Imtech, parent company of Radio Holland, has developed a new ECDIS, which will be marketed under the name ECDIS 4500. The new system will feature a menu structure designed to support manual update of data products, support for position fixing and dead reckoning, route planning, monitoring by intelligent anti-grounding settings, transfer of planned route to an integrated adaptive autopilot, and additional information on chart objects like buoys, cables, and warning areas.