Presented at a meeting of the Institute held at the Royal Geographical Society on 15 June 1951.

Shore-based radar stations to supervise or assist the navigation of ships have now been employed for at least a decade. Such stations were more extensively used during the war than they have been since, principally because there had to be large convoy movements along heavily mined coastlines under conditions when, because of wartime limitations, many of the more conventional navigational aids were not available. The most important wartime development in the use of radar in this direction was undoubtedly the introduction of high power centimetric equipment and the plan position indicator. Since the war the use of shore-based radar to assist navigation of merchant shipping has been extremely limited and the only outstanding installation of this type is the Liverpool Harbour Supervision System, which was brought into service in 1948. This system has now been in operation for three years and has provided a great deal of information and has created a world-wide interest.

In the January 1966 edition of this Journal Captain Wylie has given a lucid summary of the factors involved in the presentation on radar displays of true and relative motion. He also stated a conclusion on the combinations of display and ancillary equipment which he considers best satisfy the requirements for use when plotting to avoid collision at sea. Whilst acknowledging with respect all the work he has done to clarify the issues raised on this important but contentious subject over a number of years, a number of us has found it impossible to agree with his latest findings. As these may influence opinion in the shipping industry, the Board of Trade, the Courts of Law and the radar manufacturing industry, both at official and unofficial levels, they should not go unchallenged. Our disagreement concerns the priorities defined for display equipment and the method to be used for plotting. There can be no disagreement on academic principles.

Digiplot is a marine radar aid for automatic anti-collision navigation which processes signals from conventional radar and presents computed information on a separate screen to give at-a-glance situation appreciation. The company's origin is touched on and conception and design are described as they evolved to meet operational requirements.

The majority of sophisticated radar equipments and devices available today have evolved from successive shipborne radar developments over a considerable period of years. With Digiplot it is otherwise. The Iotron Corporation was established in 1969 by a few men whose background had been information technology in the realms of fire control and navigational systems for submarines, aircraft, missiles and spacecraft, and reconnaissance systems using electronic and optical techniques; in all these systems digital electronics played a key role. The choice of the navigational functions of marine radar as the most appropriate subject for attention by the group was made after a general study of the commercial field, because of the revolution apparent in ships, their equipment and their operations.

Dr. David Lewis, better known for his own remarkable feats of navigation, which include single-handed transatlantic passages, illuminates the background to various theories on early Polynesian navigation. Reviewing the evidence, which includes the wide dispersion of the Polynesians and their culture as well as methods of navigation and seamanship that were still practised at the period of European contact, Dr. Lewis concludes that they could determine both course and, in effect, latitude with sufficient accuracy to make a landfall within the area of a known island group, and so proceed to any intended destination.

In this paper, methods of defining heading are enumerated and the limitations of magnetic and gyroscopic devices are analysed in detail. Particular attention is paid to the development of the rotated race principle which is likely to be responsible for a large improvement in the basic azimuth gyro. The gyro-magnetic combination is scrutinized and the errors inherent in this compass system are classified. The possibility and consequent effect of diminishing certain categories of error are presented. The current position is summarized and an attempt is made to suggest possible future trends. The authors are, respectively, with Smiths Aircraft Instruments and the Sperry Gyroscope Company.

Sweden and some other countries are currently evaluating and verifying the potential impact of a newly developed, satellite-based GNSS transponder system on future CNS/ATM and ATN systems.

The concept provides the possibility to introduce a distributed, mobile, real-time data processing system, for all properly equipped users in the global civil aviation community being interacting members (air/air, air/ground and ground/ground).

In the past, air traffic services (ATS) have been compared with vessel traffic services (VTS) in numerous articles, in particular from a technical and operational point of view. Generally emphasis has been laid on existing technical differences between air navigation and shipping, which in brief are related to the speed of aircraft and ships and the medium in which these craft move.

For many generations mariners have been taught the law of storms and the rules for avoiding their centres. This paper describes some of the practical difficulties of avoiding hurricanes in the south-west Pacific area, and the failure of meteorologists to appreciate the dangers and difficulties of the mariners.

About half the tropical storms observed conform roughly to the parabolic track of the law of storms. They form about 10° South of the equator during the north-west monsoon, (from December to April), and travel west-south-west, south-west and south-south-west as they gather strength and speed to a maximum; at 20° South they pause, recurve through south-south-east and south-east as they diminish in force and pass out of our consideration at 30° South.

New ideas of a really fundamental character are always received with horror and alarm by the general public, and are vigorously repudiated. When Fred Hoyle, in a brilliant series of broadcasts, remarked that his physico-mathematical calculations indicated that newly created hydrogen was being continuously injected into the Universe, the B.B.C. had to take hasty countermeasures. A well-known authoress of detective stories and religious pl ys, followed by a respected professor of science, declared on the air that the earlier t lks had been merely speculative. A similar role was filled in 1543 by the theologian Andreas Osiander, who added a Preface to Copernicus's startling book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (the author having just died), to the effect that he had only intended as a mathematical hypothesis, not as a matter of fact, to picture a rotating globe revolving round the Sun. From the point of view of pure geometry it was, it is true, merely a matter of a change of coordinates. People settled back comfortably for another sixty or seventy years, until Galileo made certain awkward observations with his new telescope.

In his detailed and valuable account of the history of the Log (this Journal, 9, 70) Commander Waters is surely at fault as regards the part he ascribes to the Gresham Professor, Gunter. This eminent mathematician delighted in designing instruments with engraved scales, and at first issued the customary Description and Use in Latin, a sufficient indication that he wrote only for fellow scholars. Importuned probably by the instrument-makers, he later published English versions of the tracts (in 1623), and among the numerous ‘uses’ included a couple of chapters on those for navigational purposes.

The following is an abbreviated version of the 29th Haldane Memorial Lecture given by Sir Frederick Brundrett in the University of London Senate House on 7 March 1963. Sir Frederick is Scientific Adviser to the Civil Service Commission.

1. INTRODUCTION. The North Atlantic air traffic system is the busiest and most important long-range system in operation today with a current total of 127 000 flights“annum. The combined effects of the total flight time and the difference in time zones on either side of the Atlantic makes it desirable for most passengers to fly westward in the day-time. Conversely, it is most convenient (or least inconvenient!) to fly eastbound during the hours of darkness. Thus the Atlantic traffic system is strongly tidal with the flow predominantly (though not entirely) westbound during the day and eastbound overnight. Currently the central core of the traffic in the busiest hours is organised into a parallel track structure – the Organized Track Structure (OTS), though nearly half the aircraft operate so-called random routes clear of the OTS.

Taking the dictionary meaning of society to be the civilized body of mankind – what are the relationships between society and the art or science of navigation? To define navigation itself I have used Wing Commander Anderson's definition of 1961 – ‘Navigation is the business of conducting a craft as it moves about its ways’.

This paper falls roughly into three sections: the inter-relationship between economic forces, technological change and occupations, a brief history of navigation in occupational terms, and the present and future state of the occupation. The conclusions drawn may be open to discussion, since it presents a point of view and not a specific piece of research. It is restricted to the occupation of navigation in the Merchant Navy; naval and aircraft navigation appear to be very different as occupations.

The cocked hat problem is a difficult one and though Captain Cotter in a recent article, has gone a long way towards clarifying it, I believe that the fundamentals of the subject are more difficult than this article suggests. A brief treatment of these, together with an indication of how they may be applied in practice, may be worth while.

This report was first published in the Journal in 1966 (Vol. 19, p. 411). In its reprinted form it has been abridged by omitting detailed recommendations for the establishment of separation areas and recommended routes in the Baltic, the North Sea, the Dover Strait, and the English Channel to Gibraltar. These recommendations were included in the original section 7. The report is followed by comments from Norman Cockcroft.

In 1961 the Institutes of Navigation in Great Britain and France, with the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Ortung und Navigation, formed a representative Working Group to go into the question of regulating traffic in converging areas at sea with particular reference to the Dover Strait. The Group's Report, which was published in October 1962, made certain proposals for routing traffic in the area which were accepted, in April 1964, by the Maritime Safety Committee of the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization.

Collisions are one of the major accidents in the shipping industry, causing significant losses. In this work, a framework of marine collision risk identification strategy was developed to quantitatively analyse collision risks and provide an easy and convenient way to monitor traffic flow in relevant waters to mitigate the chances of collision. The model was verified by using automatic identification system data obtained from Tianjin Port. When compared to previous research, the proposed model can identify risks earlier and give people more time to analyse and take action. The results indicate that it also can provide a visual display to alert relevant personnel. The model can be used as a reference to identify potential collision risks or as an information source for future research.

Inadequate human actions are still the main cause of all reported accidents and incidents on board ships. The aim of this study is to explore the influence of safety resource activities and other exploratory variables on seafarers’ safety behaviour. For this study, a series of open-ended interviews were conducted to gain insight into how shipping organisations struggle with this issue. Following the interviews, a questionnaire was prepared and distributed to professional seafarers. Two exploratory factor analyses were conducted to identify the underlying factor structure and five factors emerged. Furthermore, three hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the influence of the factors obtained, namely, Company safety orientation and Additional safety incentives on seafarers’ perceived Safety awareness, Job satisfaction, Risk acceptance and other exploratory variables. The study shows that the perceived resource-related activities of the organisation and the demographic characteristics of the respondents can influence the safety behaviour of seafarers.

Most professional navigators would agree that navigation could play a useful role in general education. How are teachers to be convinced of this and how are they to be persuaded that its introduction is desirable ? If navigation is to be introduced as an academic subject into the school curriculum we must endeavour to remove the mystique with which it is often surrounded and dispel the suggestion that it is an art rather than a science. The notion that successful sailormen must have a seafaring background has been proved wrong time and again; let us also dispense with the misconception that good navigators are born with a gift similar to that of a homing pigeon. Man has a natural instinct to explore and find his way; the purpose of navigation in education should be to exploit and develop this natural instinct to the full.