About a hundred years ago, the introduction of steam propulsion made it possible for steamships to navigate on direct routes from point to point, particularly in clear weather, and this started to concentrate shipping on these routes. Principally because of this, the Rules of the Road, which were originally established by custom and prudence some 300 years earlier, were produced as a code for the first time in 1862. This introduced such innovations as moderate speed in fog for steamers but, curiously, this did not apply to sailing vessels until 1880. In Britain, the statutory steam vessel law of keeping to the starboard side of a narrow channel was repealed in 1863 when the new Rules came into force. The Board of Trade hoped that local authorities would introduce local laws to cover this vital point—not an auspicious start to the first rule on routing.
National safety efforts varied widely; the British introduced mandatory lights for vessels in 1854, but were behind America with visual sound signals in 1878. As the changeover from sail to mechanical propulsion took place between 1860 and 1900, the Steering and Sailing Rules were codified when the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea came into force in 1895 after the meeting at Washington in 1890. With experience the Rules have been modified at the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Conferences in London in 1913, 1928, 1948, and 1960 as the number, type, size, and speed of ships have grown.
The number of ships over 100 gross registered tons in Lloyd’s Register has grown from 28,890 in 1900 to 47,444 in 1968. Nearly all of this 64% growth has occurred since 1948. In the same period, the gross tonnage has grown from 29 million tons to 200 million tons, with a tremendous growth in the last ten years. Collisions rose steadily from 1900 to 1907 when a peak figure of 2,208 collisions between vessels of over 500 tons was recorded by the Liverpool Underwriters. This figure was again reached in 1929 but, after a 1962 peak of 1,818 collisions, the figure for 1968 had dropped to 1,605 collisions, reflecting the great improvement in safety measures over the first 68 years of this century.
The most striking change in navigational practice in recent years has stemmed from the introduction of radio navigational techniques. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a gradual fitting of medium frequency (MF) radio beacons and shipborne direction finders, begun by the Cunard Line in 1912. Radar and area navigation systems, such as the Decca Navigator and Loran A, became common in the 1950s. As a result, huge concentrations of shipping accurately navigated along the traditional steamship routes direct from point to point in all visibilities. Head-on meetings in fog, therefore, became all too common, and close quarter situations difficult to avoid. In 1956, attention was focused on collision at sea by the spectacular and disastrous collision between the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Although this collision between two ships in low traffic density perhaps was not typical of those on the dense shipping routes, it shocked people everywhere into awareness of the need to improve the situation.
The equally disastrous and spectacular grounding of the Torrey Canyon in 1967[1] focused additional attention on the problems of collisions and strandings of vessels carrying dangerous cargoes such as oil, natural gas, and chemicals. The risk of such accidents is real. In the three years before the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, 91 tankers had been stranded and 238 had been involved in collision all over the world—an average of about two potentially serious accidents per week. Of the 329 tankers, 16 became total losses; 39 cases of leakage of cargo occurred; and, in nine collisions, fire broke out in at least one of the ships. Prior to the Torrey Canyon incident, the largest single spillage near the United Kingdom had been 2,600 tons of oil in March 1965 when a Liberian-registered tanker collided 10 miles south of Beachy Head in the approaches of the Strait of Dover. The spillage of some 100,000 tons of oil from the Torrey Canyon took place by stages as she broke up and caused gross pollution to English and Brittany beaches.
In 1966, the total volume of seaborne oil moved by 3,654 ocean tankers was 935 million tons, of which about 450 million were imported into Europe. By 1983, the total volume of oil moved by sea is forecast to be 3,350 million tons by 4,400 tankers. By 2003, a volume of 13,400 million tons is postulated. These are clear indications of the scale of the navigational problem for the future and the need for traffic separation to minimize accidents. A further need for routing has come about with the exploitation of offshore petroleum and natural gas.
In 1948, the first offshore drilling platform rig was erected out of sight of land and, in 1950, the first mobile rig was completed. With nearly 10 billion dollars invested during the last 20 years, another 25 billion dollars is expected to be invested in offshore drilling over the next ten years. Now there are 180 mobile rigs and 100 platform rigs, each valued at nearly $5 million, working in American, Persian Gulf, Nigerian, North Sea, and Australian waters, with over 100 in U. S. waters alone. These have necessitated the delineation of “fairways” for ships by the U. S. Coast Guard and these may be required elsewhere, since a number of ships have collided with oil rigs off the American coasts already. A law was passed in 1964 in Britain making it illegal for ships to approach within 500 meters of a rig except in an emergency; but only about 12 rigs are presently drilling. These are sound precautions to avoid blowouts which can have serious effects like the recent blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The first organized attempt of ship routing was made by Lieutenant Matthew F. Maury in 1847 with his Wind and Current Chart for the North Atlantic.[2] The first shipmaster to follow Maury’s charts completed the round trip from New York to Rio in exactly half the time previously required. With the coming of steam, however, shipmasters could set direct courses and the act of turning the environment to good account became obsolete. Now, however, weather routing is again the vogue. Compulsory routing will be necessary in the future, not merely to use the environment, but also to preserve it from pollution. The first proposals for traffic separation were also made in 1855, at a time when collisions between eastbound and westbound ships were attracting attention, by Maury in his Sailing Directions. He proposed an eastbound lane for the Atlantic just south of Cape Race and a westbound lane near the tail of the Grand Banks. In 1875, the problem of ice caused the Cunard Line to adopt a system of tracks for different seasons, the southern ones, used in the ice season, being south of the normal ice limits in the North Atlantic. The first international practice of following prescribed routes for traffic separation originated in 1898 when a number, but not all, of the shipping companies operating passenger vessels on the North Atlantic joined the Cunard Line in signing the North Atlantic Track Agreement which is still in force today.
Following the disastrous loss of 22 vessels in collision between 1900 and 1910, a much more significant, but less publicized, step was taken in 1911 by shipping companies represented by the Lake Carriers Association when they prescribed separate routes for navigation on Lakes Superior and Huron. The L.C.A. and the Dominion Marine Association of Canada followed these pioneering schemes on Lake Michigan in 1926, on Lake Erie in 1947, and on Lake Ontario in 1949. These separate routes over a sailing distance of 1,225 miles have been shown on U. S. charts since 1947. Judicial decisions in 1915 and 1934 have shown that “it is negligent navigation to leave them without reason.” The success of these schemes can be gauged by the fact that, between 1954 and 1963, there were only two major collisions involving losses, both of which would have been prevented had the prescribed routes been followed. There were no losses on Lake Michigan from 1926 to 1963. The establishment of prescribed routes for traffic separation in the Lakes as early as 1911 is the more remarkable since at-sea collisions were regular events and frequently sailing vessels, even wooden ones, sank or battered iron and steel steamers.
Following the loss of the Titanic in an ice collision in 1912, the International Ice Patrol was instituted at the SOLAS meeting in 1913. This came about through the co-operation of 13 nations and still continues today with 16 nations subscribing.
Historically, the next steps in routing were in World War I when the convoy system, used with great success in the Napoleonic Wars, was introduced by the Royal Navy in 1917 and “minesafe” routes were also provided. These measures were repeated in World War II and are of interest because of the strongly held views by conservative maritime opinion about innovations on ship routing. When Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, the German High Command had estimated that Britain would be forced to surrender by July 1917. On 23 February, there was a conference at the Admiralty when ten shipmasters were invited to state their views on the possibility of convoy. They were unanimous that steamers sailing in company would be unable to keep station and maneuver together, particularly at night. This view was also shared by most officers in the Royal, U. S. and French Navies.
Nonetheless, the first of the so-called “controlled sailings” of colliers from Mount’s Bay to Brest took place on 10 February, and a “convoy” sailed on 24 February from Lerwick to Bergen. Some 1,200 ships in the coal trade were convoyed in March and only three were lost. On 27 April 1917, at the height of the U-boat crisis when 354 ships were lost in a month and Britain only had six weeks’ food supply, the Admiralty at last instituted convoy, and history records that this alone saved Britain in 1917.
Minesafe routes were introduced in World War II on a large scale by naval authorities. These are of special interest as they have not yet been successful as anti-collision routes. The Royal Navy introduced NEMEDRI (Northern European and Mediterranean Routing Instructions) routes and after the war many of these swept channels through the declared danger zones became the peacetime NEMEDRI routes. Those then concerned with planning these emergency trade routes did not foresee they would still be in use nearly 25 years later. Nor did they foresee the changing patterns of trade, navigation, and ship construction. The routes were not planned or marked with the specific object of reducing the collision risk at sea but primarily to provide a safe route through areas declared dangerous owing to mines. It is possible that the standards of seamanship, navigational equipment, training and competence in merchant ships were over-estimated when planning the routes.
To deal with NEMEDRI routes, the Royal Navy conceived the International Routing and Reporting Authority (IRRA), at the end of World War II. Initially composed of naval representatives of ten nations including Britain, Russia, and America, it was joined later by six other nations. Between 1951, when the International Mine Clearance Board was dissolved, and 1963, when IRRA dissolved itself as international trade routing gathered way, IRRA acted as an international forum at which problems of mine danger areas, mine clearance, and routing were discussed. The IRRA was also responsible for the promulgation to the mariner of the relevant hydrographic information on routing in the form of the NEMEDRI publication which today has become a normal hydrographic publication, now in its tenth edition.
Initially, the peacetime mine risks in Northwest Europe were considerable, mainly owing to naval magnetic mines which were laid on the sea bottom without sterilizers by R.A.F. aircraft. Over 350 ships were lost or damaged off Denmark alone after the war, and 39 mines were reported off Northwest Germany between 1959 and 1963. Since 1960, however, there have only been three casualties, the last in February 1962 off North Holland, although mines which are explodable are still being recovered. Unfortunately, these routes have caused huge artificial concentrations of shipping and owing to poor route discipline, navigation, and seamanship, a large number of collisions still occur. On the Borkum and Terschelling route along the north coast of Germany and Holland, a flow of 350 ships per day was reported in 1963, with 57 collisions, between 1959 and 1963, a much higher collision risk than in the notorious Strait of Dover. On “Way 1,” the main NEMEDRI route in the Baltic from the Kiel Canal, a flow of 200 ships per day has been recorded with a similar collision risk. A radar survey of Way 1 found 10% of the ships navigating on the wrong side of the route. Analysis of these collisions shows that nearly all occurred in poor visibility and most of them between meeting vessels off the center line of the route and in some instances off the route altogether, as shown in Figure 1. Probably in the interest of economy, these routes were marked by an axial system with buoys and light vessels on the center line. This axial buoyage system, which had been found to be unsafe for marking swept water in wartime, has been found, for reasons which are not entirely clear, to be unsafe for anti-collision purposes. Little emphasis was placed on the needs for instrument navigation in bad weather and very few of the buoys had even a simple radar reflector.
[Figure 1 Collisions on the NEMEDRI Routes in the North Sea.]
The basic cause of all these hundreds of collisions and near misses on NEMEDRI routes, principally in reduced visibility, is the failure of ships to keep to the starboard side of what must be considered a narrow channel. Faulty navigation may be the cause of this, but the main cause can be more simply stated to be the failure of one vessel to comply with Rule 25, the Narrow Channel Rule. This may be due to difference of opinion about whether Rule 25 applies on these routes or not. In the general instructions on navigation on NEMEDRI routes, it is stated that ships are normally to keep to their starboard side of channel and this instruction has been in all except the 1956 edition when it was temporarily omitted. These ambiguities have not been helped by the different findings of the various Courts. The German Courts of Enquiry into accidents have found that Rule 25 applied but a British Admiralty Court has ruled it was not material. Without any real force or legal sanction applied on these NEMEDRI routing systems, ships have been navigating where they wished, with disastrous results. It is a pity that, when the opportunity occurred and prior to its passage in 1963, naval authorities did not put more force into the routing system.
The first protagonist of routing in the radar era was a Spanish navigator, Rear Admiral J. Garcia Frias. In 1956, he proposed a rather complex traffic separation scheme for the Strait of Gibraltar and its approaches which embodied what are now known as one way “traffic lanes,” with “separation zones” between lanes. He proposed this again in 1957 at a marine radar conference at Genoa but his ideas did not receive attention at the time. He was joined in 1958 by a French navigator, Commandant Robichon, who proposed similar principles for traffic separation with his Naviroute and drew attention to the roundabout which had been operating successfully off San Pedro harbor. However, it was left to a French naval officer, Capitaine de Frégate L. Oudet, of the French Hydrographic Service to give the matter the necessary stimulus. In 1959, he proposed in a French nautical magazine a traffic separation scheme with a roundabout for crossing traffic for the Strait of Dover. In 1960, Commandant J. Poll, a Belgian navigator, followed up Oudet’s article with another, giving for the first time a systematic analysis of the traffic flow in the Strait of Dover. He concluded that the flow was 800 vessels per day, with 60% of the traffic being through traffic, 18% bound for French and Belgian ports and, surprisingly, only 22% bound for English ports. He aimed to separate these traffic streams into the natural channels and to do away with the roundabout. Poll shared Oudet’s view that only a thin “separation line” was necessary, though a wide separation zone later was adopted and he proposed to mark the center of the routes with an axial buoyage system based on the NEMEDRI system which they thought had been a success.
SOLAS 1960, in the context of the North Atlantic Track Agreement, recognized the importance of organizing traffic in converging areas and placed upon shipping companies the responsibility for defining their limits and marking out routes within them. Contracting governments agreed to do everything within their power to ensure that “all ships” would adhere to these routes. This initiative, in part due to U. S. pressure, made it possible for organizations to suggest traffic separation schemes. In May 1961 at Dusseldorf, the German, French, and British Institutes of Navigation agreed to form a joint working group to study traffic separation in the Strait of Dover. The working group first met in October 1961 under the chairmanship of the British hydrographer Rear-Admiral E. G. Irving. The British and some others were not keen on a formal routing plan and suggested that it would be sufficient to have better navigational marks on the French side to encourage traffic to that side.
The real case for routing was first made by an investigation carried out by the Royal Netherlands Shipowners Association who received over 500 replies from masters of Netherlands ships to a questionnaire. Over 90% were in favor of routing. The working group decided to confirm these figures with an international questionnaire. They sent out 10,000 and, of the 3,755 replies, only 107 were against routing, with over 96% expressing approval. These replies included 69 from U. S. masters, only five of whom were against routing. During 1961 and 1962 the group considered no less than nine different plans; the one finally accepted was similar to that presented by Captain Lynes of British Rail. Published in October 1962, it recommended an immediate improvement in the navigational marking of the area to make it possible for traffic to use the French side of the Strait. It then recommended that through traffic, comprising 60% of the total, should be separated by the natural features in the middle of the Strait and should use one-way “traffic lanes” on either side. This report was then forwarded to the International Maritime Consultive Organization (IMCO) and, in April 1964, the Maritime Safety Committee decided to accept the recommendations.
It was agreed that as soon as the improvements to navigational aids had been made, member states should advise their ships that the proposed system should be followed. The committee accepted the group’s recommendation that the observance of the “recommended” tracks would be governed by Rule 29 of the Collision Regulations which speaks of the Ordinary Practice of Seamen. The Collision Regulations would remain the only rules governing maneuver. On 1 June 1967, the repositioning of the navigational aids—involving installation of one new light vessel, moving two light vessels, and placing nine new buoys and a brighter light at Cap d’Alprech—was complete, and the scheme was introduced by Notices to Mariners. In addition to the two “main through traffic lanes,” provision was made in 1966 for an inshore traffic zone on both landward sides of the Strait in which ships could navigate in either direction. Navigation charts were made available showing the routes.
Meanwhile, in May 1964, the British, French, and German Institutes of Navigation formed a second working group “to suggest further immediate measures to enable ships to navigate through heavily congested areas with more efficiency and a higher degree of safety.” It added representations from various organizations in the countries concerned and investigated and prepared a number of traffic separation schemes in European waters. These covered the Dover Strait plan in its final form with the “inshore traffic zones” and “separation zones” off the Lizard, Bishop Rock, Casquets, Ushant, Finisterre, the Berlengas, Cabo da Roca, Cape St. Vincent, and in the Strait of Gibraltar. Another major scheme covered the Sound, which is the entrance to the Baltic between Sweden and Denmark through which about 140 ships pass daily, a process further complicated by some 140 ferry crossings. At one point it is only two miles wide. The last schemes, and possibly the most important, covered the NEMEDRI routes, including the infamous Way 1 and the great German plan for the North Sea routes connecting the Elbe and Weser with the Dover Strait. All of these envisaged the introduction of “separation zones” from one-quarter to two nautical miles wide at the center of each route, as well as provision for straightening the routes. The North Sea scheme has included a major minesweeping program with about 50 minesweepers involved. One of the most important recommendations concerned the principles and methods of traffic separation and their presentation and definition. The production of a booklet covering these points was recommended and this has just been published by IMCO. The report was forwarded to IMCO in 1966 and nearly all the recommendations were approved in March 1968 or will soon be approved by IMCO.
In parallel with this working group, in March 1964, Shell International Marine introduced for the 316 tankers in the fleet under its control a system of voluntary routing on the great tanker trunk route between Northwest Europe and the Persian Gulf. This procedure was followed by similar action by the Esso International Fleet and by a number of other large tanker companies. In addition to the traffic separation working group’s traffic schemes, Shell proposed six separation schemes in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf which were agreed to by IMCO in March 1968 in slightly modified form.
Early in 1967 and before the Torrey Canyon incident, the United States had introduced separation schemes in the approaches to New York and Delaware Bay. These differed from other schemes by having three traffic lanes radiating from New York and two from the Delaware Bay for up to 100 miles to seaward, as well as “roundabouts.” These were approved by IMCO in March 1968. Following the Torrey Canyon incident, further schemes were introduced and approved in IMCO. The British government introduced eight new schemes, the Norwegians six, and the French one. The United States introduced a scheme for San Francisco. In February 1968, the Soviet Ministry of Merchant Marine called a meeting of Baltic countries in Leningrad and agreed to nine new schemes in the Baltic. They have now been implemented by IMCO together with a further Russian scheme off Sakhalin in the Far East, recommended by the Russian Government to Soviet ships since 1957. A number of other schemes soon will be introduced. These include the great schemes for the Sound and the North Sea, on other NEMEDRI routes in the Baltic, and ten separation schemes for oil tankers off the South African coast. There is also a further scheme off Spain on the approach to the Strait of Gibraltar as well as a fourth U. S. scheme, for the Santa Barbara Channel. The Japanese Transport Ministry has just completed an international conference on improving safety in the Malacca Strait, through which passes the main trunk route for oil from the Persian Gulf to Japan.
After all this planning and implementation of traffic separation schemes, it is now essential that the schemes should operate properly in practice. The situation must be monitored properly. So far, this has been done by commercial interests on a voluntary basis but eventually this must be done by government agencies with the adequate and proper resources as in air and road traffic control. Attention has been focused on the Strait of Dover, where modern traffic separation routing was first instituted. If it can be made to work in this most difficult area, there should be less trouble in other places. It must be realized, however, that this scheme is but one of more than 50, and the success or failure of routing cannot be judged on a single scheme.
The first indication of the success of the traffic separation in the Strait of Dover came from Hoverlloyd, which operates a hovercraft service between Calais and Ramsgate. Before the introduction of the scheme on 1 June 1967, it was thought that 90% of the traffic was using the English side of the Strait. Hoverlloyd did a survey in September 1967 and, using their Decca Navigator Flight Log for position finding, pilots observed the position of 242 ships. In the one-way traffic lanes, 82.5% of traffic was observing the recommendations. In the eastbound lane on the French side, which now carried one-third of all the through traffic, 92% of the ships were observing the recommendations. In the westbound lane, only 78.5% of ships were observing the recommendations. Hoverlloyd reported the introduction of routing had made a marked difference in the shipping pattern in the Strait. The next traffic study was done on three days in February 1968, with a shore radar survey by Decca Radar. The results of the survey are shown pictorially in Figure 2. A standard marine radar was sited near several of the old wartime radar sites for watching German shipping passing through the Dover Strait. It was from three such sites on 12 February 1962, precisely 26 years beforehand that the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and their escort were tracked through the Strait on centimetric radar. During the Channel dash, these ships were detected to the south at a range of 34 nautical miles and followed out to the northeast to 33 miles on three modified 10-cm. British naval Type-271 surface warning sets, the first operational centimetric radar of any type in World War II. The first one was installed at Dover by the Army in July 1941. Today there are three harbor radars in the area at Dover Harbor, at Folkestone Pilotage Station, and at Deal Coastguard Station. In Figure 2 the flow of vessels was noted to be a rate of 25 ships per hour (600 per day), the highest hourly rate recorded during the survey having been about 30 ships (720 per day). An analysis shows that 34% of the traffic is now on the French side with 90% of the vessels in the eastbound traffic lane proceeding in the recommended direction. In the westbound traffic lane, four of the nine ships shown are eastbound. The average speed of all vessels was found to be 16.1 knots, a high figure even in clear weather. Furthermore, five of the meetings involving one ship not following the recommended direction were at closing speeds of between 34 and 37 knots. A third “voluntary routing report” on the Dover Strait was made by British Rail. It covered the period from May to October 1968 during which eight British Rail vessels noted about 100 vessels steaming against the recommended direction of traffic. Most of these were going eastbound in the traditional westbound route, with a few going westbound in the eastbound route on the French side of the Strait. Not all the vessels were identified but vessels of 18 nations were observed.
Liberia headed the list with 13 vessels. Two vessels were observed twice. Of the vessels identified, 11 were tankers, nine of them loaded eastbound tankers. Other offenders included a loaded LPG tanker and a Greek passenger liner.
[Figure 2 Traffic in the Dover Strait on 12 February 1968, as shown by a Decca Radar survey.]
Notwithstanding the poor traffic discipline being displayed by a minority of shipmasters in the Strait of Dover, the scheme has made a slight improvement in safety in its first three years of operation. Nearly all collisions here occur in fog or poor visibility. Since the amount of fog recorded from one year to another varies widely, account must be taken of this. There is a very good correlation between the amount of fog and the number of collisions in this area. The fog statistics have been taken from Trinity House records at seven light vessels and lighthouses in the area for 1963-1970 and from one or two between 1960-1962. Comparing the three years after routing with the four years before, and using an index of collisions per fog day, it can be seen that the accident rate has dropped from 0.38 to 0.30, an improvement of 21% since routing. The two safest years in recent times were the year before routing officially opened and the year after. [see table below]
Safety Record in the Dover Strait
Year | Days of Fog | Collisions | Collisions/ Fog Day |
60/61 | Before 35.5 | Routing 19 | 0.53 |
61/62 | 30.1 | 14 | 0.46 |
62/63 | 27.4 | 12 | 0.44 |
63/64 | 40.4 | 19 | 0.47 |
64/65 | 26.9 | 10 | 0.37 |
65/66 | 20.2 | 9 | 0.44 |
66/67 | 13.9 | 3 | 0.22 |
67/68 | After 23.6 | Routing 5 | 0.21 |
68/69 | 36.8 | 13 | 0.35 |
69/70 | 26.4 | 9 | 0.34 |
70/71 |
| 5 |
|
It would be valuable if more information were available into the causes of the 32 accidents here since routing. The only official information which has appeared so far was during the court-martial of a British Army LCT Captain after the LCT collided with an anchored coaster in fog in the French inshore zone. However, it does appear from the voyage statistics in Lloyd’s List that the majority of accidents are still due to head-on meetings, many in the one-way traffic lanes.
In the decade ahead a vast improvement will be required in the safety of navigation. The carriage of toxic cargoes in bulk and the use of atomic engines will necessitate urgent steps being taken if we are not to pollute the rivers and oceans further. During 1969, we had two serious cases of poisoning in European rivers, which killed millions of fish, and a 200,000-ton tanker had a collision off Japan. Nor can we afford to clutter up the fast-shrinking navigational channels with more wrecks. In the North Sea and the Strait of Dover there is now little room for deep-draft vessels. And there is a growing need to expedite traffic so that large fast vessels, like the 30-to-35-knot container ships expected by 1972, will not be delayed.
We must build a network of seaways on the sea like the airways and highways. Much work needs to be done in operational research to establish the facts, to overcome ignorance and prejudice, and to make better use of human resources. It will be necessary, as in air traffic control, to employ computers for fast time and real time simulation of traffic situations to show the advantages of traffic discipline as well as the best methods of organizing traffic. There is a need to have for ocean traffic problems something like NAFEC, the U. S. National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center, created in 1958, where 1,800 people now work on similar air problems. Air facilities, such as Euro-control, already exist at international level. Perhaps the most pressing problem remains in the field of seamen’s education and training. We must make as many changes at sea in the next decade as have occurred in the last hundred years. We must capture the imagination of politicians, scientists, and technologists to motivate them to make improved safety at sea one of their goals for the 1970s.
__________
During Mr. Beattie’s service in the Royal Navy (1945 to 1957), he served in destroyers and LSTs, mainly as navigating and signals officer. Invalided from the Royal Navy, he joined Decca Radar, Ltd., where he is now General Manager of the Sales Division. From 1962 through 1966, he was a member of both the first and second working groups on traffic separation at sea. In 1967, he was elected into Fellowship of the British Institute for Navigation for his work on analysis of traffic and collisions at sea. He became a member of the International Committee on Traffic at Sea (ICOTAS) in 1968.
[1] See J. M. Marshall, “The Black Wake of the Torrey Canyon,” U. S. Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, December 1967, pp. 38-44.
[2] See W. J. Cromie, “First American Oceanographer,” U. S. Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, April 1964, pp. 56-69. See also A. C. Brown, “The Arctic Disaster, Maury’s Motivation,” U. S. Naval Institute PROEEDINGS, January 1968, pp. 78-83. See also V. T. Miscoski, “U. S. Naval Oceanography . . . a Look Back,” U. S. Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, February 1968, pp. 46-54.