A Gard Insight gives a global overview of navigation incidents.
Human error
The majority of the investigation reports tend to conclude that “human error” is the root cause of navigation incidents. Among the findings, human error generally entails; lack of situational awareness, poor lookout and competence of the mariners involved.
The human error, as has been observed in several investigation reports, may well be just one of many factors contributing to the incident. There may be other factors which may not have been paid attention to during an investigation, such as geographic areas of high frequency of navigation incidents, or “navigation hot spots”.
Data on vessels’ movements
The Gard article focuses work with data on vessels’ movements where a possible different narrative for navigation incidents is observed.
Firstly data collected on all navigation incidents for the five year period of 2016 to 2020 is evaluated to understand how geographical locations compare for collisions and groundings. Contact incidents, i.e. allisions with fixed objects, are omitted as most allisions are related to navigation during berthing/un-berthing operations. They can be complex to evaluate and do not fit the scope of this article.
Secondly, the contributing factors that lead to these incidents are focused. Instead of human errors, vessel behavior is observed. One could argue that the vessel behavior is also linked to the humans operating the vessel, but when these behaviors are studied, there may be a different pattern providing another perspective.
To read the full article, click here.
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Source: Gard
