Shared Pilot Passage Plan and Navigational Safety During Pilotage

Abstract

This study was initiated by major players in the shipping industry where a need for a better communication line between pilots and vessels were required. After a few accidents where the cooperation with the vessel’s bridge team and the pilot did not functioned as required, the industry indicated that these accidents could be prevented if a Pilot Passage Plan (PPP) had been shared before the pilotage commenced. This led to the questions; of whether a shared PPP in the vessels Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS), lead to better navigation, more speedy recovery in case of navigational errors and higher navigational safety? 20 participants were recruited amongst 2nd and 3rd year nautical students at University College of Southeast Norway (USN) to act as captains and sail through a predefined route in narrow waters on USN’s main navigation simulator together with a pilot. Two 3rd year students acted as pilots,ten participants had the route inserted in the ECDIS prior to the simulator run and could see the PPP through the entire exercise, and the last ten participants were not given the route prior the exercise and were only explained verbally where the pilot intended to go. In this study the pilot intentionally lost focus on the navigation at the same point in every simulator run and missed to make a specific turn. The study revealed that that the time to express concern and time to recovery is much shorter for the group with a shared PPP than for the group without a shared PPP. This difference was statistically significant and of a large effect size even after controlling for whether the participant where 2nd or 3rd year navigational students. The statistical significance of grounding was however too high to be accepted as statistically significant, but on the other hand the real-world implications of groundings are easy to envision. This study concludes that a shared PPP improves navigational safety during pilotage.