News

Plane speaking

The MAIB's latest report deals with a high speed grounding that left one member of a RIB’s four man crew dying of head injuries. It glosses over the fact that the men were trying to find their way out of an unlit and unfamiliar harbour, at night, and with no experience or training in night navigation.

Instead, it majors on the fact that the four had spent the evening in a local pub. It claims that “a life has been lost due to the consumption of alcohol”, and devotes five full pages to expounding the evils of the demon drink.

Mind you, the same report also refers repeatedly to a "GPS mapper", and even includes a footnote describing this unusual piece of equipment. A photograph, in the same report, shows that the thing in question was a perfectly ordinary chart plotter … or an “Electronic Chart System” if you prefer the official MCA-approved jargon. But maybe the inspectors aren’t as familiar with those terms as they are with the effects of alcohol.
 
Another footnote explains that "A displacement craft planes when power is applied, enabling it to climb onto its own bow wave."

Illustrations:-
TOP: A displacement craft mysteriously failing to climb onto its own bow wave
BELOW: A "GPS Mapper" of the type fitted to the ill-fated RIB

Sit Vac
Coincidentally, the job of Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents, has just come up for grabs.

Based in Southampton “with some overseas travel” the job pays about £100k, and calls for “excellent leadership skills, a professional background at a senior level within the marine industry, as well as a professional qualification in a recognised marine discipline,” -- but evidently not a working knowledge of the distinction between planing and displacement craft

Twice in the 180-word job description, the MAIB describes itself as “the world leader in marine accident investigation”. Like so much of what has come out of the MAIB over recent years, the claim is almost completely meaningless and impossible to substantiate.

Another setback for Galileo
It has been reported that the EC has reduced the number of Galileo satellites it will order this year. The two consortia still in the bidding race had originally been asked to bid for contracts to build 28 or 30 satellites, but they have now been asked to quote for 8, 16, or 22.

The EC claims that this is to "allow satellite design modification early in the system’s life". But it is also true that saving a million Euros here would help mitigate 0.4 billion Euros that have already been overspent in the in-orbit validation phase.

The news is not expected to go down well with the European Parliament, who had been led to expect that 3.4 billion euros would see the system fully operational by 2013. The latest best guess at when Galileo will become operational has now slipped to 2016.
Photo: European Space Agency: One of the two existing in-orbit validatioon satellites, prior to launch

UK Borders under attack
There is growing anger over the heavy-handed behaviour of the UK Borders Agency, whose black-clad paramilitaries have taken to using high speed ribs to carry out random stop and search raids on pleasure craft at sea.

The RYA has been receiving an increasing number of reports from yachtsmen and motorboaters who have been intimidated by the UKBA boarding parties, and says it has formally complained to the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration about their conduct. It has also challenged the raiders’ right to demand documents such as crew passports and registration documents, which are not required on passages within UK waters.

Suggestions that the boarding parties might be carrying weapons that have appeared on the ybw.com forum have been dismissed as “far-fetched” by an UKBA press spokesman. The same spokesman explained to me that that the gun-like object that was clearly visible on the foredeck in a PR photograph of one of the UKBA cutters was actually “something in the background, not on the boat itself”. I mentioned how odd it was that the same thing should also appear in photographs of the same boat taken at different locations, at which point it became a fire monitor.
 
But whether these government thugs are armed or not is almost irrelevant.
 
The plain fact is that they are rampaging around our waters, intimidating the people who pay their salaries and pensions, and causing far more fear and distrust than whatever or whoever they pretend to be "protecting" us from. Their chances of actually catching a serious criminal during a random raid is “vanishingly small”, so the best that can be said of them is that they allow UKBA officers to meet some arbitrary quota without infringing health and safety guidelines by doing anything that might bring them face to face with anyone who might do them harm.

Better late than never

What has been described as “a new era for European navigation” began on October 1, with the announcement that the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) open service is now available.

Only nine years later than was originally promised, EGNOS is the European counterpart to the American Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) Like WAAS, it uses a network of ground-stations, spread across the continent, to monitor the signals received from GPS satellites, and calculate the errors in each one.  The forty ground stations pass their data to four control centres, which calculate appropriate corrections, and broadcast them – through the Inmarsat communications satellites -- to GPS users.

Like land-based differential GPS (dGPS) the main purpose of WAAS and EGNOS is to enhance the accuracy of GPS, reducing typical positioning errors from about 20 metres to about 2 metres. Almost all GPS receivers produced in the last ten years or so are able to receive and apply the corrections, free of charge and in most cases without any intervention on the part of the user.

Glonass setback

Glonass – the Russian equivalent to GPS – has suffered a setback, due to “a technical problem” with one of the batch of three satellites that was due to be launched on September 25. The launch is now due to take place no earlier than the end of October. Even so, Roscosmos (the Russian Space Agency) expects to launch all six remaining Glonass satellites by the end of the year.

With nineteen satellites in orbit already, the final launch – scheduled for Christmas Day – should see the constellation up to its operational strength for 24-hour, world-wide coverage.

The diagram above, downloaded from the Russian Space Agency just after midnight on the 15th of November, shows the values of PDOP  around the world. PDOP (Position dilution of precision) could  be regarded as a simple indicator of the "quality" of a position fix. For surface navigation a PDOP of 6 or better is generally regarded as acceptable. In other words, anywhere not coloured black on the diagram was getting acceptable Glonass fixes. But bear in mind that the diagram changes every few seconds... and remember that there were times in the early years of GPS when we were happy to accept anything better than 15!