The Black Box - Safety At Sea

We often hear how important it is for the authorities to find the black box after an aviation disaster and by now we all know is not even black

. Instead, it is a florescent orange box that is you see on the news containing the important data of all the flight characteristics. The data is recorded on impact resistant hard drives.

In recent years, the Maritime authorities have enacted regulation for several commercial and passenger vessels to carry similar systems onboard in the event of a maritime disaster. This system is called a VDR (Vessel Data Recorder). VDR's record order and response of all of the vessels systems; from engines, alarms, rudders to navigation data.

The bridge is wired for sound. Recording all the conversations among crew members as well as radio communications with others. These systems are capable of multiple points of monitoring and feeding the data to a similar black box receiver on breakaway hard drives located on the top deck. These systems are designed for the major players. It is the recreational boater or even the average yacht that can benefit from systems designed to record our sensors.

Most chart plotters and GPSs have a recording function for tracks and points. This is important to know because of the ability to retrace a vessels path if an incident should occur. With the advent of more sophisticated chart plotters the user is given the ability, via the log function, to record in real-time all the sensors that are interfaced to it; radar targets, environmental data, wind direction, wind speed, temperature, depth, gyro heading, GPS, AIS, LOG speed and several other data streams.

Maritime incidents have been solved and lessons learned by analyzing data received using this technology. VDRs can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars if you decide to monitor every data point on a ship. Decent chart plotters along with their computers can run in the tens of thousands of dollars depending on their options. A high-end GPS chart plotter could run you in the two to four thousand dollar range. The ability to pick up the pieces and learn from a disaster is essential. By collecting ships data, we are capable of engineering our future voyages at sea to be safer for all.

by:Brian Coffin

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