This. I operate a bridge with tons of resources and only a few people to do so. It means that those people will be assigned more tasks, but it is certainly doable.
To me, good BRM is simply talking about what you are doing. Letting the bridge team know what the plan is and how we are going to achieve that goal as well as encouraging the conversation to happen so others can call out things they see or questions they have.
Basically what’s being said that is that people higher up in the hierarchy always know better than the people lower.
That means that individual Chief mates, Captains and so forth can’t implement BRM practices until someone higher up in hierarchy gives them specific instructions and procedures on how to do it.
At least we have babysteps…which is you giving in to the idea that the system can be improved and that cruise ships already have made the improvements. Now that we’ve admitted there is a problem, we can work on implementing the solution on cargo ships.
The truth is that most officers out in the fleet are average, and perform average. They are not innovators and just continue to do things “they way I was taught it”. Usually, those higher up in the food chain are also average, but somehow get the power of the pen (even though they may get paid less than the sailors at sea).
And then occasionally, you’ll get somebody in the office that is above average, has experience, and sees the big picture to make good changes. The also get to see multiple ships across their fleet and are in a position to implement change overall. But the only real way to get those on the ships to sign in is to bring them into training sessions on land and rotate them around the fleet to cross pollinate the better methods.
These good people usually have an extremely diverse career history and a questioning attitude. In my experience, the “expert” that has done the same thing for 20 years is likely to be the most useless in creating improvements. Honestly, bringing a few complete outsiders from completely different industries will probably be more useful than bringing together 20 sr officers with 400+ years of combined experience.
Is there an ideal number of people for an effective Bridge Team, bearing in mind the different aspects of deep sea, coastal, pilotage and harbour navigation?
Reading posts here it seems fairly obvious that some of the ships have a larger Bridge Team complement than other ships actually have on board in total.
How effective would the larger Bridge teams be if they had to do multiple ports a day?
By multiple, I mean more than 2.
How do the teams operate with day and night Masters?
There seems to be some discussion on what pilots do in regards to letting the crew no what to expect.
Would the maritime versions of SIDs/STARs help? I used to hate the things, but now it is a couple of button pushes and maybe a knob twist to load the “XYZ arrival” and I can follow the whole thing easily.
So, totally reliable and un-hackable then?
As unhackable as any other data in the plane or boat. It is not sent real-time, there is a database of arrivals and departures that is part of the same database that tells you where all the airports are. If they give you XYZ arrival, that is a published procedure and is already loaded at your end. It isn’t any more or less likely to be hacked then selecting KLAX as a destination.
So, completely un-hackable database then?
Well done.
“we need more sophisticated competencies on board ships”. Agree. Would make seafarers more valuable too
Anyone know if our Navy uses BRM? I understand they have a lot of bodies on their bridges, but is there teamwork going on? We learned in the 2017 collisions that they needed work. Curious where they are now
P 281. “From the Costa Concordia to Navigation in the Digital Age”. Antonio Di Lieto.
“Under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 by the ILO, seafarers can work more than 72 hours per week for a maximum period of about one year. All this is without shipowners having any obligation to guarantee at least one effective rest day per week or month: a rest day day that is not financially compensated but is used to combat long term fatigue for the benefit of ship safety.
**ILO’s Director of the International Labour Standards Department, Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry claims she is proud of “her” convention.”
I have Piloted a vessel where the Korean Master was into his 13th straight month and he was clearly brain dead (could not get a relief)…….and we all believe that BRM is going to work.
Nobody here has made any claims that the industry as a whole is going to successfully adapt BRM anytime soon.
I think, based on my own experience, that individual captains and department heads can educate themselves and their crew on the importance and benefits of BRM. They can also lead by example even if the industry as a whole does not fully embrace those principles.
Airplanes and ships pretty much all use charts downloaded from somewhere. If you could hack into the source of such charts, you could create mass havoc for a time. So far I have heard nothing about anything like that happening.
It wouldn’t be just SIDs and STARs, you could move New York a couple miles south and Newark a couple miles north. Subtle changes would be the worst, move a sandbar just a little bit over to force you to go wide around the bend into the shoal you also moved over.
That actually is a disturbing thought…and much more likely to catch out a younger person than the old farts who grew up on uncertain navigation and triple checking everything.
If bridge resource management is to work you have got to have a resource to manage. I have seen on occasion where a vessel was alongside Christmas Day and unusually, in this day and age the port was idle for the day. The entire crew took to their bunks exhausted.
We can pretend that the third mate testing the bridge gear at 01:00 immediately after a cargo watch of 6 hours is on the ball. The second mate on deck with the final containers loading, Master with agents and mate finalising cargo documentation, the pilot parked somewhere and two tugs waiting.
In my day in the navy we had a lot less people on the bridge. The occasions where we embarked a pilot were few. The bridge team consisted of the navigating officer who had the con. The OOW who maintained the ship’s position and routine. A bosun’s mate and a signalman plus lookouts on each bridge wing. The yeoman ( senior rating in charge of signalling department) stayed close to the Commanding Officer who sat in his chair.
The helm and telegraphs were 4 decks below in a cruiser.
The combat information centre had an identical passage plan that they followed advising the bridge of alterations and traffic as well as the bridge.
The commanding officer normally berthed the ship.
Indeed.
Perhaps I have laboured this to it’s conclusion. My experience indicates that the operational, organisational and regulatory hurdles are significant and perhaps insurmountable. I read the USCG report on the “Ever Forward”, shook my head and muttered “nothing has changed”.
I would like to see Dr. Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry undertake a 12 month stint at sea, 72+ hours per week with no respite and honestly say that this is an acceptable and safe work environment conducive to introducing new practices regarding human factors.
I will leave it at that.
One tool some senior officers use to control the crew is controlling access to information.
A concrete example is the varying practices among different captains regarding distribution of the periodic weather updates for the routing software,
One captain I sailed with used to update the bridge computer twice daily using a floppy disk. Other captains never shared those weather updates with the bridge, even after the ships got the much more convenient email connection to the bridge computer.
I used to routinely email updates to the bridge. Once when the other captain and I were reliving, out of the blue he told me that he did not send the updates to the bridge until after he’d reviewed them. He made a point to tell me that. Evidently he wanted to avoid a situation where a crew member had relevant information he was unaware of.
The bridge crew of the El Faro did not have timely access to readily available routing updates. I believe that the captain was limiting access to that information as a tool to control the bridge crew.
EDIT: I’ve made this point before on a thread about the El Faro - this post is from March 2017:
This may be partially true for 2016, however in 2023, I would say it’s downright negligent for any deck officer not to be able to procure at least two forms of weather routing regardless what the captain wishes people knew. Just using windy I access a more user friendly weather forecast for the route than a lot of wxrouting programs. Everyone from OS to chief engineer should have windy on their phone. And if a ship has wifi, you’ve got access to three models before the email server can even get a BVS update to you.
And when internet goes out, as it sometimes does, WxFax got me weather just as well as it did for the folks in the 80’s.
You know CRM started out not as rearranging how every single thing got done, but simply listening to your crew.
Sharing weather information with the crew and soliciting input, or at least being receptive to it, IS the very core of CRM/BRM.
Speaking of that, I knew someone who crewed on a salmon boat where the skipper decided even knowing the boat’s position was top secret information in the style of a 17th century captain preventing mutinies.
Yeah, I didn’t word my post very well. The captain had control of access to the weather routing updates and he rejected information coming from all other sources. Wasn’t a technical issue.
It’s not uncommon for captains (and others) to limit information to maintain control of subordinates. Sometimes it’s just out of laziness but it can be an effort to maintain control.
