That is a sales pitch, not serious analysis.
“Then there’s the passenger experience. Cruise and ferry operations could see a seismic shift, adopting aviation’s seamless journey technologies. Unified booking and check-in systems, automated luggage transfer – these are not mere conveniences but game-changers.”
No one that has flown commercially in the last couple of decades is thinking the modern airport experience is anything but getting your teeth drilled out without novacaine.
Absolutely.
Flew last week, what a nightmare.
Taking the car and catching a ferry next time.
Probably helps that I work on a ferry too.
Another startup with some financial backing spun from a company out of maritime. They will get some clients, have a niche market, but in no way will change the industry. Last time I looked any solution associated with the airlines cost 20x + than maritime, good luck with that.
The bit about cruiseand ferry passengers were a single paragraph as an aside to the main points:
I looked at their site and a few other things related to them and it all seems like The Dilbert Mission Statement Generator wrote it.
There are some things done on airplanes that are of real benefit, like a master alarm panel as discussed elsewhere with about 100 posts. Much of this though seems hand-wavy stuff that might attract venture capital more than any concrete solutions.
Much of what happens in airplanes is predicated on them all being identical. I was part of a program that extended the time between overhauls of PT-6 turbine engines by flying at certain power settings and keeping track of doing so. This worked because THOUSANDS of identical engines are in use all over the world. If there are THOUSANDS of ship engines that are the exact same and maintained by law in the same way, you might be able to do this, except AFAIK the engines don’t have a TBO spec anyway, you can run them until they die.
“Enhanced navigation and traffic management” - oh, goody, lets create a monster bureaucracy to re-create the air traffic control system and give them statutory authority over all waterborne operations.
In the air, every aircraft is registered and every pilot is licensed, with serious penalties for non-compliance. While private aviation is uncontrolled in many areas, this does NOT include anyplace with a major airport. Since private boat ownership is much more widespread than private aircraft, the need for a rather larger “port control system” would be indicated - even if you could force all those fishermen, water-skiers and sailors to equip their craft with the requisite AIS and communications equipment.
And license them too or you have no real way to punish them for ignoring you.
The article is about commercial shipping, not WAFIs / MAFIs or hobby fishermen.
They should stay away from anything big, or gray.
Yeah, that isn’t how ATC works and you can’t port it onto boats where 99% of them are ignoring you.
Nobody is taking about transferring ATC to the maritime environment wholesale.
The idea is to take what is good and learn from it.
It the WAFI/MAFI insist on getting “their rights” (maybe “dead right”?) they’ll be run over.
(Then maybe they’ll learn something too)
I guess you have to be a user of ATC to realize how much it doesn’t work with boats. If ATC told me they weren’t talking to 99% of the traffic landing at BWI and couldn’t see about 75% of the traffic, I would just turn the radio off as a useless distraction and keep a sharp lookout.
It also makes no sense for most ports, is there someplace where several hundred ships come and go PER DAY?
“They should stay away from anything big, or gray.”
Um, I don’t think you understand at all, sir. Small vessels do try to “stay away” from the big iron - but there are times when we have to share the same waterways, and the current system generally works as long as the participants understand the parameters - WITHOUT invoking a major government bureaucracy.
One limitation of the waterways traffic systems is that they are essentially two-dimensional, while the ATC system uses three dimensions to integrate high-speed/low-speed, large or small traffic. None of these schemes would work for a maritime environment, because small vessels often have to cross, intersect with or travel along major channels. Want to take your small airplane through a major metropolis’ airspace? - there are corridors you can use, with strong restrictions and (usually) a need to communicate with the controller. Can you see such a system in say, the Chesapeake Bay for every fishing, motor or sailboat there?
There may be some lessons the marine industry could learn from aviation, but the ATC system isn’t one of them.
I am guess they are mostly at anchor, thus more like the ramp (parking) at the airport than the air.
They also already have transponders and already have a traffic control scheme. I am not sure what this word salad “leveraging cross platform synergy” company is proposing to make it all work better than it does right now.
Besides for that our fine local fisherman would obey such a scheme at gunpoint only and then go buy more guns!
It is a still picture. Vessels arrive, move and leave Singapore port all the time.
Again; this is NOT about transferring ATC directly to a maritime environment, but about learning from aviation to improve maritime safety and efficiency worldwide, both in ports, waterways and on the high seas.
OK, that’s a clip from your post explaining how wonderful this initiative is - lets break it down:
- “Enhanced navigation and traffic management” Please tell us what navigation and traffic management tools should be brought over from Aviation Technology. Should we have a data link from VTS to vessels? Besides GPS, is there some navigation tech in use in Aviation that could be used by vessels?
- “…safer and more efficient routing,…” What Aviation tech would possibly accomplish this beyond what we’re doing already?
- “…improved situational awareness in congested waters…” ATC (and on-board equipment) advises air traffic of potential conflicts, what could be done for vessels that isn’t already provided by AIS and onboard radar?
- “real-time data sharing and communication could…” It strikes me that we already have real-time communications with VTS (where it exists) - does Aviation do real-time data sharing with aircraft? What data would be shared?
I do not know enough about shipboard maintenance to comment on that aspect - I will leave that to the pros here who do 
Again, this is about worldwide shipping and aviation, not about WAFI/MAFIs in the US only.
One thing that could be useful is if ALL seafarers knew and used IMO mandated SMCP:
https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Safety/Pages/StandardMarineCommunicationPhrases.aspx
That is NOT always the case today. Local languages and slang is used far too often,
(Understanding communication between two local vessels in the GoM is almost impossible, unless you know the local slang)
FYI; Standard Aviation English is used worldwide, even on domestic flights and for communication between the flight deck and cabin crew:
The issue is not a lack of tech to support the system, it’s the fact that for the most part there is no system.
The bible here is still probably Charles Perrow’s “Normal Accidents”