bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Channel Navigation Information Service
Authors: Emden R. K. N. 
Published: November 2009

Since its inception in 1972 progress of the Channel Navigation Information Service (CNIS) has twice been described in the Journal. The tenth anniversary of the first broadcast bulletin of information occurred on 31 July 1982, and it is perhaps appropriate to review and bring up to date the major milestones in the history of the Service and to review the safety of navigation in the Dover Strait.It will be recalled that, following the multiple collision off the Varne in 1971 and bearing in mind previous major disasters – Torrey Canyon, Pacific Glory, etc. – the Department of Trade concluded that a voluntary Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), without surveillance and without a coordinating information service, was inadequate for the dense and complex maritime traffic problems of the Dover Strait. Thus was born the Dover Strait Information Service, now CNIS, under the aegis of HM Coastguard, and located on the upper floor of an old Port War Signal Station at Leathercote Point, St Margaret's Bay. The Decca Marine Radar Company installed a simple harbour radar and its associated display towards the end of 1971 and Coastguard evolved the essential elements of what remains to this day a half-hourly bulletin, broadcast on vhf/rt Channel 10. In low visibility intermediate broadcasts are given, based on actual visibilities reported from sea.In August 1973 the French authorities installed a similar system at Cap Gris Nez and a very close co-ordination, vital from the mariner's point of view, developed.
A Return to the Sumner Line?
Authors: Sadler D. H. 
Published: November 2009

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the almost universal use of some ftym of electronic calculator for the reduction of astronomical sights, there is a growing demand for a simple back-up method for emergency use when a calculator is not available. Presumably the need arises because of the disinclination to carry the material for a standard method in order to provide cover for the small chance of calculator failure. It is a surprising development, enhancing the continued interest in, and use of, astronomical navigation in a field increasingly dominated by instant and continuous position-fixing systems of high precision and universal applicability.Similar considerations may apply to the ephemeris data, which are being increasingly generated by calculator or computer. However, to a precision adequate for emergency use, near-permanent data for the Sun and stars can be given in a few pages in tables similar to those for G.H. A. Aries (Vol. I) and the Sun (Vols. 2 and 3) in Table 4 of AP 3270 Sight Reduction Tablesfor Air Navigation. In fact the simplest conceptual solution might well be to carry the appropriate latitude pages extracted from the loose-leaf US edition, HO 249.In 1948 I had occasion to review the existing tables for the reduction of astronomical sights (this Journal, Vol. 1, p. 298, 1948); the review was limited to intercept methods and, mainly, to those based on the use of the DR position.
Manoeuvring Times, Domains and Arenas
Authors: Colley B. A. , Curtis R. G. , Stockel C. T. 
Published: November 2009

Two main concepts in mathematical modelling of ship encounters have been proposed by Davis. The first, the ‘domain’, was an adaptation of a concept originally introduced by Goodwin, who defined the domain as the ‘area about own-ship that a navigator wished to keep free with respect to ships and other stationary objects’. The second, the ‘arena’, conceived by Davis, is the area around the domain which when infringed causes the mariner to consider whether to make a collision-avoidance manoeuvre. Thus, in a computer model, when a vessel enters the arena the computer analyses the situation and, depending on the severity of the threat, makes a collision-avoidance manoeuvre.Goodwin's domain was divided into three sectors corresponding to the ‘giveway’, the ‘stand-on’ and the ‘overtaking’ regions as defined by the relative velocity of approach. The domain was derived from radar films of ship tracks and records of radar simulator experiments. Davis smoothed the sectored domain to a circle with own-ship off-centred astern and to port, and the weighting of each of the sectors retained. Davis's domain had a solid theoretical grounding; the arena, however, was simply a larger version of the smoothed domain. Its size and position were obtained by means of a well-distributed questionnaire. It served its purpose in the model, but lacked any real validation.One problem with the Davis arena was its inability automatically to take into account different velocities, both of own-ship and of targets.
The Automation of Air Traffic Control
Authors: Villiers Jacques 
Published: November 2009

Experience gained in the automation of air traffic control is of interest from more than one point of view, and not only because of the range and diversity of new and delicate problems to which this application of automation has given rise, and for which it is necessary to find simultaneous solutions. It has been necessary to design and develop new methods for the acquisition, processing and display of information and to link them with digital computers, for which a complex and voluminous ‘real-time’ software has had to be compiled and brought up to date without interrupting the procedure. But it is when it comes to visualizing the total pattern that the most difficult problems arise because the major decisions determining the success or failure of the operation have had to be taken without the possibility of acquiring any preliminary experience.Man and the computer have to work together in real time as harmoniously as possible to obtain the best results from the modern data processing systems that it was proposed to employ; it was therefore essential to consider very deeply the complementary roles which each was intended to play.To describe this research in detail or the solutions arrived at would not be of great interest to those other than specialists.
I.—The Severn Estuary
Authors: Cotter Charles H. 
Published: November 2009

F. J. North reminds us that the well defined geographical entity now called the Bristol Channel should, on historical grounds, be called the Severn Sea. This was the name used by Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?–1223) in his Topographic Hibernica of 1188 and by Roger Barlow in his A Brief Summe of Geographic of 1540, among other early writers. But with Bristol's rise to fame as a great seaport the name Bristol Channel came to be used and, as early as 1693 we find the name ‘Canal de Bristol’ on a French sea chart by H. Jaillot.An unknown writer of 1578, whose Discourse was published in John Stow's Survey of London of 1598, in explaining why a site on the Thames instead of one on the Severn was chosen for the metropolitan city, stated that:‘… the Thames both for the straight course in length and reacheth furthest into the belly of the land, and for the breadth and stillness of the water is most navigable up and down the stream…. The river openeth indifferently upon France and Flaunders, our mightiest neighbours, on whose doings we ought to have a bent eye and special regard…… For the Prince of this Realm to rest and dwell upon Severn were to be shut up in a cumbersome corner, which openeth but upon Ireland only, a place of much less importance…’
The Craft of the Navigator
Authors: Anderson E. W. 
Published: November 2009

Sir George Deacon, F.R.S., a past president, has recently written a most persuasive case for founding a Chair in Navigation. He mentions Sir Isaac Newton's insistence that Christ's Hospital should teach ‘not only what is necessary to make a mariner skilful in his ordinary road, but also what would assist him to invent new things and practices and to judge what comes before him’. It was in this spirit that a basic analysis of navigation was begun some years ago although it was not expected that Sir Isaac Newton's great conception would be realized. Indeed, the object was only to try to suggest to educators the potential of navigation as a scientific discipline.Elements of the work dealing with probability and with information theory have already appeared in the Journal and certain ideas have been crystallised into patents taken out by Smiths Industries Limited. Other results are presented here in a condensed form starting with a definition which leads on to a pattern of equipments by using a particular development of dimensions and which highlights the special difficulty of collision avoidance. Linkages between gimballing error, precession and coriolis effect are suggested, and the significance of frames of reference is emphasized, suggesting a unified approach to the trigonometry needed by the navigator. If these crude tools can be tempered by the fire of criticism or replaced by finer cutting edges, the effort will not have been wasted.
Early Portuguese Navigation
Authors: Cortesão Armando 
Published: November 2009

Professor Cortesão sent the following message to the Annual General Meeting of the Institute on 23 October which he had been unable to attend to receive personally his Honorary Membership. An account of the meeting appears at page 111.The Honorary Membership which the Royal Institute of Navigation bestows upon me, when I have reached the eighty-fourth year of my laborious life, the last forty years of which have been largely dedicated to the study of the history of early cartography and navigation, impresses me deeply and I am very sorry that, due only to my advanced age, I cannot be present at this ceremony to thank you personally for such a great distinction.
‘K's and F's’
Authors: May W. E. , Cotter Charles H. 
Published: November 2009

I am indebted to Captain Duncan M. Henderson (Journal27, 536) for causing me to seek further than I had done previously to enable me to prove that ‘F’ in old log-books stood for fathoms and not fractions.I would quote the following authorities who all state definitely that the ‘F’ meant fathoms and that there were usually eight fathoms to a knot, at any rate in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are:
V.H.F. Interference
Authors: Downer Ivan 
Published: November 2009

Having read Professor Hugon's informative paper on ‘Navigation in the French merchant navy’ and in particular his remarks regarding the cluttering of the 182 kHz band, I would hazard a guess that he has not listened to the v.h.f. channel 16 band in recent years, when clear of the U.K. and continental areas.In the open sea well away from land this channel is not often abused, but off the West African coast between about 13° N. and 22° N. the air at night is, more often than not, cluttered with noises like animal and bird calls for long periods on channel 16, and during the day with lengthy chitchat, possibly between foreign fishermen, on this and other channels.
The Optimal Speed of Ships
Authors: Goodwin Elisabeth M. , Kemp J. F. 
Published: November 2009

The following paper was presented at a meeting of the Institute held in London on 21 February 1979 with the President, Captain R. Maybourn, in the Chair. It considers some of the factors which apply in the context of overall safety and the weightings which they should be assigned in estimating the optimal speed for ships in given circumstances and conditions.In air traffic control the speed of individual aircraft cannot be significantly varied without unacceptable economic penalties, or the aircraft falling out of the sky. In the case of ships the speed is a useful variable for traffic management and individual ships can choose, or be assigned, any value between zero and their normal service speed. The following discussion concerns the choice of a suitable speed for marine traffic in terms of safety criteria.
A Stranding in the Magellan Strait
Authors: Burger W. , Corbet A. G. 
Published: November 2009

The paper by Captain Burger and Captain Corbet was presented by Captain Corbet at a meeting of the Arab Institute of Navigation held in Alexandria on 9 April 1979. Before the meeting M. W. Richey, as Director of the Royal Institute of Navigation, gave a short talk to the Arab Institute.On the 9 August 1974 the steam tanker Metula grounded in the First Narrows of the Magellan Strait. The grounding of this deeply laden VLCC provoked very little publicity either on television or in the press, probably because of the remoteness of the area. The Metula was a first-class, well-found vessel manned by properly qualified and experienced personnel, and had two Chilean pilots on board to assist with the navigation through the Strait. How could such an accident happen?
GPS Navstar: A Review
Authors: Jones S. S. D. 
Published: November 2009

The Global Positioning System, Navstar, is an advanced satellite-based navigation system which is currently under development and evaluation in the United States of America. Progress has been very fully reported in the open literature and a definitive paper on the concept has in fact been published in this Journal. The concept has now been experimentally validated and much of the evidence which supports this validation has in turn been published.The impact of Navstar on navigation in the period beyond 1985 is potentially very great indeed in that it offers, worldwide, a navigation capability to surface and aerospace users of a standard of accuracy combined with continuous availability which is currently associated only with short-range aids.This paper has the objective of presenting (a) a general introduction to the physical principles on which Navstar is based, followed by (b) a survey of its potential relevance to the operational needs of various classes of user. Finally there is some more speculative matter in the form of (c) a discussion of the potential impact of successful implementation of Navstar on current and projected future navigation systems.
Radar Estimation of the Height of a Cruising Aircraft
Authors: Nagaoka S. , Yoshioka E. , Muto P. T. 
Published: November 2009

Separation standards are used for assuring the safe and effective operation of aircraft in a traffic control environment and as aircraft operations increase in number the need to reconsider separation standards is strongly voiced both by operators and controllers. A panel, the Review of the General Concept of Separation Panel (RGCSP), has been organized by ICAO and the possibility of reducing conventional separation standards has been discussed. Mathematical models for estimating collision risk due to loss of separation between aircraft require data on navigation accuracy. In general, three-dimensional radars are used for height finding but these are complicated and expensive.The altitude of the cruising aircraft is required within about 100 ft. In the simplified radar here described a rotating antenna produces a fan beam for scanning aircraft flying overhead. The data obtained from several scans are processed by a mini-computer and the height of the aircraft estimated by a least-square method and sequential approximation. Between the items of information obtained for each scan (the distance, the elevation angle and the data acquisition time) a theoretical relationship is established as an observation equation, one of the coefficients of which includes the height information. The coefficient is determined by a curve-fitting method. The paper first describes the method of analysis for height estimation and then an evaluation of the accuracy of the method by a computer simulation.
The Impact of Low Cost Micro-processors on Airborne Navigation Systems
Authors: Hearne P. A. , Hamlin D. J. 
Published: November 2009

The following paper was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institute held in London on 21 March 1979 with Mr S. S. D. Jones in the Chair.This paper is not so much a forecast of future navigation systems as a personal view of the philosophy of the increased use of micro-processors. Digital computers were first introduced into airborne systems in the late 1950s to meet the demands of new sensors such as inertial navigators and star trackers for which analog computation methods proved inadequate and inaccurate, but their cost restricted their application to specialized high accuracy systems.
Automation and Air Traffic Control
Authors: Goodwin John 
Published: November 2009

It is of course a truism to note the profound effect that transportation has had on modern society, which is quite simply unimaginable without communications by land, sea and air. The role played by navigational science and its application has of course been somewhat different in each medium. Navigation by air, though, has a special distinguishing feature in that the aviator frequently shares responsibility for the safe and efficient conduct of his flight with another agency, the air traffic control system.For the foreseeable future, air traffic control will have a major part to play in the navigation and safety of travel by air and so, by implication, future developments in air traffic control will have an influence on society at large.Turning now from the general to the particular, the author would like to give an example, which may be symptomatic and serve to illustrate the magnitude of the problems that the air transport industry, including air traffic control, may face in the future.
Strategies for Marine Traffic
Authors: Goodwin Elisabeth , Richardson R. B. 
Published: November 2009

Although its achievement may prove long and difficult, it is surely time to think out the lines along which future traffic systems must inevitably be developed, for we are still largely without any real rationale as to what it is we are to achieve when traffic measures are introduced, whether with IMCO agreement or nationally. We have some of the right answers but have we yet asked the right questions?Before we can evolve any realistic strategy there must be some consensus across several disciplines; disaster seems to show itself the only effective antidote to fixed ideas. Society is not likely to tolerate this approach indefinitely and a more acceptable mode of progress must begin now, before irrational forces take charge.The dominant factor has hitherto been safety of navigation, though navigation concerns only the ship and not her cargo, with its contractual obligations and penalties. Yet the risk to society derives almost wholly from the nature of the cargo.The laws concerning carriage of goods and contracts of affreightment – the province of the ship-operator and his litigation processes – can often be in direct conflict with the statutory requirements of governments relating to navigation and collision, whose theme is safety of life per se and is not concerned with efficiency. It would be reasonable to accept the proposition that the demands of society towards these problems should be solved by traffic-oriented rather than ship-oriented schemes.
Navigational Measurements
Authors: Anderson E. W. 
Published: November 2009

In this paper we shall seek to discover what information we need in order to navigate and how this information is obtained. To do this we first define what we are talking about and then, by a logical process, determine the components involved and the ways they can be measured. Efforts to discover whether another science has been approached in this basic way have failed. All that can be said with certainty is that the path is fraught with difficulties.The word navigation has nautical origins but the scope of the discipline is far wider today. Nevertheless, a modern definition must stem naturally from marine operations. There would seem to be four factors:(a) A ship at sea is not navigating when she is docked. There has to be motion.(b) Rocking to and fro is not enough. The motion has to be from one place to another.(c) Drifting helplessly before the wind is not being navigated. The motion has to be under control.(d) The word ‘control’ has a negative and restricting connotation whereas travel has positive aims. Hence the control has to be exercised to a purpose. Steering aimlessly, however complete the control, is not navigating.A definition of navigation should therefore include four features, motion, place, control and purpose. A possible wording might be:‘Navigation is purposeful control of motion from place to place’.
US Research into Shiphandling Simulators for Mariner Training and Licensing
Authors: Hammell Thomas J. , Gardenier John S. 
Published: November 2009

Shiphandling training simulators have come into use since 1967. Several such simulators, with differing technical characteristics and training goals, are now in use around the world. They are commonly used to familiarize already competent masters with new vessels, restricted water areas, or some form of standard bridge procedures. Acceptance of these simulators by highly experienced master trainees has been predominantly favourable. Ship radar simulators have been in use for a somewhat longer time. They are typically used for training entry level officers as well as experienced masters.The aviation and nuclear reactor industries, with a greater experience of simulator technology and its training value, use simulators for both training and licensing. The military (e.g. Navy) and other government agencies (e.g. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) have extensively used simulators for training and qualification. It has been suggested (Schumacker, Madsen and Nicastro, 1972; IMCO Standards of Training and Watchkeeping Convention of 1978, Resolution 17) that simulators could be used for proficiency demonstration on the part of mariners. The US Port and Tanker Safety Act of 1978 requires standards for licence qualifications by use of simulators.The United States Coast Guard and Maritime Administration have funded research into the role, technology, and effectiveness of ship-handling simulators. Depending partly on conclusions from this research, the Coast Guard will consider partial credit toward licences for successful completion of approved simulator training. The Maritime Administration may assist maritime training academies to design and procure simulator-based training systems.
The Industrial Archaeology of Lighthouses
Authors: Komesaroff M. B. 
Published: November 2009

Most lists of the seven wonders of the world include the Colossus of Rhodes. This bronze figure of Apollo, which the sculptor Chares took several years to construct, stood near a harbour on the island of Rhodes in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is reported that ships in full sail could pass between its legs whilst navigation lights were kept burning in its eyes. Whilst such descriptions are coloured by romance and myth, there is little doubt that early lighthouses were substantially tall towers supporting an open wood or coal fire. Such lights existed in Britain until as late as 1819, when Flathom light in the Bristol Channel was replaced by more modern equipment.In time the open-flame coal brazier gave way to tallow candles. In 1696 Winstanley introduced a chandelier with tallow candles into the lantern of his famous Eddystone Tower. In 1759 Smeeton's Tower, which now stands on the Hoe at Plymouth, incorporated two superimposed iron rings that contained twenty-four candles.By and large it was the improvements in optical systems that governed the development and introduction of oil and then, at a later date, electric illuminants.The first attempt to intensify a lighthouse beam was in 1727 by the French at Cordouan. Mariners had complained that they could not see the light at more than 2 miles. In an attempt to improve on this, a cone of wood was covered with tin plate and suspended above the open fire.