We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS
- Reference: 1632212950
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/21/hms_severn_fleet_navigating_officers_course/
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This week we are exclusively reporting from aboard HMS Severn , the warship hosting the Navy's Fleet Navigation Officer (FNO) course.
The FNO course takes naval officers who have passed the navy's first-stage navigation qualification, Preliminary Navigating Officer, and qualifies those people to navigate larger ships of frigate/destroyer size. It also teaches them to do it in the absence of GPS, falling back on age-old skills that would have been familiar to sailors in the early 20th century.
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Although the course uses IT (the Warship Electronic Chart Display Information System, or WECDIS), the student navigators don't get the luxury of instant and precise position updates from GPS. The emphasis is on old-fashioned mathematics, with the ship's position calculated to within yards.
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Under "pilotage" rules (visual identification of landmarks or navigation buoys while close to shore), the ship's navigator must keep away from the Limiting Danger Line, a navigational term for the point at which it becomes unsafe for the ship to go any closer to shore in case she runs aground.
Each twist and turn of the journey from port to open sea (referred to as "legs") is meticulously planned in detail, from speeds to rudder angles to turning points, right down to the amount of "squat" the ship has for a given speed – which influences her depth below the waterline.
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'Squat' is the amount by which the ship's stern sinks under speed. The faster you go, the more squat you have
"We don't use paper charts at all," Severn's captain, Commander Philip Harper, told your correspondent. Although a paper backup seems like a great idea, he continued, there are two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses them: "One, we've never lost everything," said the captain, referring to the nightmare scenario of all WECDIS terminals simultaneously crashing or corrupting. "Two, we no longer have the skills to operate a paper chart."
We're a digital navy nowadays. We don't spend time and money maintaining skills we no longer use.
A wry smile crossing his face, Cdr Harper explained that working a paper chart "takes a lot of time and is always wrong."
If you fix the ship's position by taking, say, three bearings from shore landmarks, there will always be an error introduced by the time it takes to physically convey the bearing from the gyro-compass to the chart. Seconds count in a navy that prides itself on precision to within yards.
[5]British naval food doesn't look half bad... so we're going to try it out for ourselves
[6]What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse
[7]Big data at sea: How the Royal Navy charts the world's oceans
[8]Windows XP? Pfff! Parts of the Royal Navy are running Win ME
Calculating the ship's position on paper while simultaneously allowing for that ever-growing margin of error is a very perishable skill. Without WECDIS doing the sums in the background it all becomes rather tricky, we're told. There are some simple rules of thumb – for example, one degree is equal to 35yds at 1nm, so if you're off-course by a single degree you know how far left or right of track you've gone.
This morning Severn left HM Naval Base Portsmouth for the week-long course. After a 6am start the ship's company had carried out their Standard Operating Checks, ensuring all equipment and machinery was in running order. After a thorough briefing from one of the junior officers in the ship's charthouse, we were "off the wall" ahead of schedule, heading south under an increasingly warm and sunny sky.
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The Register will continue reporting from HMS Severn during this week. ®
Bootnote
As your correspondent finished writing this article in the wardroom, a voice piped up. "We should play UNO!"
This is an operation of vital importance to the running of the ship, played with the utmost integrity in accordance with a set of clear and comprehensive rules (or perhaps not). Severn's wardroom picks one officer a day to do the washing-up; UNO is the method by which the victim is selected.
"We once played for two hours to decide who'd wash three plates," one officer gravely intoned.
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Re: Everybody Down!
Oooh, nasty!
At last a good use for this icon :-D --->
"two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"
"One, we've never lost everything," said the captain, referring to the nightmare scenario of all WECDIS terminals simultaneously crashing or corrupting
Yet
"Two, we no longer have the skills to operate a paper chart."
You're expendable when 'one' happens.
Re: "two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"
I was deeply impressed when two guys from our aero club flew to England (to watch some air show thingy), with a sinlge engine plane. On the way back the weather over the channel got worse (not what was forecast...), and they lost ground view. That was before world and dog had GPS units. One of them served as a chopper pilot, so he was well versed in navigating with stop watch, compass and map. They did make their way to a small airfield in Northern France without any problems (and external help).
Sure, they could have asked to get a QDM, plus the plane was equiped with ADF and VOR, so it was reasonably safe.
However, I doubt they had their position down to a few yards, which is what the requirements are for navigating shallow waters near the coast as described in the article. The problem you have with triangulating your position while moving is that you have to correct for this. Being a yard or 50 off is not an option here.
Re: "two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"
I remember a conversation with a colleague who'd worked at Eurocontrol upgrading the air traffic control system. With the new system the probability of failure went down immensely, but the impact went up;
The old ATC would fail about twice a week and take 30-90 minutes to be restored. The new one should fail no more an once every 2 years and recover inside 30 minutes. When the old one went down, everyone looked at their notes (which they always kept on paper) and their charts and kept directing traffic. If the new one failed, they had no backup notes and were out of practice working from paper.
Reg units need not apply
...for example, one degree is equal to 35yds at 1nm...
That one nanometer must be the X-ray laser wavelength that can strike at thirty-five yards with a one degree centigrade temperature rise?
Did ISO fall out of grace?
Re: Reg units need not apply
1) it is the British Royal Navy!
2) ships and planes use nautical miles for distances and knots for speed. Unless you are a glider pilot, then you use kilometers for distances and metres for height, and curse the official map material...
Re: Reg units need not apply
For all the arguments of metric vs imperial, both still have their place and in the real world, we're all quite happily working with both. The Americans take this even further than the Brits.
Watching a US medical series last night, patient weight was in lbs, drug dosage in metric. Using each system to its strengths.
Re: Glider units
Glider pilots in the UK still use feet for altitude, at least up until last weekend. But they do use km for task distances.
Has anyone offered
to take you down to see the Golden Rivet?
Capt Pugwash
References incoming in 3.. 2.. 1..
"We once played for two hours to decide who'd wash three plates,"
I'm glad the Royal Navy is able to spend that much time determining with precision who is to do what.
I do hope they do not use that system when it comes to targeting and weapon firing in combat, though.
What really worries me is the " we no longer have the skills to operate a paper chart " part. That clearly means that, in case the computers go down, the Royal Navy (and probably every other navy in the world) is dead in the water.
That part doesn't sound too good.
Everybody Down!
One wonders how Sub-Lieutenant Phillips would have coped.
Left hand down a bit.