![]() ![]() ![]() Continuous Monitoring of Vessel’s Position: One of the single biggest advantages of the ECDIS over paper charts is its ability to enable the user to see the vessel’s position in real time without user action. Even the dreaded T&P notices are now shown electronically on the ECDIS.Ĥ. The Navigating Officer now receives weekly updates to the Electronic Charts via Email which he has to download onto a zip drive and upload them to the ECDIS. All that has changed with paperless navigation. Keeping the world folio updated was a matter of pride which came with a lot of bragging rights. The Temporary and Preliminary (T&P) Notices were especially tedious since these came without tracings and required a thick file to be maintained. Even then there was a possibility of the occasional erroneous correction. Correcting charts with speed and accuracy was a skill that took a long time to master. Corrections: Before the advent of paperless navigation, the largest chunk of the Navigating Officer’s work time was consumed in Correcting Charts. can be done quickly with hardly any effort.ģ. Daily reporting data such as Distance to Go, Distance Covered, Average Speed, etc. Most ECDIS units have a facility where the waypoints can be imported into an excel format which reduces the effort to manually input the waypoints when compiling the Voyage Plan. Speed and Accuracy: With ECDIS as the primary source of navigation, the Navigating Officer can plan and summarise the passage much faster than on Paper Charts. A task that with skill and practice required hours now takes a few minutes.Ģ. The Master then emails this list to the chart supplier, who will then send the activation codes for those charts. With vessels going chartless, all that the Second Mate needs to do now is plot a rough course in the voyage planner and a list of all the required paper charts is populated. ![]() More often than not, this proved a major challenge especially on tramper trades which tend to get last minute voyage orders. This was followed by the arduous task of ordering these charts and hoping that they arrive in time. Gone are the days when Second Mates huddled over the good old NP 131 (chart catalogue) to determine what charts they require for the voyage. ![]() Availability: One of the great advantages of ECDIS over paper charts is the availability of electronic charts – especially when voyage orders are received at the last minute. Let’s discuss some of the pros and cons of paperless navigation.ġ. Who’s responsible for this change? Well it is none other than the Electronic Chart Display and Information System aka ECDIS.Īlthough, a bit biased towards the old school paper chart navigation, I cannot deny the fact that ECDIS does have an edge over paper charts. But now, armed with the IMO mandate for compulsory ECDIS carriage, the big vessels such as the super tankers and giant container vessels are also running smoothly without paper charts. The transition started slowly with smaller vessels like pleasure crafts, tug boats and yachts. Imagining that a day would come where we’d no longer have them onboard was nothing short of blasphemy.Įvery single navigating officer who’s been out at sea “long enough” still fondly recollects joining vessels with his own treasured Chart Correction Pen. After all, since centuries, navigational paper charts had been the heart and soul of ship navigation. A mere 15 years back, navigators would have scoffed at the idea of Paperless Navigation on big ocean going ships. ![]()
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