NavList:

I’m not sure I’m sure I follow the logic in that report.  The the USN reports into what must be three collisions and a grounding referred to in the text criticised poor situational awareness and failure to follow correct navigational and seamanship practices by the Bridge Team, not unavailability of the vessels’ positions.  Moreover, to emphasise his argument, the author of the report above quotes an example (not in the subject ships) of  an OOW being faced with too much information already, so I can’t see how yet another positional input will help matters in what are essentially pilotage situations relying as much on the Mk1 eyeball as anything else. 

My other concern is 'availabiliy'.   As far as I’m aware all the astro-trackers used in the past or in use today spend most of their operational lives above the Tropopause.  Whilst they might work at sea-level on a sunny day, what if there’s up to 40,000/sin Hc ft of occasionally very wet cloud in the way for the stars UV, visual, and IR emissions to burn through?  Do they still work as well, or at all?  True, some of the aircraft and missiles using astro-trackers descend to low-level over enemy territory, but the astro-tracker will have already done its job until then minimising inertial platform drift until they descend.  As predicted previously, I see Mr Kalman also gets a mention in the NAS-26 report.  DaveP