NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2017 Mar 3, 10:27 -0800
Lu Abel, you wrote:
"Here's another (and possibly better) report of the incident from a commercial marine oriented [gCaptain]"
But why go there? Did you miss my posts last night that included the official report (here)? Go to the source! Some blogger working for gCaptain is no more and no less: just some blogger working for gCaptain. That blogger has no special knowledge here, and it appears to me that the reporting was influenced by the techno-phobic tabloid coverage rather than being derived from the actual official report.
Anything is possible, but why would this be relevant in any way? Such a device would not fail as they moved away from shore. It's not significant anyway. The MAIB report barely mentions the iPad, but it does note that it was not the skipper who was using it but rather his passenger, who was a representative of that prospective buyer whose schedule they were rushing to meet. The reporter notes that the skipper believed that he could navigate visually based on a line of buoys. It also notes that he believed the fog would burn off soon. The primary navigational methodology that he was depending on was traditional navigation and piloting. He also had a fully-functional stand-alone GPS unit as well as paper charts on which his passenger successfully plotted their position and saw that it was in the shipping channel immediately before the collision (the official report did complain that they didn't have proper plotting tools but come on --anyone with basic skills can plot a GPS position on a chart without tools). The skipper wasn't relying on the iPad though they may have had a false sense of security before departure that the iPad's AIS app could alert them to shipping traffic (of which there is plenty on the Humber Estuary.
Frank Reed
