Improvement of Navigation Lights and Signals

Extract

In recent years there has been growing concern over the adequacy and distinctiveness of navigation lights in use at sea. This has expressed itself in a series of modifications to the lights shown by various specialized vessels, and by and large the more unusual users of the sea are now clearly and distinctively lighted by night. However, despite the noise being made about it, little has so far been done to improve ordinary ship's navigation lights. There can be little doubt that something urgent does need to be done about them; the survey carried out by Shell International Marine1 indicated this statistically, and any practising navigator need only think of the difficulties encountered at sea from other ships showing wrong or inadequate lights to realize it.

The range of navigation lights in general is the first and most obvious matter for improvement. The present statutory ranges were laid down when oil lamps were still the normal means of providing light, and when in addition ships were much smaller and slower than the average today. In view of the current size and speed of ships, and the obvious fact that in the future they are going to get even bigger and faster, it seems senseless to have their navigation light ranges prescribed on a datum established by oil lamps. The mind boggles at the prospect of two crossing supertankers, each with side-lights visible for no more than the statutory 2 miles, maintaining course and speed until each saw the other's side-lights (a common practice at sea).