In December 1999, the European Commission adopted the European ‘Statement of Principles’ (SoP) in acknowledgement of the importance of the human-machine interaction (HMI) for in-vehicle telematics. In recommending adherence to the Statement of Principles, the EC urges the European motor manufacturing and supply industries to comply with a number of basic safety requirements concerning the design of, and driver interaction with, in-vehicle information, communication and entertainment systems. When the SoP was published, Member States were invited to undertake work to assess industry knowledge about, and compliance with, the Statement of Principles. TRL are currently undertaking this work for the UK Government in support of their work to assess the impact of the SoP and develop future policies concerning HMI. This paper discusses the results of a widespread UK consultation with individuals identified as working in the field of in-vehicle information, communication and entertainment systems (IVIS). It also outlines work undertaken to establish a method for assessing the extent to which a specific IVIS complies with the SoP. It describes the development and design of a HMI safety checklist that can provide an initial assessment of whether a specific IVIS is in accordance with the Principles.

This paper describes the process of developing a safe access route to the Hook of Holland. The traffic situation in the Roads was tested by means of simulation. Van Riet, Pollen and Valstar are with the Directorate General of Shipping and Maritime Affairs in the Netherlands, Tresfon with the Maritime Research Institute in the Netherlands.

The basic concept of case and cluster rotation in inertial navigation (IN) systems is introduced, and the reduction in the errors caused by changes in gyro and accelero-meter biases is illustrated. The general properties of cluster rotated systems are summarized and it is concluded that, although errors inside the Schuler loops may be drastically reduced by rotation, care must be taken to avoid error sources outside the loops.

This paper formed the 1987 Anderson Memorial Lecture, and was presented to the Bristol Channel branch on 24 March.

The United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) came into force on November 18, 1994 to provide the legal framework for maritime boundary delimitation. Understanding the geomatics aspects of UNCLOS is vital for coastal nations to claim the ownership of the natural resources within the limits of their Continental Shelf. This paper discusses some of the geomatics aspects of UNCLOS, namely the geodetic and uncertainty issues. A case study for Egypt's outer limits is also presented.

The Loran C radio position-fixing system has been described in technical detail at international conferences and elsewhere. This paper tries to convey the general ‘feel’ of the system and its characteristics and to indicate, with as few irrelevancies as possible, what sort of process makes the two readout counters go round and give the navigator his position fix. The equipment to which the paper refers is the AN/SPN-31 marine Loran C receiver, which was designed and produced by Decca to a U.S. Bureau of Ships specification. Individual makes of Loran C set differ in various ways, but SPN-31 will serve for illustrative purposes.

Some questions affecting the operational value of shipborne radar and on which there is, at the moment, no clear unanimity of view are discussed in this paper.

The best position for the console is discussed in the light of requirements which vary with the different uses to which a shipborne radar can be put. The advantages of a chart comparison unit are also considered and the conclusion is drawn that these can be more economically gained by other methods. In particular the use of P.P.I. photographs is advocated as a method of land echo identification which leaves the chart free for other uses.

In the near future, Spaced-Based Augmentation Systems (such as the Wide Area Augmentation System in North America) will become operational, permitting the use of GPS as a primary system for all phases of flight. Recently the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has recommended the use of un-augmented GPS as a supplemental navigation system for all phases of flight including non-precision approaches. In this paper, the salient features of the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system in India, and the use of conventional navigational aids are described. A new landing procedure is proposed using un-augmented GPS known as ‘a non-precision instrument approach procedure with vertical guidance (IPV)’ for Hyderabad Airport, Runway 27. This procedure, if implemented, would be cost-effective and reliable for many airports in India. An algorithm has also been developed for determining the range and bearing between the departure and the arrival waypoints of an aircraft using the IPV.

IN the course of a systematic search for tables or graphs using the principles appealed to in the Experimental Astronomical Navigation Tables (see p. 333), I examined a copy of the above tables, whose full title follows:

‘Margetts's Horary Tables for shewing by Inspection the Apparent Diurnal Motion of the Sun, Moon and Stars, the Latitude of a Ship and the Azimuth, Time or Altitude corresponding with any Celestial Object.

‘London. Printed for and sold by the Author. “Published as the Act directs 1st July 1790.”’

These tables (or diagrams) do not appear to be well known and they seem to possess sufficient interest to warrant notice. The author's own description is so precise that I can do no better than to repeat it verbatim with a few added notes of explanation. The accompanying photograph, reproduced from the copy in the collection of navigational books and tables in the Admiralty Library by kind permission of the Admiralty Archivist, shows a typical opening of the tables.

I have been unable, in the course of an admittedly hurried and incomplete search, to find any biographical information about Margetts. Perhaps some reader of the Journal can supply the deficiency.

1. Hovercraft Environment. With the exception of the sidewall craft which is unlikely to achieve speeds in excess of 30 knots, all hovercraft depend on their ability to rise clear and free from water drag in order to achieve their high economical speeds. Nevertheless a hovercraft will tend to conform with the surface over which it is travelling. A rough sea produces a rough ride which at speed produces a motion not unlike that of a car going over a series of hump bridges with vertical accelerations in the order of 1½ g—one needs to be strapped into a seat. The most efficient means of propulsion is achieved by using air screws; these are noisy and necessitate crew members using an intercom. Control surfaces, rudder and airscrews are aerodynamic and to reduce air drag the hovercraft is likely to be low in silhouette and give poor all-round vision to the command. The biggest single factor is drift; being aerodynamic and free of water drag, the hovercraft is completely wind borne and in moderate beam winds can track with as much as 45° of drift angle on and turns out of wind can be alarmingly large.

When studying the influence of navigational accuracy on collision risk, operating economy, or traffic organization it is necessary to distinguish between monitored and unmonitored traffic. With the monitored traffic the relative separation between aircraft is detected by the monitor and can be controlled by it. This is a closed-loop concept. With unmonitored traffic the separation is provided by procedural clearance of the flight plan. This is an open-loop concept.

There are two stages in the determination of position from current observations. The observations are first resolved into positional form on the chart and plotted so as to give either a fix or a position line. When more than two position lines are available, some of the information is redundant and a problem exists of determining the most likely fix. In the case of air navigation, the number of position lines seldom exceeds three, and the determination of position in this case has been studied in a previous article.

Heading errors caused by gyroscope drift affect the positioning precision of pedestrian dead reckoning, and these errors are even greater for smartphone-based reckoning. In this study, an optimised improved heuristic drift elimination (O-iHDE) method is proposed to correct the heading errors on a smartphone gyroscope. Based on an analysis of the improved heuristic drift elimination (iHDE) and enhanced improved heuristic drift elimination (E-iHDE) algorithms, the quaternion method is used to update the attitude and angle threshold judgement conditions, and a method for correcting the quaternion is added to eliminate the heading errors caused by random gyro errors. The analysis of multiple sets of experiments shows that the new method improves the ability to discern and correct the walking route, and the heading accuracy is improved by more than 90%, which extends the effective operation time of pedestrian dead reckoning positioning based on the step-by-step system.

(1) In the paper ‘The Avoidance of Collisions for Newtonian Bodies with Hidden Variables’, by B. D. Bramson (vol. 45, p. 55), equation (4.4) should read:

(2) In the paper ‘Quantitative Estimation of Secondary Surveillance Radar Information, by D. J. A. Weeda, L. P. Ligthart, L. R. Nieuwkerk and B. C. M. van der Klein (vol. 45, pp. 26–35), the first initial of the last-named author was given as D instead of B.

On p. 27 line 22, the phrase ‘scans of 32 plots’ should be replaced by ‘scans of 32 numbers of plots’.

On p. 34, the denominator on the right-hand side of equation (12) should be v(v ± Δv) instead of v(vδv).

On p. 35 line 16, ‘air traffic route 1’ should be replaced by ‘air traffic route i’.

The purpose of this paper, which was presented at the seminar on Coastal Navigation described on p. 448, is to consider the role of ‘dead reckoning’ at the present time, in the context of coastal navigation, and to indicate one or two devices which might alleviate the navigator's task in trying conditions and perhaps improve the accuracy of the result.

The new Australian ship reporting system, identifier ‘REEFREP’, will be the core component of a Vessel Traffic Information Service (VTIS) covering the Torres Strait region and the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). It is the first such system to be considered by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) under the terms of the new SOLAS 74 regulation v/8-1, which entered into force on 1 January 1996 and allows for ship reporting systems adopted by the Organization to be made mandatory for all, or certain categories of vessels.

The REEFREP system, planned for implementation on 1 January 1997, extends for some 900 n.m. or about 1500 km along the Queensland coastline. It will be a VHF radio-based system with radars covering three selected focal points in the Torres Strait, off Cairns and in the southern approaches to the inner route. The system will provide a capability for a single Ship Reporting Centre to interact with shipping, enabling the provision of improved information on the presence, movements and patterns of shipping in the area and the ability to respond more quickly to an incident or pollution should this occur.

An interesting feature and a major factor in the system design is the remoteness of most equipment sites and the limited infrastructure available to support communications and data transmission requiring the application of advanced technology and video transmission, solar power generation and software engineering skills of a high order.

Mr. Blake has given us an outline of what is needed in the context of Navigation of Long-Range Subsonic Transports in the 1970's. I now intend to pursue the theme by saying what I think v.l.f. navigation techniques can contribute to the solution of the navigation problem. In particular, I want to talk very briefly about the contributions that we feel v.l.f. might make towards the particular problem of limiting the numbers of aircraft which creep beyond Mr. Blake's navigation tolerance ‘fringe’ in addition to, possibly, by adding navigational information, increasing the effective M.T.B.F. of the total navigation system.

Clearly, addition of equipment cannot reduce M.T.B.F. in the narrow sense of the term—more equipment must have more faults—but if one interprets ‘fault’ as the incidence of a navigation error beyond the specified limit rather than narrowly as an electronic malfunction, I do think that v.l.f. navigation has its contribution to make to effective M.T.B.F.