In light of the recent horrible events off the coast of Italy with the Costa Concordia cruise ship, I began to think about what Satellite AIS could do to possibly prevent such a tragedy in the future.
The development of an application that would allow ship owners to be alerted if any one of their ships entered a cautionary zone (safety or environmental) would be extremely beneficial. Also, as satellite AIS offers global coverage, these alerts would be available for any restricted zone world-wide. The app would be based on the flag/owner providing a list of MMSI numbers and verification that they are entitled to that data. The app would then be able to provide notification when any of the listed ships entered a cautionary area, allowing ship owners to be pro-active.
Allowing ship owners to monitor any given ship’s behaviour and if there were trends in the violations, would ensure that appropriate action could then be taken. Certainly this type of data would enrich training programs and it might also lead to changes in the definition of the cautionary area itself. As the vessel trends may be seasonal, this would again lead to refinements in training and to the cautionary area.
