Thursday, 19 November 2009 04:34
The pressure from some ship owners to consider shortening training time for watch officers prompted Jean-Pierre Clostermann, manager of ship handling simulation at the Le Havre Merchant Marine Academy in France, to bring objective, experimental results into the debate about how much simulators can replace at-sea experience.A rough trade could be one week on the simulator for six weeks at sea but Mr Clostermann warns that similar attempts made in civil aviation were quickly found to be dangerous.
“If we go too much in that direction, we will have experts at handling very risky situations but these people will not even recognise when this situation is about to occur,” he says.
During an experiment with 90 cadets on a ship simulator, one third of the trainees performed an illegal and unsafe manoeuvre, even though they knew the appropriate rules perfectly.
This led him to the development of decision games where teams evaluate a situation and actively discuss and review their decision-making processes.
While the games helped to improve the results of the collision avoidance simulation for another group of 81 cadets, they did not eliminate the difference in competence demonstrated by cadets who had experience involving similar vessel types at sea.
According to Mr Clostermann, a simulator cannot compete with normal life at sea when it comes to accumulating ordinary non-event situations where an officer learns to do the routine things that enhance situational awareness until it becomes an automatic part of their thinking.
This in turn leads to the ability to recognise the difference between a potentially dangerous situation and a normal one.
Central to building a proper situational awareness is the recognition of a generic “pattern” , derived from former encounters with similar situations, called “pattern matching” , says Mr Clostermann.
“To be able to use that specific decision making skill, a person needs a good data bank of real life experience. If the bank is not big enough, they may not recognise at once the situation and its demands.
“You learn by sailing a ship in normal conditions, without any danger, because you deepen your skills doing things without thinking about them. You cannot do this in just a few hours on the simulator. Training means repetition just like an athlete trains by running a few hours every day, all week long and all year long.”
This limitation in learning potential is not a function of simulator realism and simulator training is certainly valuable.
“Mainly what we do on the simulator is check that the knowledge is there and that the trainee has started the process of turning knowledge into skill. We also push the trainees to their limits because we can provide some very difficult situations without threatening their lives.”
Mr Clostermann, a former seafarer himself, says there is no real alternative to seagoing experience.
“Nevertheless, if we want to improve the skills of the cadets faster, the studies at management level could be focused on mastering a specific seatrade (liquid bulk, offshore support, passenger vessels, cable lying, etc.), just as the aviation industry offers type ratings for specific aircraft. This could also prevent us from training our cadets to be future jacks-of-all-trades.”
Wendy Laursen