Sailors looking at smartphones blamed for surge in ship collisions
Captain Andrew Moll, Britain's chief inspector of marine accidents, said the increased automation of shipping had rendered watch-keeping mind-numbingly dull and led crews to view the shifts as time for rest and relaxation, rather than a vital element of safety.
To make matters worse, a requirement to appoint additional lookouts to aid watch-keepers is often ignored, while some sailors are even deactivating alarms that sound on a regular basis to ensure they are paying attention to computer screens.
Work by the Maritime Accident Investigation Branch (Maib), which scrutinises accidents involving British vessels worldwide and all incidents in UK territorial waters, said waning attention spans on the bridge have been linked with numerous recent disasters.
Those include the collision between the container ship Solong and oil tanker Stena Immaculate off the mouth of the Humber on March 10.
Capt Moll said the Solong, bound for Rotterdam from Grangemouth in Scotland, had been travelling in a straight line on autopilot for around 11 hours in poor visibility when it hit the tanker, killing one seaman and igniting a fire that took two days to extinguish.
The Maib's interim report found that neither ship had a dedicated lookout and said further scrutiny will be given to their watch-keeping practices and 'fatigue management'.
A collision between the British cargo vessel Scot Carrier and the barge Karin Høj, which killed two in 2024, happened after an officer on the former ship was distracted by the continual use of a tablet computer during his watch after earlier consuming alcohol, the Maib found.
Capt Moll said: 'We're seeing more and more cases where a vessel has set off and a watch-keeper has turned up on the bridge, but they are not looking where the ship is going, and as a consequence it runs into something.'
He said there was particular concern about the hundreds of coastal vessels plying crowded UK waters with only two watch-keepers on alternate six-hour shifts.
Under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, each can work for 14 hours a day, five days a week. However, the Maib's research indicates that examples of crew falling asleep are just as prevalent on larger vessels with more officers to share watch-keeping duties. Capt Moll said that indicated a problem intrinsic to the changing nature of the role.
'Chronic boredom'
He said: 'The job itself is not very exciting. If you went back 20 or 30 years, the watch-keeper had to rush around gathering information, and it was an active, busy thing.
'In the engine room they were looking at gauges and temperatures and on the bridge they were taking navigation fixes and plotting them on charts.
'That's now all being done by machines, which has taken away the engagement. Technically speaking, you're talking about chronic boredom and a job that suffers from qualitative and quantitative underload with the result that it lacks meaning and purpose.'
In its annual report on marine safety the Maib said that 'humans do not make good monitors and if under-stimulated they will find other things to occupy themselves'.
Capt Moll said that included listening to music, browsing the internet and making video calls. Other seafarers are essentially flipping their day, spending their breaks gaming and leaving them so exhausted that they fall asleep on the job when they return to the bridge.
An early warning of the trend came in 2013 with a spectacular collision between the UK bulk carrier Seagate and the Timor Stream, a refrigerated-cargo ship, off the Dominican Republic.
Both had been sailing through open water in good visibility yet crashed into each other, with the bow of the Timor Stream ploughing into the engine room and accommodation block of the Seagate, with sleeping crewmen miraculously escaping injury.
The report said that neither watch-keeper had realised that the ships were on a collision course until less than a minute before the accident, blaming poor standards 'driven by complacency'.
While vessels have multiple systems designed to maintain the attention of watch-keepers, those are often poorly understood or regarded as an irritation and deactivated, Capt Moll said.
A Maib report on the collision between the freighter Scot Explorer and gas carrier Happy Falcon in the North Sea in 2023 found that the cargo ship's navigation aids were not being monitored, with its electric chart display system set to silent.
Capt Moll said: 'You can have the equivalent of a dead-man's handle which if you don't set it every 15 minutes it will alert the whole ship, but that's being turned off. Navigational and radar alarms that tell you of an impending danger are being turned off or muted.
'So the watch-keepers aren't engaging with the systems and neither are they using the things that should force them to engage with the systems. That is a significant problem.'
The ultimate solution, he said, may be to require manufacturers to modify warning systems and alarms so that they can never be disabled.
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