Depending on who you ask, AIS is a godsend or "the uniformly crappiest of all equipment"
By Ryan Skinner (email)
Two stories published yesterday give starkly contrasting views of AIS. One is an excellent exercise in PR by a Dutch company, which is eager to make the case for AIS as a voyage planning tool. The other is a diatribe against poor bridge planning and AIS as a clunky addition to a confusing picture for navigators.
BBC News carried news from Dutch firm Royal Dirkzwager, which has begun using AIS signals to help ports, cargo handling companies and maintenance companies streamline the port visits of incoming ships. By tracking a ship via satellite and mapping that against berth availability, both ship and port can optimize their schedules - speed up, slow down, seek alternatives, etc.
The Bills of Lading blog brings another experience of AIS - this one from the bridge. Here a blogger named Velu, presumably on the bridge team of a large tanker somewhere, rails against the inutility of the AIS in general, and the bridge planners who wired the AIS into the ECDIS instead of the radar. "A few years back, one of the nightmares of the ship's master was that the duty officer wouldn't even look outside because of the radar. Now because of AIS feeds into the ECDIS, the chap isn't even going to look at the radar!"
I've also heard complaints that AIS signals make it easy for pirates to find merchant ships. Still other officers have told me directly that they find AIS very useful, as a means of mouse-over queries of targets on the map.
What's your opinion of AIS?