I am honoured that the Royal Institute of Navigation has invited me to give the E. G. R. Taylor lecture for 1992. These lectures, held annually, were funded by well-wishes in various societies to celebrate Professor Eva Taylor's 80th birthday. As a scholar, Professor Taylor moved in many spheres. I have chosen a subject which seems appropriate to her pioneering work in the history of navigation and the marine sciences.

The unexpected commercial success of electronic charting systems has put an unusual pressure on the regulatory organizations to come up with some accepted international standard for this new technology. Unfortunately, the scope of this issue is far-reaching and touches the most sensitive nerves of maritime tradition and culture. This cumbersome legacy was noticeable from the very first US RTCM meetings on the subject and has conditioned the development of recommendations ever since.

This paper, written by an outsider, tries to look at the whole issue with an unprejudiced eye, arriving at a conclusion which casts heavy doubts on the wisdom of the current course and which advocates a different approach to take advantage of the incredibly powerful potential of this new technology – a technology which could radically change the rules and laws of commercial navigation to the benefit of safety and economy.

The development of an electronic system which can be used for navigating water-borne craft has been going on for well over two decades. In fact, various digital representations of navigational maps have been in use since the concept of computers. The word ‘map’ is intentional, for in some cases, apart from the land outline and some navigational marks, they bore little resemblance to the paper navigational chart.

At the present day European ATC is exercised by a multiplicity of more-or-less autonomous control centres. ‘Flow Regulation’ is used roughly to match traffic demand to the capacity of the en-route ATC and of the destination airport. The ATC authority at the point of departure for a remote destination cannot however give any guarantee that the pilot will be able to follow his chosen trajectory. The filed flight plan and the departure clearance have been described as a ‘licence to get into the sky and see what happens’.

Anthropologists tell us that over 500000000 years ago the seas swarmed with some type of marine life and that during the Devonian period of 350 0000 000 years ago we could find the first species of monk fish that is now in high demand on the fish market place and sought after in strange hostile waters by European fishermen. The sharks were introduced to the planet at about this time and until this day have had the reputation of being the ocean's most voracious predators.

To ensure integrity of the Loran-C radionavigation system during non-precision approaches, an automatic blinking system notifies the user when the system is not functioning within specifications. To be certain that timely detection of this blinking can be guaranteed, one of the requirements imposed on an airborne Loran-C receiver is that it should flag an alert when the signal to noise ratio drops below –6 . This paper addresses some blinking detection methods, that will ensure safe operation beyond this –6 dB limit. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Wild Goose Conference in Birmingham, August 1992.

Weather routeing of ships has taken roughly three chronological steps. Originally, seasonal climatological weather charts, bearing little resemblance to actual conditions, gave standard routes. This somewhat passive activity was superseded by the measurement and subsequent forecasting of atmospheric and oceanographic data. Weather routeing became more complex as telex and radio facsimile routeing messages could be regularly transmitted to the ship. This form of routeing is still operational; masters can obtain radio facsimile sea and pressure charts and perform their own routeing, or employ specialist organizations which transmit the relevant routeing advice.

A realistic runway capacity study for two major airports, namely Frankfurt (EDDF) and Chicago O'Hare (ORD) is presented, assessing the effect of optimal scheduling on the runway capacity and air traffic delays. The maximum position shift (MPS) runway scheduling algorithm, used in the study, was developed by Trivizas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987).

EDDF is studied in the context of 160 major European airports, with a real traffic sample from 6 July, 1990. ORD is studied in the context of 26 major US airports using a large traffic sample from 1 March, 1989. Secondary airport traffic has been assigned to the geographically nearest major hub and time compression has been used to extrapolate to an artificially denser scenario.

The results show that optimal scheduling can bring about capacity improvements of the order of 20 percent, which in turn reduce delays up to 70 percent. These results are the product of a dynamic traffic management process which has been visually validated by observing animated runway operations and monitor functions.

The study has been conducted with TMSIM, a comprehensive, object-oriented simulation tool that allows one to build an understanding of the structure and functionality of the air traffic control system, by modelling its components, their functionality and interactions, and measuring component and system performance. It features interactive route network editing (using menu/mouse techniques), complete route and airport structure modelling, independent flight and ATC objects, 3-D animation, advanced algorithms for scheduling, routeing, flow management, airspace restructuring (sectorization) and performance (capacity and communications workload) analysis.