As for radars being able to keep watch unsupervised, it's hard enough to teach humans to differentiate ships from high seas, let alone teach a computer.
A 'safety' aid which fails to be reliable in bad conditions, is, IMO, not worth having.
And I think this is particularly problematic, in a 'moral hazard' sense, if the "bad conditions" are hard to define in any hard-edged way (as would be the case for technology like this).
If the upsurge of collisions proves to me more than a statistical blip, I wonder if might turn out to be associated with the 'moral hazard' aspect of AIS: namely that it's buggerall good if the other guy doesn't have
his set turned on and working properly.
It's an interesting and perplexing question: an example of 'other reliance' as opposed to 'self reliance'
Of course I realise that
single handers cannot keep watch at all times, but that's nothing new.
I can't thing of another plausible explanation if there does turn out to be a genuine upsurge of these collisions.
For instance it doesn't seem to me the speeds have suddenly jumped sufficiently to account for this upsurge, if the standards of human-supervised watchkeeping have been maintained unchanged.
And I don't think the
fishing fleets are more populous: generally over time the number of ships gets fewer and their size larger...
I guess it's possible the
fishing effort has moved into areas which the preferred routings happens to traverse...
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