Black Box or Black hole?

By Andrew Guest
Patience and resourcefulness, two of the main attributes required of marine accident investigators, are being tested to the limit.

They can handle many things in their line of work – crawling around in dirty and dangerous spaces, extracting information from suspicious or scared seafarers and handling aggressive legal representatives – without complaining too loudly.

One thing, however, that is increasingly causing these quietly determined detectives to make their feelings known is the “black box”, known more prosaically as the voyage data recorder (VDR). When this box of tricks was adopted by shipping from aviation it was seen as an invaluable tool in getting to the bottom of why things had gone wrong – sometimes very badly.

Of course, like many other things, the reality has often proved to be far different from the promise and the black box turns out to be a black hole. Instead of a wealth of data from the ship’s equipment and recordings of what was happening on the bridge at the time, the VDR offers nothing but silence or static.

In the latest example of the frustration no doubt shared by others, including lawyers, German investigators have reported in length and in great technical detail their experience with a malfunctioning VDR on the containership Chicago Express after a fatal accident.

The frustration, as the VDR was put through various diagnostic tests, was heightened when at one point they were falsely lead to believe the black-box data could be retrieved.

Given that this was not the first time they had been, if not thwarted, hampered by VDR failure (they cite four other cases, the most recent being the collision between the containership Hanjin Gothenburg and the bulker Chang Tong in September 2007), it is not surprising they have given vent to their feelings.

Accepting that early teething problems are understandable, they say, “However, after more than five years of technological development and optimisation, we cannot understand how it is possible for a VDR system to fail in terms of both software and hardware to the extent seen here”.

An unsuccessful attempt to rectify the problem with the containership’s VDR before the incident in September 2008 was, the report from the Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation (BSU) says, “an example that evidently even highly trained staff are not always readily familiar with the full functionality of the system on site”.