Northrop Grumman has been awarded type approval by the US Coast Guard for the Sperry Marine VoyageMaster II Simplified Voyage Data Recorder (S-VDR), one of many such units now available on the market.
The S-VDR is a simplified version of the Voyage Data Recorder (VDR), which is currently required for all new ships constructed since 2002. The S-VDR standard was adopted by the IMO to provide for retrofitting recorders on older ships, many of which were built with older analog devices that cannot easily be interfaced to the VDR.
The S-VDR carriage requirement applies to all cargo ships constructed before 1 July 2002 and larger than 20,000 gross tons as of July 1, 2006, and will be extended to smaller ships from 3,000-20,000 gross tons on 1 July 2007. Similarly the VDR carriage requirements apply to ships, other than passenger ships, of 3,000 gross tonnage and upwards constructed on or after 1 July 2002. Thus it applies to the largest fishing vessels only, but is of vital importance to all.
With too many cases of large vessels colliding with small fishing vessels, the ability to recover crucial information on both vessels – from radar tracks, course and speed data – can prove vital in determining what happened.
