Final Issue but ever Alert!

It is appropriate and my pleasure to start by recognising the originators of the Institute’s Human Element Project, Julian Parker and Vaughan Pomeroy, and the crucial funding provided by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation over the past 12 years.

It is appropriate and my pleasure to start by recognising the originators of the Institute’s Human Element Project, Julian Parker and Vaughan Pomeroy, and the crucial funding provided by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation over the past 12 years. The Institute has always sought to raise awareness of issues affecting the industry, often before they are in the collective consciousness, and to be supported by a like-minded organisation with the stature of Lloyd’s Register in this project was the key in also providing solutions to the issues identified.

We are most grateful to the contributors to the project over the years and to our dedicated Editor. In page 6 of this Issue, Thimio Mitropoulos rightly questions why the Alert! bulletin is ending now when there is so much still to do to embed the application of Human Element principles in all the industry does and strive for further improvements in safe and efficient operations. The answer is that this final Bulletin is by no means the end of the Human Element Project, just the end of the beginning.

The body of knowledge compiled will be maintained and can be added to in the website, www.he-alert.org, which The Nautical Institute will maintain and we will continue to use this material in all our work going forward. In this respect, we are particularly grateful to Harriet Myles at the University of Southampton for compiling the Alert! Index in such a user friendly style, and

for her pertinent paper Human Element in Ship Design to help educate many in the industry (see Page 8 of this Issue).

It is now up to all of us to ensure that the Human Element remains the focus of attention in ship design and operation for the current and future generations of practitioners. The legacy of the Alert! material in hardcopy and website libraries, including videos, is there to be used. We are confident that it will influence and help the next generation as it is already doing so in our recent book Human Performance and Limitation for Mariners and The Navigator series.

Human Performance and Limitation for Mariners,
a Nautical Institute publication, ISBN: 978 1 906915 34 6,
Available for puchase in The Nautical Institute Bookshop

The Navigator series, downloadable here