Marine-Pilots.com celebrates its first anniversary these days!

International Marine pilot platform for information and knowledge exchange an acute necessity.

Editor's note by Frank Diegel

A Marine pilot would like to obtain information and further training on specific topics, would like to be informed promptly about current news and events and would like to exchange experiences and opinions with colleagues, not only from within his own organisation, but also across national and organisational borders. I for one, would like to find everything in ONE place.

The existing national and international structures, social media channels or the well- known maritime publications cannot meet all of the above needs. Large pilot organisations, for example, have a rather political mission and are not a maritime online magazine that reports daily about this and that down to the last corner of the world. News streams in social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others are often up to date and fast, but the information is usually neither edited nor checked for truthfulness.Therefore the information "runs" through the news stream and after a few hours it has disappeared from the visible area and is therefore lost. The information does not remain there permanently. The common maritime online magazines only have a very small amount of pilot-specific content.

The importance of information exchange
The importance of exchange of information within Marine Pilots and their connected offices cannot be overemphasised. The world data on Marine Pilot is very scanty and the pilotage activity is also quite fragmented. The silos of Pilotage operations contained within port, are stand alone and hardly any incidences, near misses are shared with outside world. Hence the learnings from near misses are not captured and percolated outside the port for others to learn from someone else's mistakes.

If you study the trend in the pilotage accident, you will see a repetition of the same mistakes and so are the defects on board wrt Pilot ladders. There is immense need to curb this and collect various near misses as well as Incident reports so that we have ample data to analyse the things and this also can be shared across countries, MOUs and other organisations.

The idea of Marine-Pilots.com

Therefore, more than a year ago, I decided to found my own pilot portal with Marine- Pilots.com, which aggregates the many individual information islands on the internet and can serve as a central source of information for pilots. As a first step, our team has tried to "measure" the international pilot world, whether non-profit or commercially organised, in its entirety and to record and make visible as many organisations and companies offering pilot services as possible.To date we have collected more than 600 profiles from 120 countries around the world. We welcome any feedback, which will further complete this database for pilots. A tremendous Sisyphean task!

Central part of the portal is the collection of pilot-specific content, be it articles, news or even videos. All sorted by topicality and topics. Individual pilots have the opportunity to publish their opinions, experience and expertise in articles and make them available to a wide audience. A large part of the specialist articles come from the pilots themselves and are almost always truly unique content! The articles are discussed by the large community and the content is further distributed. Unlike social media, however, this information remains available in the long term, thus creating an ever-growing library of expertise and information for the world of pilots.

It is the first birthday of Marine-Pilots.com!
Marine-Pilots.com is celebrating its first birthday these days and we are surprised by the very positive feedback. We have achieved great relevance and acceptance in a short period of time and are used by many pilots to inform about their job. Only with the participation of the individual pilot in the large pilot community the amount of information continues to grow. I hereby invite everyone to participate!

Note from AIMPA President Capt. Gajanan Karanjikar

Very well elaborated Frank, we need to have that platform urgently and AIMPA is proud of the work Marine-Pilots.com is doing. The sharing of knowledge has no longer remained a virtue but is denitely a necessity in today's times of advanced technology. We need to have collective efforts on this from all organisations like CHIRP etc that are doing fantastic job for Maritime safety. AIMPA is also poised to take Indian Port Harbour front matters and safety of Navigation under its ambit to enhance and contribute to marine pilots, persons and port safety.