by Nick Lee, T&TC Chairman, UK Pilots - published on 4 February 2020
Personal Locator Beacons (PLB) and other individual MOB devices have been available for some years now and have evolved to incorporate a variety of different alerting methods and combinations. However, usage of these additional enhancements within UK Pilotage is still in its infancy.
Some pilots have already lost their lives because of this non-compliant construction. We don't want to see such an arrangement again. Here is a latest video from the Middle East.
Exemplary manoeuvre: The pilot should always walk on the side of the pilot boat facing away from the vessel. This prevents the pilot from being trapped between the two vessels in the event of a fall into the water.
Weatherdock demonstrates how easy the AIS MOB easyONE could be fittetd into your given automatic lifejacket and how the emergency transmitter is triggered automatically in case of emergency.
The scope of this report covers a twenty-year period between 1999 and 2019 in which there were 1,046 such recorded incidents and where each incident gave rise to P&I liabilities in excess of US$100,000.