How advanced bridge and engine room technology can mask a crew’s readiness gap

Sophisticated onboard systems can compensate for gaps in crew readiness, until conditions change and those gaps become impossible to ignore. This insight explores how digital systems can make competence problems invisible during routine operations, why workarounds become normalised across fleets, and what happens when the mask slips under pressure.

The competence gap is most likely to appear under high-pressure, time-sensitive situations. This includes bridge watchkeeping in congested waters, use of vessel-specific ECDIS settings, cargo operations, machinery troubleshooting, alarm handling, emergency response, handovers, inspections and the use of company-specific reporting systems.

At such moments, competence means knowing what to do when a situation does not fit the standard operating procedure.

For McDonald, competence is built through experience as much as formal training. “You can know how to avoid collisions from scenarios, but when you’re actually in those situations, and you’ve got to make those decisions, that’s another thing,” he said.

High-pressure situations were identified by 56% of survey respondents as a common source of competence gaps. McDonald said: “The digital systems are so good in many ways that they can mask a lack of competence until a point where it becomes critical.”

This dynamic is further complicated when workarounds become the norm on a vessel. If tools do not fit the task, or if systems do not integrate properly, crews can develop informal ways of working. While these workarounds are often practical, they can hide problems in the design process.

Amitvikram Chitnis, Head of Product at Inchcape Shipping Services, explained that technology needs to be built around how work actually happens onboard. “Any system which is designed without keeping the people at the centre never works, because systems are often designed around assumptions rather than operational reality,” he said.

Over time, the gap between documented procedures and actual practice can become difficult for shore teams to see. It is in these circumstances that the relationship between competence and system design is most obvious. If a process relies on individual experience, the vessel’s performance can be compromised. A highly experienced crew member might know how to manage a difficult system, but someone new will not be aware of the workaround, the risks, or when support is needed.

A missed handover point, an unclear alarm, an incomplete familiarisation process, or a misunderstood system output might not cause an isolated incident, but if these recur across vessels and voyages, they create the conditions in which serious incidents become more likely.

These situations are a test of more than just classroom knowledge. They test prioritisation, judgement, communication, confidence, and situational awareness, as well as whether crews understand the systems they are using well enough to recognise when something is wrong.

Mohit Mehrotra, COO, Oil and Tanker Management at Kmarin, noted that accidents and incidents most often occur “wherever there’s a human interface”, especially during connection and disconnection activities. He argued that these events are “predominantly due to the people mishandling” rather than equipment failure, pointing to procedurally intensive, high-risk operations as the moments where gaps in competence are most likely to surface.