Mentoring - Charting a course: from slide rules to cybersecurity

ON INNOVATION

Tom: When I was starting out, we did all of our calculations by hand, and at university we weren’t allowed to use a slide rule in exams. For me, the biggest innovation was computers. On ships like the QE2 and the Canberra, we could only run one damage calculation, choosing the worst-case pair of compartments and testing that. Our criterion was that if the ship settled with more than 6in of freeboard, she was safe, and we weren’t even looking at waves, only still water. When those two ships went to the South Atlantic in the early 1980s, we were able to use the Royal Navy’s computer in Bath and ran 10 damage conditions. Fast forward to 2010 and the Oasis of the Seas, and we managed 9,600 damage scenarios. That gradual progress was probably our biggest innovation.

Martina: For me, innovation isn’t the computer, it’s AI, and how it can be applied to our industry. Innovation is anything that helps us solve the net-zero challenge, from optimising ships to port call optimisation, and plugging that together with green technologies so that the worldwide fleet can reach its targets. I don’t think a single technology solves this – it will be a mix.

SAFETY VERSUS THE ENVIRONMENT

Tom: What concerns me is that over the past 15 to 20 years, we may have taken our eye off the ball on safety design, in preference to the environment and net zero. I worry we aren’t