Accept every finding, however small
Fewer observations is the right goal for PSC, SIRE and RISQ. Internally the aim is different: accept every finding, however small, and fix it. The ship and the office are on the same side.
Capt. Gaurav Khanna
Capt. Gaurav Khanna is a Master Mariner, the founder of VragaMarine and the editor of Maritime Dossier. He spent 18 years at sea on product tankers and crude carriers, trading the Persian Gulf, the North Sea and the Baltic, before coming ashore in 2013.
He then spent 13 years ashore with a Japanese ship management company, rising to Senior Deputy General Manager and Branch Head, with responsibility for fleet safety, vetting performance and SMS compliance across tanker fleets. In 2021 he founded VragaMarine, a maritime safety consultancy focused on what is actually happening on board rather than what the paperwork says.
Capt. Khanna is a Lead Auditor, Navigation Assessor and VDR Data Analyser.
Nobody thanks the HSE department for the accident that didn’t happen
A quiet HSE department is not an idle one: its work is what makes nothing happen. Why a quiet year is not proof of safety, and why quiet times are when the guard should stay up.
When the whole fleet skips the step, the procedure is the finding
If one crew skips a step, ask about the crew. If every crew skips it, ask about the procedure. What desire paths teach ship managers about non-compliance.
You can’t train your way out of human error
Training narrows how people work; learning means something changes afterwards. Why ship managers can't rely on trained crews alone, and how to investigate so systems get fixed.
CLUE: a first look at DNV’s new incident taxonomy
DNV and Equinor’s new CLUE taxonomy replaces “causes” with 26 neutral contributing factors. What it changes, what it hasn’t yet proven, and what ship managers can test without adopting anything.