This paper formed the 1993 Anderson Memorial Lecture. It was presented by the President at a meeting of the Bristol Channel Branch on Tuesday 10 March. At that time, the second Way Ahead Group (WAG 2) was still sitting. This Group has since reported to Council (see Navigation News, July/August) but the discussion of the future of the Institute is ongoing (see also the following paper).

In his Presidential Address at the 45th Annual General Meeting in October 1991, Norman Dahl gave a thought-provoking discussion of the future of the navigator. He suggested that the navigator's trade is not just a changing trade, but a vanishing one. He proposed then, and subsequently in his 1993 Anderson Memorial Lecture (reproduced as the previous paper in this issue of the Journal), that consideration should be given to the future of navigation, the future of the navigator and the future of the Institute.

In this contribution, papers and addresses over the history of the Institute are examined critically to extract insights into navigation applicable to the present era. These are used to discuss and develop the meanings of the terms ‘navigator’ and ‘navigation’.

In the former USSR, the Radionavigation Service was based on national radio systems without any real employment of foreign navigation aids. Separation of the independent sovereign States from the USSR caused problems in operating separate radionavigation systems (RNS) and resulted in failure to support the economic activity of the States with radionavigation data. Solving the problem for each new State individually seems unrealistic. Its solution can, however, be found through cooperation amongst the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Internavigation Committee therefore suggested an initiative to coordinate these efforts via a new Radionavigation Intergovernmental Advisory Council. This suggestion was approved by the Independent States and the Council has been formed. Also, since operating the RNS in limited national interests seems inefficient, the Internavigation Committee is broadening international cooperation for the integration and joint exploitation of radionavigation systems in the interests of the world radionavigation community.

Europe is moving towards a more closely integrated air traffic management system through the European ATC Harmonization and Integration Programme (EATCHIP). This paper explains the need for such an approach and how it was brought about by capacity limitations in the current European air traffic system. It describes the key strategy of progressive harmonization and integration by the various States, examines the roles of the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), EUROCONTROL and the European Commission in the management of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) development programmes. It also reviews the longer-term planning of a future system with an enhanced relationship between the air and the ground, and addresses the navigation aspects of ATM systems.

Since the advent of large-scale commercial aviation in the mid 1940s, a system of routes has been developed between airports serving the major conurbations of the world. To prevent collision between aircraft using these routes and off-route traffic, protection is provided to the routes and to the vicinity of airports by means of controlled airspace, airways (AWYS), control areas (CTAS) and control zones (CTRS). Zones commence at ground level and the base an area is at a defined altitude. Inside this controlled airspace certain rules apply which are more stringent than those applied outside, and all movements are subject to Air Traffic Control (ATC).

For the travelling public in the late eighties and early nineties, the most disturbing characteristic of air travel must be delays. In Europe, this is certainly the case. These delays not only cause much inconvenience to the air travellers but also generate high costs for the aircraft operators. To a large extent, these delays are due to an imbalance between the air traffic demand and the capacity of the present Air Traffic Control (ATC) system in Europe.

This paper, and the following 5 papers, were presented at the RIN93 Conference on “Orientation and Navigation - Birds, Humans and other Animals.” This took place in Oxford in April, and included some 40 papers. Copies of the complete Proceedings, priced £25 for RIN members and £35 for non-members, are available from the Director.

A model avian compass is formed if magnetite crystals are included among the statoconia loading some of the hair cells in the vestibular system. The magnetite is used as a null detector to detect the direction in which the magnetic couple acting on the magnetic crystal is zero. The location of the north/south plane and the angle between the directions of the gravitational and the magnetic fields are detected at a single site.

According to comprehensive theories of navigation, animals navigate by using two complementary strategies: (1) dead reckoning informs the subject in a continuous manner on its actual location with respect to an Earthbound or absolute coordinate system; while (2) long-term associations between particular landmarks and specific locations allow the animal to find its way within a familiar environment. If the subject structures familiar space as a system of interconnected places – the so-called ‘cognitive map’ – it may know through dead reckoning where it is located on its map and relate its route-based expectations to the actually perceived scenario of local cues.

It is now well established that homing pigeons (Columba livia) use a variety of mechanisms and cues to help them find their way home. It is far more difficult to determine the relative importance attached to such mechanisms and cues by pigeons during homing. As a step towards this quantitative stage in our understanding of homing behaviour we consider if cues contribute significantly to homing speed. In particular we attempt to assess the role of visual landmarks. Using pigeons released from familiar release sites, we demonstrate that birds home faster if they can view their surroundings from inside a Perspex box for 5 minutes prior to being released, compared to birds denied this view. Pigeons released from unfamiliar sites, however, do not show a similar improvement. We suggest that seeing familiar visual landmarks before release allows pigeons to become more certain of their current location with respect to home. Simply viewing the release site is not sufficient to produce a faster homing speed; the pigeons must be able to recognize that the release site is familiar.

Migratory directions of birds have long been assumed to be at least partly ‘innate’ that is, genetically determined. In recent years much progress has been made toward understanding the genetic basis of several components of the orientation system. An important distinction has to be made between a bird's ‘knowledge’ of which direction to migrate, and its ability to use certain compass systems to find this intended direction. Both processes, establishing an intended direction and the subsequent compass orientation, have a partly genetic basis. The present review will be concerned only with the first of these processes, and the way it allows evolutionary changes of migratory routes to occur.

Over the last two decades, my colleagues and I have sailed a modern reconstruction of a Polynesian voyaging canoe some 40 000 nautical miles through Polynesian waters. This programme has been driven by two intertwined goals: one experimental – to test the sailing technology and navigational methods of the ancient Polynesians in order to resolve issues in Polynesian prehistory; and the other cultural – to enable contemporary Polynesians to relearn the means by which their ancestors found and settled their islands, and thereby gain a better sense of their uniquely maritime heritage and, ultimately, themselves. This paper focuses on the effort to rediscover how to navigate without instruments, and how that rediscovery is helping both to change scientific thinking about the colonization of Polynesia and to transform the selfimage of contemporary Polynesians.

This paper is based on one presented by the author at the Maritime Technology 21st Century Conference held at the University of Melbourne in November 1992.

It is probable that Congress will require oceangoing ships in US ports to use Differential GPS (DGPS) and electronic charts once DGPS is available on all coasts of the US, which is currently scheduled for completion by the end of 1996. The type of electronic chart currently envisaged, the Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) under development by the IMO & IHO, is unsuitable for those ports which are entered through long dredged channels – a category that includes Houston, Gramercy and New Orleans, the three ports which handled the most foreign tonnage in 1991. A different type of electronic chart has been in daily use in such channels, with microwave positioning, since 1984; the combination of DGPS with such a software package has been called an Electronic Navigation System (ENS) and differs from ECDIS in that the ENS is designed to supplement the published chart, not replace it. The paper suggests that the utility of ECDIS would be enhanced if its specifications were modified to allow the entry of the data files used by the ENS, thus giving ECDIS a similar capability for blind navigation in confined waters. Standardization of the current data format would also permit alternative versions of ENS to be developed.

Civil aviation authorities have a requirement for the application of devices which are capable of determining the geometric height of aircraft above flight level 290 with a high degree of precision. These devices, called height monitoring units (HMUS), should pave the way for a safe and expeditious introduction of reduced vertical separation of 1000 ft above flight level 290.

In this paper the design philosophy as well as the prototype development of such a device, which is called the dual-synchronized autonomous monitoring system (DAMS), are outlined. This device operates fully independently of any airborne equipment such as secondary surveillance radar transponders.

The configuration basically consists of two standard marine radars with both axes of revolution situated in a horizontal plane. With this configuration it is possible to determine the trajectory of an aircraft and, in particular, the geometrical height above ground level within typical radar slant range coverage of some 18 km. The basic application of this equipment will be in the field of height monitoring of aircraft targets in environments with reduced vertical separation standards of 1000 ft above flight level 290, but a wider application of this concept is foreseen for local precision tracking of aircraft targets.

The ship domain is a very important and useful concept in marine traffic engineering. It has been widely used in traffic simulation models, for encounter criteria, traffic lane design criteria, VTS planning, risk assessment, collision avoidance, and for other applications.

Dr Y. Fujii, Dr E. M. Goodwin and Dr T. G. Coldwell have done a lot of work on this subject. The differences between their ship domain concepts are described in the second part of this paper. In the third part, the authors have used a new branch of social psychology – the theory of Proxemics – to analyse the factors which affect the ship domain, and point out that the basis of producing ship domains is in the field of Proxemics. Finally, in the fourth part of this paper, some problems in ship domains are analysed.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a cheap, accurate (±100 m), satellite-based position fixing system. These qualities suggest that it might be used in the identification of marine radar targets. The first application of such a system on any scale will probably be as part of a Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) and here GPS would seem to be ideally suited. Vessels entering the VTS control zone would need to be fitted with GPS interfaced with either a dedicated VHF receiver or a ‘guard’ channel on their normal receiver A VTS radar operator needing to identify an echo would work out the echo's position from the radar range and bearing and transmit that position as the interrogating signal. Only the vessel in the control zone with that position (derived from its GPS interface) would respond with its identity. There would thus be no possibility of interference between responses or garbling that can be a problem in interrogation systems based on secondary radar. Even if the VTS had several radars, these could easily be synchronized to prevent simultaneous interrogations. However, outside VTS zones there is a clear need for a universal identification system that would allow any ship to identify any other. It would be unfortunate and wasteful if a system developed for VTS was found to be unsuitable for this general application. This note will therefore discuss the adequacy of GPS as the basis of a universal marine identification system.

There was an error in Mr Richard Trim's paper, ‘Some causes of problems in the observation of standard racon marine beacons when observed by means of standard marine navigation radars’, which was published in the May 1993 issue of the Journal of Navigation. Section 3, paragraph 4 of page 276 should read:

‘A third and very important cause of radar received-signal differentiation arises if a widely used form of automatic anti-sea-clutter processing is employed, since part of this processing is to differentiate the radar-received video so as to remove the d.c. term in the sea clutter echoes as part of the Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) processing. When such automatic sea clutter supression facilities are in operation, the gain level applied to the radar receiver video amplifier has an adaptive signal superimposed upon it which, while slow acting, generally follows the shape of the clutter returns on the received signal video, while being largely unaffected by the wanted echo returns such as those from ships, navigation marks, coastlines, etc. This effect may be reduced in the case of the very latest radar designs’.