An Investigation of Ship Steering Gear Direct and Root Causes

Ship steering failures limit maneuverability and have led to very serious maritime accidents. However, many accident reports on steering failures do not identify direct or root causes. This prevents establishing trends or presenting concrete safety recommendations for the better training of seafarers, improved ship design principles, and maritime policy. This paper reviews accident investigation reports associated with vessel steering systems to assess the percentage of identifiable direct and root causes. Failure effects, modes, scope and type were extracted, in addition to component and subsystem. We discuss the implications and their relevance to major maritime stakeholders, and make recommendations to shipowners, the IMO, and the maritime industry at large.

Keywords: Maritime risk assessment, Accident investigation, Loss of directional control, Reliability analysis, Root cause analysis.