⊗

One of the biggest mysteries in aviation, the disappearance of Malaysian airliner MH370, happened nearly 10 years ago, but it is still spawning headlines, Netflix documentaries, and all manner of conjecture. While there are many sunken ships yet to be found, vanishing off the map is something that happens daily in shipping. In today's high-tech world, tracking a seized ship or those in the rapidly growing shadow fleet remains a significant headache for authorities and the sector alike. Earlier this month, a Singaporean-flagged chemical/products tanker, Success 9, was boarded by pirates off the Ivory Coast and disappeared for several days, just as many ships before it in the third decade of the 21st century, where we can trace almost anything from shipments to phones to animals. When hijackers get access to a ship's bridge, the first thing they do is deactivate the ship's standard satellite communications / GNSS-PNT systems and AIS, preventing the ship from being detected and tracked via those systems. "It’s not a new phenomenon. Taking the vessel dark is perfectly understandable in the circumstances. If you’re going to abduct its crew and or steal its cargo, then you don’t want to be tracked or located while you’re doing it," explains James Wilkes, managing director of UK security consultancy Gray Page. The paramount solution would be global tracking by space-based sensors that are not beholden to signal transmission Head of maritime safety consultancy Dryad Global, Corey Ranslem, who spent eight years with the US Coast Guard, says it is actually very easy for a vessel to disappear, and unlike aviation, once its AIS is manipulated or turned off, it is actually very difficult to find it even with multiple aircraft and other vessels assisting in a known search area. "The ocean is so vast that you can easily hide a vessel almost anywhere in the world. You can try and track a vessel via satellite, but that is also difficult to do as there aren’t live satellites always watching the entire surface of the oceans," he says. Nonetheless, the most recent hijacking episodes in the Gulf of Guinea raise the question of why they had not been relocated much sooner after their AIS and/or long-range identification and tracking (LRIT) signals were lost. Jakob Larsen, head of maritime safety and security at BIMCO, tells Splash Extra that this takes place because surveillance resources allocated to the search have either not been allocated in a timely fashion, have been insufficient, or have not been allocated in an appropriate way. "In a case where a ship goes missing and a pirate attack is feared, it is essential to quickly initiate a search around the last known position of the ship. Pirates are known to keep the ship moving, and after only a few hours, the ship can potentially have moved many miles from its position, making it much more difficult to relocate it," he says. Larsen points out that reacting quickly requires airborne assets, but that in cases such as the Gulf of Guinea, capable assets are often not available with sufficiently short notice and, in most cases, are simply not effectively deployed in a timely fashion. He also stresses the tendency in this region to "turn a blind eye" to crimes to minimise risk of trouble with law enforcement agencies, since trust in regional law enforcement agencies is limited. "This should come as no surprise,” he adds "There are multiple reports of involvement of law enforcement agencies in illicit activities, and some law enforcement agencies in the region dish out enormous fines if they can get away with it." For Wilkes, finding hijacked ships is an easily solvable problem. In fact, it had already been solved years ago with a GNSS-PNT sensor and transceiver located covertly on a ship, operating entirely independently of the ship’s standard satellite communications / GNSS-PNT systems and AIS, for the sole purpose of locating and tracking a ship if its signals are lost. Some ships carry them, some don’t, he says, adding that this option is at the discretion of the ship operator/manager and their approach to security and safety. "There are of course some operators who are simply biased against the costs of carrying an additional sensor/transceiver, albeit the costs are quite low nowadays," Wilkes notes. Shadow fleet Authorities worldwide are attempting to keep tabs on the rapidly expanding shadow fleet (or dark fleet) of ships moving oil and oil products to and from sanctioned countries such as Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The fleet is mostly comprised of old ships that keep a low profile by sailing without insurance, turning off transmitters, faking documentation, or just painting over a name. “Most of the time ships are good actors that broadcast high-quality and accurate AIS data. However, bad actors may purposefully falsify their AIS data or omit broadcasting AIS altogether to avoid having their activities shown in plain sight. The saying 'where there's a will, there's a way' couldn't be more true in this context, whereby bad actors seem to be applying more and more sophisticated techniques to mask behaviours,” finds Taylor Nicholls, director of maritime product management, government at space-based maritime data firm Spire Global. Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, says that most of the vessels his platform sees lifting Venezuelan and Iranian oil are spoofing over AIS to show that they are in a completely different geography by pumping out false LAT/LON coordinates while keeping the AIS transponder on. "We'd see a VLCC pinging over AIS either in the Riau archipelago northeast of Singapore or off the coast of Angola, but it is actually in Venezuela because we have both satellite and shoreside imagery to prove it. We have even recorded large quantities of oil leaving Russia in such a manner since late December," he says without going into any further details. In late March, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) was made aware of the dark fleet activities of between 300 and 600 tankers engaged in dangerous ship-to-ship transfers in the open ocean, as well as the methods used to obscure ship identities and turn off AIS transponders. High-risk operations were identified undermining the international regime in terms of maritime safety, environmental protection, and liability, and compensation needed to be addressed immediately. BIMCO’s Larsen finds that when it comes to tracking the dark fleet, the fact that its location is not publicly known is probably more a question of insufficient resource allocation and an element of confidentiality about tracking capabilities of law enforcement agencies. "I would be surprised if these ships were not being tracked by law enforcement agencies relying on various active and passive sensors on seaborne, airborne, and space-based platforms," he asserts, but goes on to say that tasking such high-tech sensors is costly and resources are limited; "Hence, the dark fleet is still allowed to move around covertly, or at least more or less outside the public eye. It will probably require a change of priorities to keep track of all the ships of the dark fleet. " The issue of ships operating in dark trades is different from ships going missing when they are hijacked, notes Wilkes, adding that if someone uses AIS to track or keep a watch on ships, then because it can be switched off on the bridge, it’s easy for ships to disappear from public view. It is debated if AIS is the appropriate technology for tracking/watching ships in the public domain by the public. "AIS was conceived for the purposes of collision avoidance at sea, between ships and other craft. It has been exploited for tracking purposes because it was so easy to do so. No one seemed to ask whether it was right to do so," Wilkes points out. To prevent ships operating in grey areas, Wilkes suggests having the LRIT system mandated by the IMO under SOLAS on ships over 300 gt. Basically, LRIT functions on standard shipborne satellite communications using a GNSS such as GPS, transmitting the ship’s LRIT information every six hours to the ship’s flag administration. Ships should not switch off their LRIT systems, but they do, raising the question: what action do flag administrations take when ships switch off their LRIT system? "The answer, broadly speaking, is that flag administrations take very little action against ships that switch off their LRIT systems. Hence, there are a huge number of ships operating around the world unseen,” says Wilkes. If flag administrations or contracting governments to SOLAS do not enforce the regulations they have put in place against the ships in breach of compliance with their LRIT system obligations, then it’s not possible to counter the growth of the grey trade fleets, Wilkes argues. Spire's Nicholls agrees with BIMCO's Larsen that the capacity to quickly discover a missing vessel depends on the amount of money and resources put into the search for ships that are operating in the dark, hijacked, or have lost engines and electricity. “In the absence of any form of signal emitted by a ship, the only means to follow dark ships are through localised imagery sources or by having another ship, airplane, or helicopter watch the suspected region of the missing vessel in order to physically intercept it,” he says, noting that disadvantages of these techniques are that they are frequently expensive, cannot be performed in real-time, have a limited coverage area, and are prone to empty captures/intercepts if forecasting algorithms do not have a good estimate of where the dark ship is. “Ultimately, the paramount solution would be global tracking by space-based sensors that are not beholden to signal transmission,” Nicholls concludes.

Shipping’s MH370 syndrome

How is it that ships can disappear so regularly despite all the tech at our disposal these days?

⊗

To continue reading, please login below or subscribe here.

Splash

Read Next

Owners advised to cash in

Measuring shipping hubs

April 2024 Review

The on/off risk premium for tankers

Curse of the dry cargo optimist

Owners advised to cash in

Measuring shipping hubs

April 2024 Review

The on/off risk premium for tankers

Curse of the dry cargo optimist

Maritime CEO Forum Singapore

Maritime CEO Forum Monaco

Advertising

Press Releases

Splash

Splash Extra

Splash Special Reports