Immersion suits are built to keep a person alive in freezing water. In the warm seas of Southeast Asia, the rules allow some ships to leave them off. That single exemption creates more inspection confusion, and more risk, than almost any other item in the life-saving locker.
Two of the most dangerous jobs in the industry are climbing a flare stack and entering a storage tank. A drone can now do the first look on both without a single person leaving the ground, and increasingly the classification societies accept the result.
Class societies accept remote inspection in place of close-up survey, but only from a UR Z17 approved supplier with a surveyor watching live.
For thirty years a tanker faced the same fixed checklist. SIRE 2.0 builds a unique inspection for every vessel, in real time, and puts the crew on trial too.
The 2019 SOLAS deadline forced a fleet-wide swap of lifeboat on-load release hooks. Years on, they still trigger detentions. What inspectors check, and why.
Port State Control detentions in the Asia-Pacific are not random. The same Tokyo MOU deficiency categories detain ships year after year, and knowing them is the difference between a three-hour inspection and a three-day detention.
