Star Cruises wins safety and environment award at the Lloyds List-SMM 2002 Awards in Hamburg, Germany

Star Cruises has won an award for its Nautical Learning Event Report ("NLER") under the Safety and Environment category at the recent Lloyd's List-SMM 2002 Awards held in Hamburg, Germany.

"We are delighted with this award which serves as a shining testimony to Star Cruises' commitment and goal to be the safest cruise line in the world. Safety is paramount at Star Cruises and this award is a great encouragement to all of us," said Mr. Nils Nordh, Star Cruises Executive Vice President of Marine Operations and Newbuilding who accepted the award on behalf of Star Cruises.

The Nautical Learning Event Report ("NLER") developed by Star Cruises is a result of adopting a human factors-based Reason safety management model (based on the model by James Reason) that is on par with the most advanced systems used by airlines. This model relies on a proactive approach to safety and establishing a safety culture that is based on an informed organisation.

In developing the NLER, Star Cruises has used new technologies principally Voyage Data Recorder ("VDR") delivered by Consilium Navigation AB to elevate the level of sophistication and established a process to ensure that incidents recorded onboard by the VDR are thoroughly analysed by the Bridge Teams of the fleet. The objective of the NLER process is to ensure that correct lessons are learned from an incident and objective changes made to operational procedures if necessary.

"The capability to record, retrieve and analyse real incidents and recreating incidents in Star Cruises Ship Simulator located at Port Klang, enables the Bridge Teams to fine tune their skills and learn both from errors and positive examples where difficult situations have been handled skillfully," said Capt. Gustaf Gronberg, Star Cruises Vice President of Nautical and Fleet Captain.

"The use of scenarios of actual incidents is a watershed in simulator training and raises the effectiveness and impact of this training to a new level. To further enhance realism, the Star Cruises Ship Simulator has a feature that enables synchronisation and correlation of the VDR output with the visual database of the port in which the incident took place," added Capt. Gustaf.