Safship master Nick Cooper slammed the operation of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System convention at GMDSS Conference held in Plymouth, UK, last week. Capt Cooper said the system of automated distress calls using Digital Selective Calling was "almost totally unworkable, impractical and unreliable". He said a combination of false alarms and badly designed equipment was causing dangerous situations on bridges and could lead to collisions or groundings by distracting ship's officers from navigational duties.

Capt Cooper was the most outspoken critic of GMDSS. But most other speakers reported major problems with the system, which is based on now-outdated technology, including a very high incidence of false alarms, slow implementation of the system with many ships unlikely to meet the February 1999 deadline and only a handful of countries, mainly in northern Europe, having acted to implement GMDSS effectively.