Abstract:

Maritime casualties have served for speed up the reforms within the international maritime community. Their causes have been and are deeply studied so that the seafarers can take steps to avoid these accidents. Existing international conventions, serving as a rule to govern the nautical subjects, have been created and improved based on the research of these accidents. Even the current safety code (International Safety Management Code) implanted in merchant vessels extend the investigation of the causes not only to the accidents but to the near misses, that is to say the causes are what it is really important and not the consequences.
In this way, the approach to these maritime casualties can serve in nautical training for generating a focus from which it comes up different knowledge, in the same way than the conventions. Without going any further, the "Titanic" was the trigger for the first convention of safety in navigation that has served to improve the nautical knowledge concerning the watertight compartments, maritime communications, etc. Thus the marine education may be more explicit if it comes up from a known casuality and, at the end of the investigation, the student would need to know basic subjects as mathematical or physical to understand what happened. The cognitive capacity is greater if knowledge comes up from the own ship or from the environment rather than basic subjects.
In this way, the training of some nautical subjects starts usually from basics of mathematical, physical, chemical, etcetera and the student finds difficulties of the application of these basic subjects on the ship. For example, it is easier for the student to learn about buoyancy if your first contact is the sinking of the Titanic rather than the Archimedes principle. Moreover nautical knowledge is not based only on the ship but on the sea voyage. Therefore, different casualties may occurred along all phases of sea passage, since the shipment of the goods or the passage aboard up to their landing, including the previous and subsequent stages of the haulage of goods from the warehouse to the vessel and from the vessel to the warehouse.
The sea voyage includes knowledge of navigation, meteorology, oceanography, maneuverability, propulsion, stability, buoyancy, longitudinal resistance, maritime economy, maritime law, safety, pollution prevention, risk management, loading / unloading, stowage, lashing, goods, dangerous goods, containerization, marine insurance, etc. In this way, it is not important for the seafarers to know basic subjects in-depth but their application on board the ship and, more broadly, on the sea voyage.

Keywords:

Maritime accident, near misses, maritime knowledge, ship, sea voyage.