Nils Holgersson Resumes Scheduled Service

The Nils Holgersson, the TT-Line ferry which had been out of service owing to damage to one of its two pod drives, left the Lloyd shipyard in Bremerhaven on September 6, bound for Travenmunde to resume scheduled service. As Siemens and Schottel keep a replacement propulsion module in stock for this project, the time lost by the Nils Holgersson could be kept to a minimum by simply exchanging the module in question. In the case of the Nils Holgersson, the exchange work was completed in only five working days. Small cause, great effect: an installation error in the cabling of the monitoring system let ultimately to the failure of a drive. That was the result of the examination of the defective SSP10 at the plant of Schottel-Antriebstechnik in Wismar. In the case of the Nils Holgersson, the failure of an alarm message meant that the crew were not informed in time that a certain type of check was necessary and that corresponding action therefore needed to be taken. The result: loss of oil led to the failure of a bearing and the seawater seal. As a result of this damage, which was demonstrably caused by human error, Schottel has checked all pod systems currently in service and found that the fault is an isolated case limited to the “Nils Holgersson”.