Winners of Ferry Design Contest Selected

 

Dr. Roberta Weisbrod, Executive Director of the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association (WFSA) has announced that the winners of its Safe Affordable Ferry Competition will be made known at the Ferry Safety and Technology Conference. The conference, in its second year, will be held in downtown New York, June 2-3.

 

The competition, a project of the WFSA, challenges teams of Naval Architecture students to design a vessel that would serve a population dependent on ferry transportation. The requirements of this year’s competition were to design a RoPax ferry able to transport 185 passengers plus a crew of 15. The vessel, which would also take vehicles (including trucks), would be required to complete a 468 Nm round trip among the five islands surrounding Indonesia’s Savu Sea, at a service speed of 14-18 knots. 

 

Awards for first, second and third place in the Competition will be presented on June 2 by Dr. Bekir Sitki Ustaoglu, Head of the Technical Cooperation Division, Asia Pacific Region, of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), on behalf of Nicolaos Charalambous, Director, Technical Cooperation Division of the IMO. Both Charalambous and Ustaoglu have been very active in organizing and following up on Safety Forums in various parts of the world in which information is exchanged among government and industry participants in the regions relying on ferries.

 

For this year’s competition, 25 student teams from universities and schools all over the world registered, but, according to Dr. Weisbrod, “Only nine teams stayed the very arduous course and actually submitted designs.” Information about the winners will be posted on the WFSA website, and disseminated through the trade press when the awards are announced. 

 

Indonesia is the fourth largest nation in the world in terms of population and extends across the western Pacific from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific, an archipelago consisting of 922 permanently inhabited islands. The current administration is committed to strengthening the nation’s maritime presence and to enhancing inter-island commerce and exchange by an expanded and improved ferry system. 

 

The Savu Sea area is important for Indonesia. The administration has felt that a good ferry system, with safety built in, would enhance interisland trade, social interaction and economic development. Tourism- and the attraction of more visitors, is another driver for a ferry serving this region. The islands adjacent to the Savu Sea are noteworthy because of a non-human inhabitant- a species of large lizards known as the Komodo Dragons (Varanus komodoensis) and because of a long-gone civilization of “hobbit people” (Homo floresiensis) who lived on Flores Island approximately 50,000 years ago.