FERRY, CRUISE, RO-RO AND HIGH-SPEED INFORMATION FOR PROFESSIONALS OCTOBER 2022 • NO. 10 SHIPPAX INFO 57 YEARS 1965-2022 HIGH-SPEED UPDATE FERRY INDUSTRY INTERIM PERFORMANCE REVIEW JUST DELIVERED: AERO 1, 2, 3 QUICK Q&AS: MIKE CORRIGAN HIGH-SPEED ON ORDERLet’s connect your operational data. telenormaritime.com Wherever your digitalization course may take you, whichever manufacturers, applications or partners you choose – we are here to make your journey smooth. Find out more at telenormaritime.com/ferry With 20 years’ experience in maritime communications, we are the experts of innovating solutions at sea. We connect 30 million people through more than 500 installations on vessels, and oshore platforms and rigs worldwide.OCTOBER 22 · SHIPPAXINFO 1 www.shippax.com These are the circumstances in which we find ourselves after the all-too-brief summer break. The cruise and ferry sector must brace itself for further assaults from often unex- pected occurrences and it must be assumed that the regular emergence of fresh crises will be the “new normal”. The constant change is now more than ever expected and its pace accelerating. But, amid the upheaval, one constancy can always be relied upon: the editorial contents of ShippaxInfo are always anchored in well- established plans. In this October edition, we steadfastly uphold the high-speed-theme tradition, at the same time, without losing sight of the topical and rhapsodic issues concerning the industry we serve. In the clamour of headline-dominating crises, we have not overlooked the succession of talis- manic events taking place in this emblematic segment of the ferry industry. The editorial team As we entered another uneasy boreal autumn of uncertainty, most people in the cruise and ferry industry would find that the pandemic impacts, though still present, had taken the back seat, giving way to the more insidious cost-of-living crisis, which now threatened to derail recovery and restrain growths. It seems that nothing stays constant for long in these unsettling times; even the often nauseatingly repeated cliché, “the new normal” is rapidly shifting. Gone are the days when we spoke of crisis in singular form; multiple crises, and with prosaic repetitive- ness, are what we must learn to live with from now on. Aside from the existing calamities, the extreme heat of the 2022 Northern Hemi- sphere summer has been an under-stated catastrophe. The drought induced by the record-high temperatures has severely inter- rupted European inland waterway shipping operations, further damaging the already impaired supply chain. This situation is now expected to recur every year, as the climate change intensifies. ONE CONSTANCY SHIPPAXINFO Published by Shippax AB Box 7067 SE - 300 07 HALMSTAD Sweden Tel: +46 35 218370 info@shippax.se www.shippax.com Visiting address Horngatan 4 SE - 302 33 HALMSTAD Sweden Publisher Elizabeth Mandersson elizabeth@shippax.se Editor-in-chief Victor Mandersson victor@shippax.se Advertising advertising@shippax.se Statistics statistics@shippax.se Subscriptions and Accounts subscription@shippax.se Photographers Frank Behling Christian Costa George Giannakis Søren Lund Hviid Marc Ottini Contributing correspondents Australia Dale Crisp Canada Aaron Saunders Croatia Neven Jerkovic Finland Eero Mäkinen France Nikias Ioannidis Bruno Jonathan Germany Frank Behling Frederik Erdmann Kai Ortel Greece David Glass Italy Angelo Scorza Japan Tsuyoshi Ishiyama Norway Magne A. Røe Poland Peter B. Starenczak Spain Mike Barker Alan Lam UK Russell Plummer Bruce Peter USA Tom Stieghorst Founder Arne Steving, in 1965 Printers DanagårdLiTHO AB, Ödeshög, Sweden Contributing correspondents and news items do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors. Information believed to be correct but cannot be guaranteed. No reprint or further distribution without permission. SHIPPAXINFO is owned by Shippax AB, reg no 556937-9414. ISSN 1102-934X © SHIPPAXINFO PHOTO: SØREN LUND HVIID2 SHIPPAXINFO · OCTOBER 22 www.shippax.com Editorial One constancy 1 Inside Story All the world's an airliner cabin 4 Incat's novel wave-piercing hybrid ro-pax 9 Floating coach stations 11 ZeFF - race to zero launches a new era for foilers 13 North European and North American ferry industry interim performance review 16 Theme High-speed update 23 Sanctions likely to impact future Russian fast ferry operations 24 Thames Clipper bounces back from Covid 27 Midships News 33 Statistics 54 Projects and conversions 58 Fleet changes 59 On order: High-speed 61 Just delivered AERO 1, 2, 3 64 Q&As Mike Corrigan - Interferry 68 CONTENTS 4 COVER PHOTO MARITIME PHOTOGRAPHIC 23 16 64 68 11 9 13“Since we started working with Hogia in 2020, we have valued the great partnership and collaboration they have brought to Irish Ferries along with a deep understanding of our business, allowing us to successfully launch Bookit for our passenger division in 2021.” Seamus Mc Carville – Head of IT HOGIA FERRY SYSTEMS FIN-65100 Vaasa, Finland info@hogia.fi| www.hogiaferrysystems.com4 SHIPPAXINFO · OCTOBER 22 www.shippax.com ALL THE WORLD’S AN AIRLINER CABIN Have you noticed how many of today’s travel experiences have been made to feel like just flying in an ordinary high-capacity jet plane? Typical fast ferry interiors are one example of several to be filled with row upon row of airliner seats. In the early Jet Age, however, more imaginative solutions to interior design and layout were attempted. TEXT: BRUCE PETERYourDeckhand.6 SHIPPAXINFO · OCTOBER 22 www.shippax.com One of my son’s favourite places is the National Museum of Scotland’s Museum of Flight at East Fortune near Edinburgh. Located at a former Royal Air Force airfield built during the Second World War, it features a number of hangars i nside which historic aircraft of all kinds are displayed. Pride of place in the centre of the biggest hangar is a Concorde, which is my son’s favourite exhibit. Even grounded and displayed indoors, its exterior makes an awesome and stirring sight – a beautiful object from a highpoint in British design and engineering excel- lence. Upon embarkation, though, one finds a cramped little tube of a cabin that although intended to accommodate the super-rich appears not so different from Economy on standard a short-haul Brit- ish Airways Boeing 737. Even the smell is exactly the same. Concorde’s neighbour in the same hang- ar is part of the fuselage of a BOAC (British Overseas Airline Corporation, British Airways’ precursor) Boeing 707, represent- ing the early Jet Age, inside which is shown a film of interviews with retired cabin stewardesses who flew on such planes back in the early-1960s. How glamorous jet air travel then seemed! Everyone wore their best clothes, the cuisine was gourmet and the destinations were exclusive. Planes such as the 707 and Concorde created a special aura and, as is typical of the com- mercial world, other transport modes began to copy airliner style. The first fast ferries In Norway, Italy and the Soviet Union, jetliner style took to the water in hydro- foils. The leading makers of the era were Westermoen Hydrofoil A/S in Mandal, Rodriquez Cantieri Navali in Messina and the Soviet Central Hydrofoil Design Bu- reau, which devised the ‘Raketa’, ‘Meteor’ and ‘Kometa’ types. Inboard, all of these featured airliner-style cabins with repeti- tive rows of high-backed, uni-directional seating. In Britain, meanwhile, an alterna- tive strategy for fast ferries was devised by the British Hovercraft Corporation which, following a number of experiments with small hovercraft types, delivered in 1968 the first very large examples for service across the Dover Strait. The first two SRN4 ‘Mountbatten’ class hovercraft were operated by British Rail and two further examples were then ordered by its rival, Hoverlloyd. In terms of layout, these crafts featured a car deck along the centreline with airliner-type cabins on either beam, these closely resembling equivalent spaces inside the emergent generation of wide- bodied jets. Hitherto, ferry interiors had tended to use hardwood for all finishes and rubber or linoleum for flooring. They had a par- ticular, distinctly heavy and solid nautical aesthetic with brass-framed windows and portholes and heavy hardwood doors with combings to stop seawater washing from the deck into the accommodation. The first generation of fast crafts instead used pretty much exactly the same forms and finishes as airliner cabins, there being substantial use made of moulded plastic, fiberglass and other synthetic materials. The lighting was fluorescent and con- cealed and above each row of seats were adjustable punkah-louvre ventilators, just like the ones on the undersides of jet planes’ luggage racks. The experience of traversing the Dover Strait in a ‘Mount- batten’-class hovercraft was indeed rather like being on a plane experiencing 45 min- utes of extreme turbulence. The noise was more like that of a helicopter, however. Ocean liner to airliner It was not only hydrofoils and hovercrafts that pretended to be jetliners on the inside; in 1969, the new Cunard flag- ship trans-Atlantic liner and cruise ship QUEEN ELIZABETH 2 – a very large and technologically conventional steam turbine vessel – was finished internally Concorde Cabin.OCTOBER 22 · SHIPPAXINFO 7 www.shippax.com in ‘jetliner’ style. Cunard’s chairman, Sir Basil Smallpeice, had previously led BOAC and the designer of its plane’s cabins, Gaby Schreiber, was employed by him to draw up the QE2’s cinema/theatre auditorium, in which airliner-style reclining seats were installed, upholstered with the same Bernat Klein tweed fabric as was used by BOAC. Elsewhere, the Grill Room and Grill Room Bar, on adjacent decks, were connected by a spiral aluminium stairway just like the ones linking the two First Class cabins on Boeing 747 ‘jumbo’ jets. Only a few decades before, ocean liners of the previous generation, such as the old QUEEN MARY and QUEEN ELIZABETH, had influenced a distinct ‘ocean liner style’ that was widely copied ashore in architecture and interiors ashore, including those of other less ex- clusive forms of transport like buses and trains. But in the ‘sixties, even operators of liners such as the QE2 felt obliged to emulate the visual language of air travel. In 1974, Boeing launched its 929 Jetfoil which was surely the ultimate example of a plane-ship hybrid, built by the world’s biggest and most famous aircraft maker. In 1981, the Belgian ferry operator Regie voor Maritiem Transport placed two such craft in service on the Dover Strait, giving Channel travellers another variation on the airliner cabin experience (the Jetfoil cabins even were outfitted using standard Boeing plane seating, fixtures and fittings, so the style really was like that of flying). Also coaches and trains… Since the 1970s, touring and express coaches have been designed internally to resemble planes too. The typical Van Hool, Bova or Neoplan – and many others coaches besides – are, from their passen- gers point-of-view, essentially wingless plane fuselages on road wheels. And when in 1997 the British Conservative govern- ment of John Major decided to privatise British Rail and henceforth to have train QE2 Jumbo Jet stairs.Next >