NATO has published Edition E of the Naval Ship Code, developed to provide a naval alternative to the commercial ship safety standard Solas on its website as ANEP-77.
Edition E of the Code supersedes Edition 4 and is a further development of this naval safety standard and the result of continued collaborative efforts of the navies and classification societies involved in the International Naval Safety Association (INSA).
The standard is not mandatory and any nation, in or outside of NATO or INSA, is free to implement all or part of the Code in their national regulation for naval ships. Edition E includes comprehensively updated Chapters on Navigation and Dangerous Goods.
INSA
INSA hopes the Naval Ship Code will become established as a common goal-based standard for naval ship safety. The Association was created from a NATO group specialist team in December 2008 to develop, maintain and promote adoption and application of the Naval Ship Code, and to capture feedback from the Code’s application.
Participation in INSA is open to all nations interested in contributing to the future development of the Code. INSA now has seventeen members; ten Navies and seven classification societies.
Naval Ship Code and Solas
The benchmarking of the Naval Ship Code against Solas is an important feature of the Code and in many areas the links to the originating Solas text are maintained. This allows the Code to demonstrate equivalency with statutory safety regulation and conventions.
The Naval Ship Code is revised annually to incorporate the work of INSA’s study groups and to maintain equivalence to Solas.
Edition F
Edition F of the Code has already been agreed by INSA, and includes a new three part format and updates to the Navigation and Communications Chapters. Edition F has now been passed to NATO for agreement and publication and is available as a draft on the INSA website until it is formally released by NATO.
The Naval Ship Code is freely available and Edition E can be downloaded from the NATO website e-library under standardisation agreements. Further details on the work of INSA and Draft Edition F are available at INSA.
Picture: Dutch naval ships (by Dutch Ministry of Defence).
