[BITList] BI, avery special club

[HUGH]

Ron,

You wondered, re engineers/electricians and navigators, "Are modern trainees in both disciplines taught the very basics or do they plunge straight into the electronic modern stuff ?".

I cannot speak of navigators, but nowadays they reckon a 3 year apprenticeship wearing a hard hat and a yellow dayglo jacket with time off for study is sufficient to make someone a shipbuilder or an engineer.  And they reckon universities produce engineers, ie, the acquisition of the certificate is enough to do the trick.  There was a correspondence recently in the Independent that didn't deviate from this line - James Dyson (he of the vacuum cleaner), blamed a shortage of engineers on the slow throughput of universities.  Before I retired a bit early in 1995 the shipyard (Kvaerner Govan), recruited a dozen engineering graduates, 6 male and 6 female.  Of the females, only one lasted the pace - of the males, only two.  The rest vanished, no doubt to search for an easier life.  Heather, the odd lady out, moved into commissioning and didn't mind wearing a shapeless boiler suit weighed down by torches and gadgets.  The two chaps fumbled their ways through for a couple of years, playing catch up. I worked near one of them - he was keen to learn, but he had a hellish lot to learn and not much time in which to learn it. I was never sure he had a clear picture of what he was about.  To illustrate - one of his predecessors had done a sandwich apprenticeship, and around the time HMS Ocean was being built in Govan he had graduated, and was in the Engine Drawing Office doing some design layout work on the vessel, as I later discovered. I discovered it when I was asked to take over what he had started. He had proceeded on the principle that anything inconvenient either didn't exist or didn't matter, so all the uptakes and downtakes had beautiful lines.  This was hard lines on all the decks, bulkheads, and cabins and other spaces he had omitted to take into account - the job was all a few levels above and beyond his ability to visualise the whole in 3D.  That was only a sample of what I was faced with.  As was my custom in such cases, I put it all in the bins, real and electronic, and started over. If lessons were learned, I didn't hear about them, so the rot had already started.  Now people appear in front of CAD screens armed only with evidence of some training course.  As a counter to this, one shipyard (still in business) got rid of CAD, retaining only an AutoCAD work station.  They required people who could switch on a pencil and and keep drawing during power cuts.

When I moved to Kincaid's DO in the 5th year of my apprenticeship as a fitter, new entrants were given work appropriate to their ignorance, and matters proceeded from there, advancement to harder stuff being achieved in line with how well one progressed.  There was no Design Department - draughtsmen were expected to do their own design.  Walter Macintosh, pianist, led the Calculating Squad, which was as close to a Design Dept as they had at that time. Mostly it was just Walter sitting by himself, and we were seconded to him as and when his work load got out of hand - analysis of torsionals, power estimates, spare propeller design, sea and shop trials analysis - stand alone stuff.  When I went to sea aged 23 I had acquired a fair amount of practical and theoretical marine gineering experience, and I wasn't dumb, but it didn't take me long to work out I was in a new ball game.  Sandy Suter and I were subjected to withering scorn from our betters one afternoon, after being bumptious enough to claim we had had some pre-sea experience.  I still recall the fingers pointing in outrage.

The answer to your question, Ron, is No.

Hugh.
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