Becoming Sea Savvy, on Land

It was such a picture-perfect day on the Caribbean island of Curacao that experienced skipper Bob Glynn could pick out buildings on shore as he guided the Arleigh Burke up a narrow ship channel.

Suddenly, freak 30-foot waves hit. The guided missile destroyer was destined to become a $1-billion beach ornament.

“It’s just a matter of time now,” noted Glynn, former commander of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and seismic research vessels, as he nonchalantly consigned the ship to its fate.

Fortunately, this disaster wasn’t real. It was just another turn at a ship simulator operated by Marine Safety International, where a calm afternoon can turn into a stomach-churning nightmare for anyone at the helm.

“I never have a bad day at this job. But it’s often my job to make it a bad day for anyone who walks in here,” said retired Navy Rear Adm. David Ramsey, a master seaman who serves as director of MSI’s San Diego offices. Ramsey commands a 250-ship fleet that has never gotten wet, much less left port.

On any day of the week, MSI’s three bridge simulators are helping maritime academy midshipmen learn how to deal with emergencies, training foreign naval officers or helping a variety of maritime businesses determine what is economically practical.

Simulators have become valuable tools for the maritime industry, which once relied on small models of ships in large tanks of water or pools to mimic real life situations.

“Any time you can provide a simulation of a situation, it enhances the skills of the pilots and all the licensed officers on those ships and makes for a much safer situation,” said Manny Aschemeyer, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which tracks vessel movements at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. “Cadets and midshipmen can now get sea-time credits toward their graduation requirements for time spent on simulators. They are that realistic.”

MSI is one of the biggest businesses to have emerged over the last 10 years in the field of ship simulations. Others include RealSims of Orlando, Fla., Netherlands-based VSTEP, FORCE Technology of Denmark and Kongsberg of Norway.

The nine-employee San Diego office, located inside the U.S. Naval Station, is one of four such facilities belonging to New York-based MSI, a subsidiary of FlightSafety International Inc., which is owned by billionaire Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. FlightSafety, employer of more than 1,500 aviation and maritime instructors, posted operating income of $110 million in the second quarter. That was barely a blip given Berkshire’s net earnings of $2.4 billion for the period, but it was more than twice the $51 million the unit brought in the same quarter a year earlier.

The growth reflects several things: a steady stream of military work combined with businesses hedging their bets on multimillion-dollar projects, and ports, harbor pilots and tugboat captains pressed with figuring out how to handle additional traffic from ever larger ships.

Military training can include simulating the escort of commercial vessels through the Strait of Malacca or helping a captain know when a suspicious ship in the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz is making a run for it. (Hint: You don’t wait to see if the ship has a wake trailing behind it.)

“In many ways, the simulator is helping you look at procedures and how to recognize things. Suddenly that ship has gotten underway and is heading south. What do you do?” Ramsey asked.

“How do you recognize that he is moving? You look at the radar image reflecting movement. You look visually at the ship in reference to other landmarks. If you see a wake, it is already too late. He is already moving.”

Ramsey said the simulator has also been used to mimic an aircraft carrier on the lookout for small high-speed ships that might be trying to ram it.

About 40% of MSI’s work is commercial. One recent example involved a Long Beach energy company that wanted proof it was possible to dock a fully laden oil supertanker inside the Port of Los Angeles.

Pacific Energy Partners sought out MSI’s San Pedro Bay simulation, which is so precise that all the harbor pilots who guide ships there practice on it. The simulation can mimic anything up to 50-knot winds and 30-foot ocean swells, with as many as 25 vessels in the harbor simultaneously.

Twelve runs later on MSI’s equipment and Pacific Energy Partners was convinced of the feasibility of its $300-million project to build the West Coast’s first inner harbor docking facility for fully loaded supertankers. The company even determined an optimal approach speed for the supertanker of 4 knots.

“I figured we could do it but I guess I got cold feet and wanted to prove it to myself,” said Jerry Aspland, a consultant for Pacific Energy Partners and a former oil company executive. “Sometimes you just want to step back and make sure that this is going to be OK.”

MSI is doing similar work for Sempra Energy, which plans to build liquefied natural gas terminals in Port Arthur, Texas, and Cameron, La.

MSI’s trainees include U.S. naval officers and many of their international counterparts, such as six Egyptian officers who trained in August to operate coastal mine-hunting ships. Their clients also include harbor pilots and tugboat captains who, among other things, want to know whether specific inner harbor routes can accommodate the largest container ships.

A total of 26 computers are used to run three simulators. Two of the simulators can be run together in situations such as a tug pilot working with a ship captain to help maneuver the larger vessel. Five overlapping projection screens offer a 225-degree horizontal field of view, more than the human eye can see without turning to look left or right. Vertically, the range is as much as 45 degrees, to mimic a tug pilot having to look up at a much larger vessel.

“We do it this way so that the captain in the simulator sees everything he would ordinarily see on his own ship or ships similar to his,” Ramsey said.

Able to mimic all kinds of weather, including thick fog and bright sunshine, the simulation seems real enough when the computers are overseen by Glynn -- skipper of the beached missile destroyer -- and Dave Tharpe, a retired B-52 bomber pilot. Maritime academy midshipmen say they have gotten seasick during simulations there. They feel their leg muscles tensing to compensate for ship movements that are occurring only in their minds.

Thomas Jacobsen has stood at MSI’s virtual helm many times. He is president of Jacobsen Pilot Service Inc., representing the third generation of a business that has held the contract for steering ships into the Port of Long Beach since 1924.

“It has allowed us to take training to a whole new level. It’s been fantastic for us. You can put pilots in situations you would normally never want to be in, like a ship driven by a 30-knot wind. You can test in daylight, nighttime, fog conditions. All these tests can be done in the simulation before you board the ship,” Jacobsen said.

“We also use it as a discussion tool,” he said. “It’s a great way to prevent problems and further educate ourselves.”

In 2004, for example, the Port of Long Beach wanted to know whether the narrow back channel, which runs near the Gerald Desmond Bridge, could safely handle the newest generation of large cargo ships, capable of carrying 8,000 20-foot containers.

Using the MSI simulators, the answer was yes, Jacobsen said. But the pilots also learned that they needed to set strict limits.

“We will not move a ship that large between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. That is the end of a shift, when people tend to slow down a little. With this particular job you can’t afford to miss anything,” Jacobsen said. In addition, the simulator showed that anything more than a 10-knot wind would make the back channel unsafe for such large ships, he said.

Ramsey loves the simulator for another reason. Even though he still holds a master mariner’s license that gives him the right to pilot any ship of any size in any ocean, at age 75, he figures most of his days on the high seas are already behind him. The simulator helps him pretend otherwise.

“I have never been into Bahrain, and yet I have been there on the simulator. I have never been to Valdez, Alaska, but I feel now like I know it as well as people who have been through there hundreds of times,” Ramsey said. “I can still go to all of these places for the reason I went to sea in the first place -- to see the world.”

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ron.white@latimes.com