Kongsberg Maritime’s training center in Houston, Texas has become the first maritime training facility in North America to offer the Nautical Institute-accredited Sea Time Reduction Course for dynamic positioning operators (DPO). Kongsberg Maritime already offers the course at its training facility in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The course reduces the time spent at sea required to achieve the Nautical Institute’s DPO certification by up to six weeks, through more focus on realistic simulation exercises on a Kongsberg Maritime full-mission K-Sim DP simulator.
Sea Time Reduction is an intensive five-day simulator course wherein DPOs can earn significant credit towards DP certification. During the course, participants will work with practical scenarios based on real operations, training on planning and executing specific operations under varying simulated conditions. The scenarios will be run on a K-Pos DP System Class 3 in a full mission simulator environment connected to an advanced simulator control (NI Class A). K-Sim DP is a proven simulator platform, providing highly realistic training in terms of operational processes and life-like physical consoles and visual system.
In addition to simulator training on routine and emergency situations, the new course covers the study of DP incidents and the construction and use of worksite diagrams, electronic charts and vessel templates for use in DP operations. Additionally, trainees will learn how to prepare plans for DP operations, including contingency plans, whilst carrying out risk and safety analysis and defining the DP equipment classes. The course also places focus on the DP system’s utilization of position reference measurements and the various position reference systems available.
“Training for a Dynamic Positioning Operator (DPO) certificate can be a time consuming process, which involves onshore courses and DP watch keeping experience on DP vessels,” said Jon Holvik, president Kongsberg Maritime. “Training DPOs at sea is expensive and may cause risks, so replacing some of the time a trainee spends at the controls of a real ship in a safe, high quality simulated environment is an attractive proposition, especially for operators in the Gulf of Mexico, where there is significant demand for well-trained DPOs.”
The company’s Houston training center is available to suit the training needs of the offshore industry in the Gulf of Mexico and further afield with an array of K-Sim Navigation and K-Sim DP simulators, making use of the same hardware and software found on vessels around the world. Additional product training is also available on the latest in automation, acoustic, and global positioning systems.