Simple question Maersk – were the navigation systems on or off?

The Mar­itime Union says it is not sat­is­fied with the response from ship­ping com­pa­ny Maer­sk over its nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems on two ships last week, and will be lay­ing a com­plaint with Mar­itime NZ.

Yes­ter­day, the Mar­itime Union released cor­re­spon­dence between a ship spot­ter at Ports of Auck­land and Mar­itime New Zealand, indi­cat­ing Maer­sk had inter­fered with the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems of two ships enter­ing Auck­land last week.

Joe Fleet­wood, Mar­itime Union Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary, said that the response the Port work­er received from Mar­itime NZ when it was raised on March 2 reads (empha­sis added):

“Sub­se­quent to your query regard­ing the cap­tioned mat­ter, we have raised con­cern to the oper­a­tor of both ves­sels. The oper­a­tor con­firms that the AIS sys­tem on both ves­sels is in good work­ing order. The mas­ters are now aware of this issue and have put the AIS sys­tem back into ser­vice.”

“The Mar­itime NZ response to the Port work­er makes it absolute­ly clear that the AIS sys­tems were in good work­ing order, but had to be put ‘back into ser­vice’.”

“Maer­sk also con­firmed yes­ter­day that their AIS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems were ful­ly func­tion­al.”

“Giv­en this, for their ships not to turn up for sev­er­al hours in the AIS nav­i­ga­tion­al track­ing, says to us that they were delib­er­ate­ly turned off.”

“We await a response from Maer­sk that prop­er­ly accounts for these dis­crep­an­cies,” Joe Fleet­wood said.

“In the mean­time, it is our view that Mar­itime New Zealand needs to com­mence a detailed inves­ti­ga­tion to get to the bot­tom of this.”