May Day

If there is one holiday with serious identity issues, it has to be the first of May.  May Day can be as innocent as the young maidens dancing with their ribbons around a maypole, as foreboding as the cold war military parades is Moscow, or somewhere in between, like the trade union marches in Boston or Detroit.

If you sail or fly, May-Day can also mean a call for help.  A mispronunciation of the French M’aider, the radio call literally means help me.  Since English has traditionally been the universal language of radio communication for ships and planes, it’s interesting that something as serious as a plea for help would be in French – probably a bunch of condescending jokes there, but I’ll leave it alone.

In the past year, M’aider has also become an acronym.  The M’aider Project (stands for Maritime Aids’ Development for Emergency Responses) was formed by a group of European institutions for the education and training of naval and merchant marine officers.  As defined by their website, the project is:

The systematic attempt in developing accident or incident scenarios for training of young cadets and seafarers working at sea and ports in emergency situations in considered novel and has not been done before. The M’AIDER project concerns those aspects of human error related to emergency situations which can be corrected through the removal of existing deficiencies in the Maritime Education and Training (MET) of cadet officers as well as those working on board vessels as officers of various ranks. The study of accidents and incidents at sea will identify the emergency situations and provide adequate information as to how various scenarios could be prepared and simulated in various types of simulators including integrated and full-mission ship simulators. The main focus is on the training of Deck officers as the accidents are directly related to the activities on the bridge including communication within the team and engine department. When accidents are analysed it can be seen clearly that the development of training programme for deck officers are unique to prevent accidents and cannot be developed in general form and should be based on real accidents to focus their attention on what could await them at sea.