Research of marine accidents through the prism of human factors

This paper focuses on the impact of human factors on marine accidents and their prediction developed by regression analysis. Despite the rapid technological development of ships and the presence of legislative framework for the control and safety at sea, this paper identifies the human factor as one of the weakest link in maritime safety system. First, the authors start from the literature review of human error existence in maritime transportation pointing out the psychological and organizational aspects. Then, regarding international maritime law the authors specify the regulations that consider the marine casualty statement. Descriptive statistics and review of number of ships and lives involved in accidents in the European Union (EU) waters present a starting point for applying the regression analysis to predict the number of accidents in the coming years. The obtained results indicate two directions. Firstly, the linear trend for the predicted number of accidents is mostly stable, while secondly, the authors state that this trend would not be stable in the case of number of lives lost because of the level of reliability which clearly indicates that the latter must be investigated by other different approaches in the future.