STAB 1990 — FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STABILITY OF SHIPS AND OCEAN VEHICLES

One of the main purposes of the Organization consists of promoting the highest practical standards of maritime safety and navigation, and the Sub-Committee on Stability and Load Lines and on Fishing Vessels Safety in its current, as well as in its previous, work undertakes all possible effort to incorporate the latest achievements related to both design and theoretical areas into its existing standards as well as in regulations actually being developed.

So far, intact stability requirements and recommendations have been developed for passenger ships, cargo ships, fishing vessels, dynamically supported craft, MODUs, offshore supply vessels, special purpose ships and sea-going pontoons, thus covering the overwhelming majority of the world's merchant fleet. Standards of damage stability were introduced for the first time for passenger ships in the 1948 SOLAS Convention and re-adopted by the 1960 and 1974 SOLAS Conventions. For some specific categories of ships, such as tankers, chemical tankers and gas carriers, IMO developed sets of requirements and recommendations based on the principle of prevention of massive spillage of their cargo into the sea; the current "state of the art" for other types of vessels has been given below.

The detailed description or IMO's activities related to the development of stability standards within the period 1962 to 1986 was given in papers presented at the Second and Third International Conferences on Stability of Ships and Ocean Vehicles held in 1982 in Tokyo and in 1986 in Gdansk, respectively. This paper summarizes the progress achieved by the SLF Sub-Committee since 1986...