Incident with passenger ship FINNTRADER at sea outside Travemünde

A drift failure occurred in the engine control system on the passenger ship FINNTRADER. This resulted in a near black-out during a voyage with a pilot on board, while leaving Travemünde.

The source of the failure was that a switch between the shaft generator and the ship’s power supply did not give a positioning signal to the control unit of the shaft generator, which resulted in an automatic attempt to switch power from the ship’s auxiliary engines to the shaft generator. This lead to the automatic system trying to change the electrical load to a generator, at the time not connected to the same system, which caused frequency failure and high currents, resulting in de-energizing of non-essential systems.

This was one of several near-misses of the same kind that has happened on the ship during the last 14 month period. Hence, SHK has decided to investigate the circumstances for these occurrences and how they are handled by authorities and classification societies.