An Unignorable Minority:the Passenger Cargo Liners between China and South Korea

Reporter Xu Hua

For a long time, the passenger cargo liners in China and South Korea’s route plays an important role in the two countries’transportation market with the advantage of transporting both passengers and cargoes. However, with lots of in fl uencing factors such as container liners’ participation in the competition of the same route and increasing density of air lines over the two countries, the passenger cargo shipping lines have started to face a tough market situation. Statistics show that in recent years, the attandence of passanger liners is about 60%, the actual load rate is about 50%.South Korea was the leader in shipbuilding around the world,which holds the high technical level of shipbuilding. However, with few building of ro-ro passenger ships, the current ro-ro passenger ships in service in South Korea are all second-hand ships purchased overseas. For China, the level of design and building international roro passenger ship has been in the front rank of the world, but only Huanghai Shipbuilding (Huanghai Shipbuilding Company Limited) and GSI (Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Limited) have built up the ro-ro passenger ship which meets the requirements and standards of international operation.

As the mainstay of national shipping survey, CCS has been committed to the technology research and development of passenger ship, ro-ro passenger ship,passenger container ship, high-speed passenger ship and many others over the years, helped and supported many domestic designing institutes to design and launch many types of passenger ship, including coastal and river roro passenger ships as well as the ships which sail toJapan and South Korea, which lays a solid technical foundation of design and building for passenger ships. At the same time, CCS pays attention to the accumulation of operating technology. Since 2005, when the compulsory measure for passenger ship and ro-ro passenger ship to join ERS was launched nationwide,CCS has established the ship structure database through modelling the strength and stability for passenger ship and ro-ro passenger ship and tracking the response to accidents of passenger ship and data of damage survey,which plays an active role in promoting and assisting designing institutes to optimize the design of passenger ship and ro-ro passenger ship. Over the years, CCS always actively participates in the technological research with IMO and IACS, making a great contribution to the fomulating of the requirements of safe inward-bound and the improvements of damage stability for passenger ship. Regarding the technological difficulties of ro-ro passenger ship—the design of the vehicle deck struture,CCS has abundant experience and high technological level in terms of the load calculation of the vehicle deck and longitudinal strength and lateral buckling strength calculation in the area of vehicle deck for hull girder, moreover, it holds a lot of successful cases in using the finite element calculation to optimize the structure details. Furthermore, CCS has actively built up the research team for passenger ship and the expert team for surveying passenger ship and strengthened the technical development and safety management of passenger ship with specialized measures, which results in a good performace in winning the building orders of international passenger ship, national passenger ship and ro-ro passenger ship. Thus, the safety performance of these passenger ships and ro-ro passenger ships also makes a great contribution to the improvement of marine safety situation.