Northrop Grumman Supplies Integrated Bridge System
Freedom of the Seas, Royal Caribbean’s newest and biggest passenger cruise ship, which enters regular service June 2006, has been equipped with navigation and communication electronics by Northrop Grumman Corporation. At 160,000 gross tons and carrying more than 3,600 passengers and 1,400 crew, Freedom of the Seas is one of the largest cruise ships in the world. The ship was constructed at Aker Finyards in Turku, Finland, where two additional Freedom-class ships are also being built.
Northrop Grumman's Sperry Marine business unit supplied a comprehensive array of bridge electronics for the giant cruise ship, with multiple levels of back-up systems and redundancy of all critical components to ensure safety at sea. The integrated bridge system (IBS) layout is similar to that on other Royal Caribbean ships, with displays and consoles arranged in a U-shaped configuration for easy control from trackball devices built into the armrests of the watch officers’ chairs.
The bridge systems include multiple navigation radars, adaptive self-tuning autopilot, a fiber-optic gyro heading reference system, Doppler speed logs and electronic chart display and information system running on Sperry Marine’s proprietary Voyage Management System software, as well as a full array of communication equipment meeting international requirements.
Sperry Marine is under contract to supply the IBSs for the next two Freedom-class ships and has supplied the same equipment for all of the new Royal Caribbean Voyager-, Radiance- and Vision-class ships.
