Sailing Ship - Automated Sailing

Automated Sailing

Starting in 1902 the sail ship Preussen was the first to automate handling of sails by making use of steam power without auxiliary engines for propulsion. The steam power were used for operation of the winches, hoists and pumps. A similar ship Kruzenshtern, which was a very large sailing vessel without mechanized control, had a crew of 257 men; compared the Preussen, which succeeded to reduce this number to 48 men.

In 2006, automated control was taken to the point where sailing can be operated by one person using a central control unit on the boat the Maltese Falcon, a yacht built by the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins. The boat is 88 meters long with 3 masts, 58 meters high with a total sail area of 2400 m² — which is half the size of Preussen. Maintenance and problem fixing requires only a small crew. But sailing operation requires nobody in the rig.

The DynaRig technology that was developed in the 1960s in Germany by W. Prolls as a propulsion alternative for commercial ships to handle a possible feature energy crisis. Now it equips the Maltese Falcon which has become the first proof-of-concept. Smaller versions have been designed as well. The technology is a high-tech version of the same type of sail used by the Preussen, the "square-rigger". The main difference is that the yards which is the horizontal spars that keep the sail in a fixed wing-like form do not swing around a fixed mast but are attached permanently to a rotating mast. The recent development of high-tech materials like carbon fibre have made this technology possible.

Unlike a traditional sailboat, the rig of the Maltese Falcon scarcely shows any ropes or wires. It does however have dozens of computers and microprocessors, connected by 39 900 m of cable. The sail ship Preussen is low-tech, the Maltese Falcon is ecotech.