In the Sailing Rules of International Regulation for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972, any definite distance between two vessels approaching each other is not referred for adequate maneuvering to avoid collision. At sea the officer in charge of bridge duty is required to guess safe distance before he takes maneuvering actions needed to avoid collision. Papers on safe distances calculated on the base of the motiional characteristics of ships for collision avoiding actions are very few. In this paper, the minimum safe approaching distances necessary for actions to be taken to avoid collision are calculated in numerical numbers definitely by mathematic formula based on the maneuvering indices got from experiments of actual ships. On the assumption that two vessels same in size and conditions are approaching each other, the author calculated the minimum safe approaching distance as 4.5 times, sufficient safe approaching one as 9.0 times the length of the ship involved in head-on situation and 5.0 times, 10 times respectively the length of the ship in each case mentioned above in crossing situation.

• 윤점동
• 박선규