Is it just like a button someone presses and it drops into the sea? I’m asking because there are relatively few of them on a ship but they have large capacity. Whenever someone gets in a lifeboat they have great incentive to act selfishly and release the boat immediately and increasing their chances of living.
I did a quick google search and couldn’t find a specific description, but it looks like they’re deployed with ropes and pullies like in the movie Titanic. I don’t think a passenger can deploy one. Well, aside from cutting the ropes with a knife, but that would be pretty dumb.
As far as I can remember, we didn’t actually go into a lifeboat during a lifeboat drill, but just assembled. I also rather suspect that in any real emergency crew members are at the lifeboats while this is happening getting it ready.
Here is a page with a picture of where the lifeboats are stowed (go down a little in the page.) This matches my recollection from the ships I’ve been on. Cutting the ropes makes you crash the boat onto the deck - not very useful. Given the weight of the thing, I’d be very surprised if it was manual, though I’d hope they could lower them manually of the power was out.
Anyhow, cutting the ropes would take a bigger knife than they let you board with. I don’t think my Swiss Army knife could hack it.
The traditional wooden lifeboats use ropes to lower them down. In the picture Voyager links to, you can also see the rails used to launch the boats. Once filled, the lifeboat slides down and into the water.
In the same picture, you’ll notice what looks like a bit metal drum on its side. That’s an inflatable lifeboat. They have to be in the water to inflate, so the crew just tosses them over the side. There are also designed so that if the ship goes down, they will come loose and inflate automatically, so people who couldn’t get onto the wooden boats can climb aboard.
On a passenger ship most life boats are lowered by gravity davits. The international regs require life boats to be lowered without using any power. After the restraints are removed a handle at the life boat station is lifted releasing the brake. The boat will slide down the rails to the boat deck where the brake is reapplied to stop the life boat even with the boat deck. at this time the ships gard rail is removed, the canvas cover is removed, the boat crew loads aboard the boat, and then passengers are loaded. With the life boat full lthe break handle is lifted and the boat continues down until it is in the water. At this point the davits are released, the sea painter (a roap) is released and the llife boat pulls away from the ship.
The round white things are Elliot Life boats. The canister has a cable attached to it and the ship. The hold downs are released and the canister is thrown overboard. When the cable comes under tension the canister opens. The hold downs are designed in a manner that if they are not manually released and the ship goes under water the water pressure will release the canister and it will bob to the surface and open the canister.
If someone in the life boat were to release one of the davits before the boat was in the water it would hang by the other davit until released. And someone has to be on the ship to lower the boat. And the boats are not lowered with roaps they are cables.
Did any of y’all see the recent Tintin movie? Nifty! For the first time ever, I comprehended how those doggone davits work! I could never figure them out! They can’t both swivel to the left, nor both swivel to the right. How in heck… OH! One out and one in!
Interesting thread. In the case of the RMS Titanic, the ship was equipped with both rigid (wooden, davit-mounted) lifeboats, but also “collapsible” boats.
How were these “collapsible” boats supposed to be launched? Was it intended that you waited till the deck was awash?
In any case, the impression given (by the movies and books) was that the crew didn’t know how to deploy them-hence most of them wound up unused.\Once in the water, are the boats supposed to be tethered together?
The collapsible boats on the Titanic were intended to be hooked into the empty davits, after the regular lifeboats were launched.
The trouble with the collapsibles was not that the crew didn’t know how to deploy them properly; C and D were properly deployed. But A and B were stored very inconveniently atop the officer’s quarters, with no way to get them down. That is why A and B were not launched properly–because of the trouble in getting them down to the Boat Deck before it was awash.
So do the crew on cruise ships get actual hands-on training in how to launch everything (even if it’s just a model next to a large pool), or do they get videos and pamphlets of how to do it and some mock walkthroughs?
They get actual, regular training. Not on a model, either. On the real thing. I’ve seen them in action a few times while on cruises. Usually it happens while the ship is in port, so most of the passengers are off the ship.
On the one cruise I took, the life boats were used to carry the passengers to shore on the stops where there wasn’t space to pull along side a pier. They rotated through the boats throughout the cruise. And I believe I saw them all in the water at one point or another. There were plenty of training opportunities on that cruise for practice. But I don’t know how effectively that time was really used.