President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has given the go-ahead to the government to purchase an ocean liner.
The new ship will be purchased under a deal signed by the presidential office and the Ministry of Science and Technology.
According to Mehr News Agency, the budget to purchase the ocean liner will be available within a period of two years. A special committee has been formed to look into the matter. The executive committee will review the agreement in collaboration with a number of industrialists, universities and academic centers.
Application
An ocean liner is a ship designed to transport people from one seaport to another along regular long-distance maritime routes according to a schedule. Liners may also carry cargo or mail, and may sometimes be used for other purposes such as carrying out environmental research.
Cargo vessels running to a schedule are sometimes referred to as liners. The category does not include ferries or other vessels engaged in short-sea trading, nor dedicated cruise ships where the voyage itself, and not transportation, is the prime purpose of the trip. Nor does it include tramp steamers, even those equipped to handle limited numbers of passengers. Some shipping companies refer to themselves as "lines" and their container ships, which often operate over set routes according to established schedules, as "liners".
Ocean liners are usually strongly built with a high freeboard to withstand rough seas and adverse conditions encountered in the open ocean, having large capacities for fuel, victuals, and other stores for consumption on long voyages. The new ocean liner to be purchased by Iran will be used to conduct environmental research across the Indian Ocean.
Overview
Ocean liners were the primary mode of intercontinental travel for over a century, from the mid-19th century until they began to be supplanted by airliners in the 1960s. In addition to passengers, liners carried mail and cargo. Liners were also the preferred way to move gold and other high-value cargoes.
The busiest route for liners was on the North Atlantic with ships travelling between Europe and North America. It was on this route that the fastest, largest and most advanced liners travelled. But while in contemporary popular imagination the term "ocean liners" evokes these transatlantic superliners, most ocean liners historically were mid-sized vessels which served as the common carriers of passengers and freight between nations and among mother countries and their colonies and dependencies in the pre-jet age.
Such routes included Europe to African and Asian colonies, Europe to South America, and migrant traffic from Europe to North America in the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries, and to Canada and Australia after the Second World War.
Golden Age
The period between the end of the 19th century and World War II is considered the "golden age" of ocean liners. Driven by strong demand created by European emigration to the United States and Canada, international competition between passenger lines and a new emphasis on comfort, shipping companies built increasingly larger and faster ships.
The surge in ocean liner size outpaced the shipping regulations. Until the 1920s most shipping lines relied heavily on emigration for passengers and they were hard hit when the US Congress introduced a bill to limit immigration into the United States. As a result, many ships took on cruising and the least expensive cabins were reconfigured from third-class to tourist-class. To make matters worse, the Great Depression put many shipping lines into bankruptcy.
Despite the harsh economic conditions, a number of companies continued to build larger and faster ships. In 1929 the German ships Bremen and Europa beat the crossing record set by the Mauretania 20 years earlier with an average speed of almost 28 knots (52 km/h). The ships used bulbous bows and steam turbines to reach these high speeds while maintaining economical operating costs.
In 1933 the Italian 51,100-ton ocean liner Rex, with a time of four days and thirteen hours, captured the westbound Blue Riband, which she held for two years. In 1935 the French liner Normandie used a revolutionary new hull design and powerful turbo-electric propulsion to take the Blue Riband from the Rex.
The post-WWII era was a brief but busy period. Notable transatlantic liners included the United States, which was the last ocean liner to hold the Blue Riband, and the 1961-built France (later renamed Norway) which held the record for the longest passenger ship from when she entered service in 1961 until the launch of Queen Mary 2 in 2003.
The new ocean liner will join the Iranian shipping fleet in 2011 in order to help the country carry out its oceanology project on the Indian Ocean.
Compiled by Ghanbar Naderi
© Iran Daily 2009
