Oceaneering, a United States subsea engineering company, told Offshore Northern Seas in Stavanger on 26 August that it was drawing lessons from more than 100,000 hours of remote subsea piloting run through onshore operations centres1. Stavanger is where the conference was held; the company is American, and the hours were logged wherever its vehicles work.
What those hours measure matters more than their size. They count human remote piloting, a person in a building ashore flying a vehicle in the water, rather than autonomous operation, and the company states neither the measurement period nor how many vehicles produced them2. A hundred thousand hours accumulated by one fleet over a decade and the same total logged by many vehicles in two years describe different businesses.
Moving the pilot off the vessel takes people out of an expensive offshore rotation and puts them on shift in an office, which changes the cost of a working day at sea before it changes anything about the machine in the water. Automation of the piloting itself is the step after that, and the hour count is not evidence of it.
Operators keep publishing these totals because they are the only comparable numbers in a market where most vendors disclose nothing. Ocean Infinity made a claim of the same shape on 30 July, 13,000 uncrewed hours for Needlefish in Kuwait. Neither figure has been audited, and the two companies do not define the term the same way.
