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Five Real DP Incidents From 2026, and What Each One Actually Teaches

🕑 5 min read words Revision

Why This Matters

IMCA's Dynamic Positioning Event (DPE) bulletins are the closest thing the industry has to a dedicated DP-incident archive – anonymised, CHIRP-style write-ups drawn from real events reported by member companies. This mini-guide covers the five most recent bulletins (DPE 01/26), each a genuine event, each worth five minutes of any DP-qualified officer's attention regardless of which one of these specific situations you'll ever actually face.

1. “Think Twice. Press Once!”

A DP Class 2 vessel on drilling operations experienced an incident traced back to a lack of operational knowledge at the console – a control input made without full understanding of what it would actually do to the vessel's position-keeping. The bulletin's own title is the lesson: on a DP console, the gap between intending an action and understanding its consequence is exactly where incidents like this originate. A button press that feels routine because you've done something similar before isn't the same as a button press whose specific consequence, on this system, in this configuration, you've actually confirmed.

2. “Network Issues, Not a Thing of the Past”

A DP Class 3 vessel experienced a network-related event during saturation diving operations – with divers in the water at the time. DP Class 3 systems exist specifically to keep position through a single failure without needing to suspend a critical operation like diving; a network issue surfacing during exactly that operation is the scenario the redundancy is built for. The bulletin is a reminder that network/communication failures haven't gone away as a DP risk category just because the industry's focus has shifted toward other failure modes in recent years.

3. “All Swept Up”

A DP Class 2 vessel conducting rock placement operations near a structure experienced an undesired event. Close-proximity work – rock placement, pipelay tie-ins, anything near a fixed structure – is where a DP excursion has the least margin for error and the highest consequence if position-keeping degrades even briefly.

4. “Hybrid System Won't Accept Load”

A DP Class 2 vessel on auto-DP experienced a hybrid power system rejecting a load it was commanded to take. As more DP vessels adopt hybrid and battery-supported power systems, this bulletin flags a real, current failure mode specific to that newer technology – not a legacy diesel-electric issue.

5. DP Drill Scenario – Loss of Main DP System UPS

Unlike the other four, this is a training scenario bulletin rather than a live incident report – IMCA publishing a structured drill for loss of the DP system's uninterruptible power supply. Worth actually running as a drill, not just reading, given how many of the other four bulletins this month involve exactly the kind of power/system continuity this drill is built to test.

The Pattern Across All Five

None of these are the dramatic, career-defining DP loss-of-position events that make headlines. They're the routine-feeling ones – a console input, a network hiccup, a power system quirk – that IMCA's own DP Committee considers worth a dedicated bulletin precisely because routine-feeling is exactly when operational knowledge gaps go unnoticed until they matter.

Test Your Knowledge

Think you've got this covered? Put it to the test in Crew Connect's free Knowledge Checker — try a quick DP/engineering round and see how you score.