Talk:Western Approaches

Comments

A map would improve this article. I was going to add one but I can not find a public domain map to add. Twfowler (talk) 18:17, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

It has one now, but the English and Russian labeling raises a few questions given the subject of the article. Perhaps it should just be labelled in one language - I vote for Russian. Jmdeur (talk) 17:41, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

If there are questions, let's have them. --Боцман (talk) 14:43, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Why would you vote for Russian when this is the English wikipedia and most English speakers can't read Russian? That seems absurd. Antarctic-adventurer (talk) 11:01, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Northern limit ambiguity

The article states The north and south boundaries are defined by the corresponding extremities of Britain. Presumably either this means the extremities of Great Britain or of the British Isles... but the map hedges its bets by placing the northern limit at the tip of the Orkneys, some distance north of the tip of Great Britain (i.e., the mainland) and some distance south of the tip of the British Isles (at the northern tip of the Shetlands). Which is correct? Grutness...wha? 09:16, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Disputed content

The description of the extent of the Western Approaches appears to be highly questionable. For instance, Admiralty Chart 4102, Western Approaches to the British Isles, shows a substantially greater area than that suggested in the map in the article - with the Southern limit roughly on the same latitude as Brest and the Northern limit the latitude of the northermost part of Shetland.

Looking for official usage of the term that supports this understanding of a larger area than in the article, the official report into a maritime accident "in the Western Approaches"[1] shows a position to the South of that delineated in the article.

See also Celtic Sea's mention of "Western Approaches" - is there a case that these articles should be merged?

One problem is that the over-fascination with things military within Wikipedia (and this editor has edited a number of World War 2 articles, so that is self-criticism) may bias sources and hence articles to focus on a military usage, rather than the whole range of usages.

Furthermore, the term "Western Approaches", appears to be used by some maritime writers to mean "Western approaches to the English Channel" - which appears different from the intent of the article, but should perhaps be addressed therein.
ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 22:05, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

This book gives a definition of the area around western Britain and the western Atlantic. Probably there will be wide range of possibilities. -- GreenC 02:18, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I suspect that there might be three predominant definitions of Western Aproaches - a geographical one, a government/intergovernmental organisation one (thinking of things like maritime search and rescue, etc.), and a military history one (e.g. Battle of the Atlantic).
ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 08:45, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I heard Helen Willetts use "Western Approaches" in a weather forecast for Storm Evert, at the time south of Ireland. On the one hand this sounded a little like a '50s newsreel, and on the other is very much in line with the 'Celtic sea' sense (or of course in the southern portion of the less specific one). There's also a nanostub article at Southwest Approaches, which seems to be at least-near-synonymous with the "Western approaches to the English Channel" sense, and with the Celtic Sea. My sense that should be merged to one or other of these articles, if not indeed all three merged. 109.255.211.6 (talk) 15:11, 31 July 2021 (UTC)