MacGregor’s Horizon gangway has received DNV certification for floating-to-floating personnel transfer, allowing motion-compensated walkway connections between two vessels that are moving independently rather than between a vessel and a fixed structure.
The certification was granted under DNV-ST-0358 following a sea acceptance test. It extends the existing Horizon platform to operating scenarios where no fixed landing point exists — a limitation that has shaped crew rotation and service planning for floating production units and, increasingly, for floating wind.
The technical change is at the gangway tip. A purpose-designed flap replaces the conventional docking head used for landings on fixed structures, while LiDAR-based relative motion tracking feeds the motion compensation system in real time to hold a controlled connection as both vessels move.
“This new capability opens up flexible crewing models for FPSOs and floating facilities, so that crew changes can be carried out at sea, service campaigns don’t need to be routed around port calls, and walk-to-work access between vessels can be based on the field’s schedule,” said Prateek Sadhana, MacGregor Product Owner for Walk-to-Work Gangways. “In the renewables sector, this supports the service logistics that floating wind operations demand — where there is no fixed structure to land on whatsoever.”
Floating-to-floating is delivered as an extended function of the Horizon family rather than as a separate product, and can be retrofitted to units already in service. Operators running Horizon gangways gain the capability on equipment they already know, without a separate qualification process.
Sadhana added that certification carries commercial weight as well as technical: it gives owners, charterers and insurers an independently verified basis for planning vessel-to-vessel operations. MacGregor is presenting the capability at ONS 2026 in Stavanger this week. For the Baltic, where projects remain fixed-bottom, the immediate relevance is limited — but the same walk-to-work logic applies wherever service fleets want to cut port calls out of the schedule.
