The class query lands on the engineer who designed it

When a class query lands on a drawing, it finds the engineer who made the decision underneath it. Not because anyone planned this. Because no one else can answer it.

The comment sheet comes in from DNV, or ClassNK, or Bureau Veritas. The project coordinator reads it. The lead structural engineer reads it. The approval manager reads it. And then it goes to the person who decided on the frame spacing, the weld category, the detail at the bracket toe — because that is the only person who can provide a substantive response.

This is treated as natural. It is not. What it means, in practice, is that the engineer with the deepest technical knowledge on the project, and the highest ongoing cognitive load, is also the person responsible for corresponding on every design decision they have made since the first GA was issued. Class queries do not arrive in batches timed to suit the engineering schedule. They arrive when class reviews the drawings, which is when the engineer is deepest into the next phase of work.

Consider what answering a class comment actually requires. The lead structural engineer stops. They locate the original calculation set, the relevant rule reference, the version of the drawing that was submitted. They reconstruct the reasoning that led to the detail — sometimes months after it was made. They draft a response that is technically precise and that will satisfy the surveyor, because a vague answer generates a follow-up comment and the cycle repeats. Then they go back to whatever they were doing. The interruption cost is not the ten minutes of correspondence. It is the reentry cost: the time to reload the context of the work that was paused. For complex structural analysis, that cost is not trivial.

Across a newbuild, this happens at scale. A mid-size vessel project might carry two hundred class comments across structural, outfitting, stability, and systems. The distribution is not even — structural and safety-critical systems attract more scrutiny, which means the comments concentrate on the engineers who are already carrying the most technically demanding work. The principal structural engineer does not answer forty comments. They answer the forty hardest ones, because those are the decisions only they made.

None of this appears in the project plan. The project schedule has milestones for drawing submission and approval. It does not have line items for comment response load by engineer. The approval manager tracks outstanding comments. They do not track who is answering them or what else that person was doing when the query arrived. The accumulation is invisible until it becomes a delay — and by the time it becomes a delay, it is too late to redistribute the burden.

There is a secondary effect that receives even less attention. When the engineer who designed a detail is also the person writing the class response for that detail, the response is expert but the knowledge stays local. The reasoning that satisfied the surveyor — why that detail was chosen, what rule interpretation was applied, what alternative was considered and rejected — lives in an email thread and in the head of one engineer. On the next project, when a similar detail comes up, the same question gets answered again from scratch, by the same person, or by someone who has to ask them. The organisation does not get smarter. It gets faster at repeating the same retrieval work.

The structural problem is this: class approval is treated as a communication task appended to a design task, when it is in fact a design task in its own right. Responding accurately to a query on a structural detail requires the same technical judgment as making the original decision. It demands the same person. But it is scheduled as administration — something that happens between the real work, handled in the gaps, not planned for, not costed. A two-hundred-comment project does not have two hundred administration tasks distributed across the team. It has two hundred technical judgments concentrated on the engineers who have the least capacity to absorb them.

Principals know this. They have watched their best engineers disappear into comment cycles at the exact moments when the project needed them on new work. They have written the responses themselves rather than burden the team further. The problem is not unfamiliar. What is unfamiliar is naming it as a structural defect in how design offices account for approval work — not a coordination problem, not a class society problem, not a resourcing problem in the ordinary sense. A misclassification that makes a significant cost invisible, and therefore unfixable.