Nine years on, the time has come for an upgrade to the stage automation systems and Princess Cruises based in Los Angeles have tasked Anton, now owner and Managing Director of stage automation specialist AVW Controls Ltd to carry out the upgrade on Sun Princess and again on its sister ship, Dawn Princess.

AVW are therefore upgrading the Sun Princess to its award winning Impressario motion control system. This upgrade will happen whilst in dry dock in San Francisco, and later its sister ship Dawn Princess will have the same upgrade at the end of November in Freeport, Bahamas.

The upgrade involves the replacement of the main computer control systems from the original DOS based system, which was beginning to show its age, to the Impressario system which currently operates within Windows XP. This will enable the ships crew to learn the system much quicker as the crews generally rotate every three months. The upgrade will also mean that AVW can remotely access the control system from its base in the UK whilst the Sun Princess is cruising in the Caribbean or  its Alaskan tours thus making remote diagnostics a reality.

The stage automation systems on both vessels will then be future proofed for the foreseeable future.