Classification Systems for Life Jackets -- Life Jackets #4

“Safety Moments, in support of the Culture of Safety”

By Chuck Hawley, San Francisco Station, 4/1/2025

Introduction

This is the first part of two-part or possibly three-part series, inside of a 10-part series, on life jackets and how they are developed. In previous articles, we’ve discussed the purpose of a life jacket, what produces buoyancy in a life jacket, and what performance attributes are desirable and may involve trade-offs with other attributes. 

This article is about the process by which life jacket standards and requirements have changed in the last 50+ years leading up to December of 2024, when new standards and requirements took over. In the second part of this article, available next month, we’ll discuss what we think are the ramifications of the latest, greatest (?) regulations. 

From 1970 to 2000ish

 In the 1970s, a standardized way of describing life jackets and their life saving potential was introduced by the US Coast Guard and Underwriter’s Laboratories, along with a new term for life jackets: Personal Flotation Devices, or PFDs. The term PFD was intended to cover a wide range of products which were then subdivided into “Types”, with a Roman numeral from I to V. Life jacket manufacturers built their products to meet the very rigid specifications contained in the Underwriter’s Laboratories standard (UL 1123), which defined the construction methods, the materials which met the strength and weathering requirements, the ease of donning the PFDs, the in-water performance, the size of the individual who would eventually wear the product, and other criteria..

Personal Flotation Devices were offered in the five “types”:

Type I, or Offshore Life Jackets, with a minimum of 22.5# of buoyancy, intended to turn unconscious wearers face-up, and approved for commercial vessels as well as recreational.

Type II, or Near-Shore Buoyant Vests, with a minimum of 15.5# of buoyancy, intended to turn most unconscious wearers face-up, and approved for some commercial vessels and all recreational vessels. 

Type III, or Flotation Aids, which were intended for “calm, inland waters” or where there was a good chance of a quick rescue. These had a minimum of 15.5# of buoyancy in adult sizes, and generally were more comfortable and were available in a wide range of sizes. Many Type III Flotation Aids had encircling belts and were categorized as Watersports Vests for waterskiing, personal watercraft (Jet Skis, or PWCs) and other high speed boating activities. 

Type V, or Special-Use Devices, which was a catch-all category for flotation devices that did not fit one of the more specific types like I, II, III, or IV. Think of these models as having beneficial characteristics (like the inclusion of a chest harness in the case of offshore inflatables), but they didn’t comply with the standards for the other types. Certain Type V devices had to be worn in order to be counted in the vessel’s inventory of safety gear, and the only way to determine that for certain was to read the label on the inside of the life jacket.

Type IV, or Throwable Devices. This category included the classic three: life rings, flotation cushions, and horseshoe buoys, none of which are intended to be worn. The concept was to be able to throw a floating device to a person in the water who was too foolish to have not worn their own life jacket. In the 1990s, when the Lifesling became Coast Guard approved, it became a fourth type of throwable device in addition to the original three.

The introduction of inflatable life jackets

When inflatable life jackets became Coast Guard Approved in the mid-1990s, it threw a wrench into the logic of the Personal Flotation Device classification scheme. While it had been possible to guess the Coast Guard type of inherently-buoyant life jackets just by their appearance, inflatable life jackets didn’t look or operate like their foam and kapok brethren, and had different buoyancies and different inflator types that had to be shoehorned into the existing types. 

This required a new UL Standard to deal with inflatables: UL 1180. The standard covered a wide range of inflatable life jackets: models had different buoyancies, different inflators (water-activated, hydrostatic, and manual), and inflators that had a “cylinder seal indicator” and those that did not (see a future Life Jacket article for more on that.)

In the early 2000s, many marine safety products vendors got confused by offering near-identical inflatable life jackets while giving them incorrect descriptions. Common mistakes included:

• Some were required to be worn to be counted in the vessel’s inventory of life jackets, while others weren’t. There was no obvious visible difference between these models.
• Some were given a Type V classification while other virtually identical models were considered a Type III or II. For example, all inflatables that had a built-in safety harness were given a Type V designation because it was argued that the life jacket required more training due to the inclusion of the harness..
• Inflatables often had two type designations: think of it as a legal type, to determine when a lifejacket could be used, and a performance type, that was related to its life-saving performance in the water. You could, until recently, buy a “Type V inflatable with Type II performance”. This is the sort of confusion that is generated when a new type of product is forced into pre-existing categorization schemes. 

The only reliable way to know the type of the life jacket and its restrictions on use was (and is) to read the life jacket label.

In the rest of the world…

While this was going on in the U.S., the “rest of the world” (at least, those countries that used ISO standards as opposed to UL standards) were busy making and selling life jackets using the ISO 12402 standard, which was similar, yet different, than the UL standard. Within one of the ISO “Performance Levels”, inherently buoyant and inflatable life jackets existed amicably. 

The New North American Standard

In the early 2000s, an effort was begun in the U.S. and Canada to clean-up the designations of life jackets and to either adopt the ISO life jacket standards, with some modifications, or to at least have a common standard between the two countries so that life jackets could be sold by Canadians into the U.S. market, and vice-versa. The resulting life jackets would meet the carriage requirements of both countries. The result, after roughly 15 years of work, was a new North American life jacket standard, UL 12402. This new standard used “Levels” that corresponded to the ISO buoyancy levels (above), with the addition of a 70 Newton (15.7#) level since the majority of life jackets in the U.S. have that amount of buoyancy. 

Part of the new standard development was to improve the labels used on life jackets, borrowing some aspects of the ISO labels, and some that were unique to the North American standard. We’ll go into details about labels in a future article, but the new labels are a dramatic improvement over the text heavy, monolingual labels that were part of the previous standards.

The life jackets available in U.S. and Canadian boating stores are somewhat in a transition phase as the industry moves from the old standards to the new standards. Shopper in stores and online may encounter:

1. Lifejackets that comply with the “old” standards that are still legal to sell and use on boats.
2. Lifejackets styles that were made to the “old” standards,, but which are taking advantage of the new labels and an explanatory placard that describes the new labels.
3. Entirely new life jackets designs built specifically to the UL 12402 standard, and using the new labels and placard.

The Coast Guard Announcement of the Lifejacket Harmonization

On December 6, 2024, in the Federal Register, Vol 89, No. 235, the Coast Guard published the regulations regarding the new North American Standard in a 47 page filing. While it’s taken over two decades to get to this point, the regulations appear to have caught the industry off-guard, containing unanticipated requirements and omissions. We’ll discuss those regulations, presuming we can figure them out,  in our next article on life jackets.

The Cruising Club of America is a collection of accomplished ocean sailors having extensive boat handling, seamanship, and command experience honed over many years. “Safety Moments” are written by the Club’s Safety Officers from CCA Stations across North America and Bermuda, as well as CCA members at large. They are published by the CCA Safety and Seamanship Committee and are intended to advance seamanship and safety by highlighting new technologies, suggestions for safe operation and reports of maritime disasters around the world.