Port and starboard vessel's starboard side by green and its port side by red. Aircraft are lit in the same way. Port and starboard Port and starboard are nautical and aeronautical terms of orientation that deal unambiguously with the structure of vessels and aircraft. Their structures are largely bilaterally symmetrical, meaning they have mirror-image left and right halves if divided long-ways down the middle. One asymmetric feature is that on aircraft and ships where access is at the side, this access is usually only provided on the port side. To understand which is which, when a person is facing the bow on a
Sinking of the RMS Titanic the first class dining room noticed a shudder, which they thought might have been caused by the ship shedding a propeller blade. Many of the passengers felt a bump or shudder – "just as though we went over about a thousand marbles", as one survivor put it – but did not know what had happened. Those on the lowest decks, nearest the site of the collision, felt it much more directly. Engine Oiler Walter Hurst recalled being "awakened by a grinding crash along the starboard side. No one was very much alarmed but knew we had struck something". Fireman George