Ric:

We may need to agree to disagree, but I'll take one more shot at it.

I think that when driving a small boat in heavy fog, dodging lobster
buoys, and other traffic, you can't take your attention away from the
wheel for more than a second or two any more than you can read the
newspaper when driving sixty on the highway.

Suppose you're on final in fairly choppy weather in a plane without
automatic landing and there's no one in the right hand seat. Can you
really do anything besides land the plane?

No? Not because you don't have spare brain capacity, or even a spare
hand, but because your visual attention has to be focused on the
runway.

Now, as you pointed out, this isn't a completely fair analogy -- the
small boater can stop, pay attention to the radar for a few minutes,
and then start again. However, few people will actually do this -- it
takes too long to get where you're going.

I want to ask a couple of questions -- please don't take offense, none
is meant ---

1) How much experience do you have in small boats in heavy fog?
2) ... where there are pot buoys all over?
3) ... where there's a lot of traffic of all sizes, even on foggy
days?
4) ... with small boat radars?

By small boats, I mean 24' or so, with an outboard or outdrive, so
that the steering is inherently unstable -- it tends to yaw if not
tended all the time. By small boat radar, I mean basic -- no ARPA,
just two electronic bearing lines and two adjustable range rings, and
a seven inch display. By a lot of trafffic, I mean twenty or more
boats and ships that would be in sight if it weren't for the fog.

I ask because there aren't too many places in the USA where you get
heavy fog, many pot bouys, and lots of traffic and just as I can't
really speak to the workload of a commercial pilot, one who hasn't
been here can't speak as well to the challenge we're discussing.

Regards,

Jim Woodward
www.mvfintry.com

"Ric" wrote in message ...
"Jim Woodward" wrote in message
om...
Yes, but the airliner has an autopilot -- nobody is actually steering
it, which was part of my point -- you can do this on a large, stable,
vessel with an autopilot, but not on a small boat. And on the
airliner, you have two pilots, an air traffic controller, and there
are rules which pretty much everyone follows. And, finally, the
controller that's guiding the airliner is on the ground and has full
automatic radar plotting in three dimensions, so that every target is
shown with course, speed and altitude. The small boat radar doesn't
do automatic plotting and can do only two manual plots at a time on
screen.

What you describe above is actually rarely the case. I'm an airline pilot,
and the workload even with modern aircraft is still much higher than on my
boat. On older aircraft, or with military aircraft, there is simply no
comparison. But the point I'm making is not just to argue which is the
harder to manage, a boat or a plane, but it is simply that you can adapt to
higher workloads as you get more experience. What is a high workload to
somebody with little experience of a high workload cockpit is a cakewalk to
somebody who has done it for a while.