These Mini-Ships Teach Pilots How to Navigate Major Waterways | National Geographic

When you look at the ships, you may think that they're small toys. But the minute you get on it, the power is to scale to the size, and it becomes very real, very quickly. When we build a new ship, the first question is, is this ship correct? Is it close to the reality? The length and the width and the drops of the shipping people are reduced by a scale of 1 in 25. So, a 250-meter ship, which is a big ship, will be 10 meters here.

The history of this place goes back to the 50s. Later on, SO came to us; they had a problem in changing the size of the ships, going from roughly 50 thousand tons to two hundred thousand tons. Their captains were a bit anxious about that because they had no simulators, no computers in the 60s. So, they were looking for a place where they could anticipate this. As engineers, we didn't know if that would work, but we told them, "Okay, come and try." That was a big success.

So, from there, we started. In 1967, we opened the place, and after that, we mainly received pilots. Now, about 80% of the people coming here before we received are 200 people per year, which is a very small school. As a port engineer, I would be ashamed of designing a boat like this; it is full of difficulties, and that's the aim of our training.

We have here the locks; one of them here is a Panamax, the new Panamax, 50–55 meters wide. So, the ships can go around here, around this waterway. Horrible is a great place to come in; we can tweak our skills. We can do things here that we couldn't do with real live ships, but we do it to scale here, so it's on real time.

We have Russians here, we have pilots from Brazil, and of course, myself from Canada. So, even over lunch and dinner, we talk about different scenarios, different ships, different cruises. It's a good learning experience. We try to concentrate on what is more difficult to do on the simulator, so in order to be complementary.

The difference may be found, especially in what seafarers call interactions between two ships when they're at close quarters, when they meet in a canal, when they are close to a bank. At this time, that cannot really be computed correctly, but here, everything’s so. We reproduce shallow waters, bank effects, currents, and also waves.

Usually, when we build a new ship, we try to ask the captain of the real ship to come over and to go on the lake with our model and just do things, you know? It's a few hours; when he comes back, we ask him, "Is it okay?" If he says, with some tears in the eyes, "It's my ship," then I'm happy.