PANAMA CITY, Panama—On a recent Tuesday morning, Captain Fernando Jaen was piloting a cargo ship through the Panama Canal’s new set of intimidatingly narrow locks.  “The times we’ve had conversations, we ended up crashing,” Capt. Jaen said. “You have to concentrate.”  Moments later, a tiny miscalculation sent the ship’s midsection on a course to brush the wall. If the impact were severe, Capt. Jaen knew that he, and possibly the entire crew, might be plunged into the watery abyss below—which, in this case, might have required everybody to take a break and change their socks.  The Panama Canal evokes romantic images of seafaring precision and derring-do. Here, at a new $8 million training facility for freighter pilots, the only outsize thing is the potential for embarrassment. Experienced Canal pilots climb aboard miniature battery-powered ships with little engines, little rudders and little anchors all meticulously constructed to match the dimensions of real cargo vessels in 1-to-25 scale. They traverse a scale replica of the canal where the water ranges from about 2 feet to six-and-half feet deep.  There is nothing Titanic here. About the length of two pickup trucks, the ships have room for two to four sailors to safely stand or sit on their decks, which are sometimes piled with faux cargo containers that double as chairs.  When it gets cramped, pilots switch around to stretch their legs. The “tugmasters” who join them steer suitcase-sized tugboats by joystick on a remote control.  It is all part of what Panama Canal Authority officials refer to as a laboratory for maneuvers—a roughly 10-acre scale remake of the real Canal, complete with elfin docks, locks and a clone of the Culebra Cut that connects two man-made lakes in which several stations along the Canal are re-created.  “For everyone that comes in, they kind of laugh at the beginning. They look like toys,” said Capt. Jose Burgos, a Panama Canal pilot and training officer. “That’s the rub.”  In a recent practice run, Capt. Londor A. Rankin, the Panama Canal Pilots Union’s Secretary-General, and a pilot with more than 30 years of experience, hit a bank. A rubber stopper resembling a clown’s nose on the boat’s submerged bow softened the blow. Capt. Rankin straightened his vessel for another round of bumper ships.  The effect on his pride was life-size. “It made my ego feel this small,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “You have to respect the vessels in the simulator, as well as we respect the vessels in real life because they react very similar.”  The facility, which opened in March, is the newest of a handful of tiny training centers, including ones in France, Australia and the U.S., where maritime professionals come to practice driving gargantuan vessels without actually driving gargantuan vessels, which is impractical.  “When we’re piloting ships, we’re doing it for our customers. You don’t practice things on your customers,” said Capt. Alison Buckler, talking about a training course she took at the Maritime Pilots Institute in Louisiana.  She had her picture taken from the stern of a miniature cargo ship. She later posted it to Facebook. Her mother wrote “Cute!”  “It looks like a little boat,” said Capt. Buckler, who’s been a pilot for 12 years. “People don’t get it, but in our world, people get it.”  The new Panama center runs parallel to the real Culebra Cut in Summit, a region of Panama City, among lush hills brimming with monkeys and the occasional crocodile, one of which recently wandered into the training lakes. It was promptly evicted and a fence went up.  As the Panama Canal nears the end of a nine-year, $5 billion expansion to accommodate bigger ships, scheduled to open June 26, the Canal Authority plans to train its roughly 250 pilots on the new waterways.  They are also using computer simulators, but animations can’t fully replicate the feel of wind and water currents. Working on physical models provides a just-right dose of reality without life-size risks, said Nick Cutmore, secretary-general for the International Maritime Pilots Association, which promotes manned-model training.  At Summit and similar facilities, sea pilots get a dress rehearsal for disaster on a diminutive scale: malfunctioning electrical systems, stuck anchors, broken rudders.  Miniatures can be used to replicate all kinds of complicated real-life situations. With CyberCity, a 48-square-foot, 1-to-87 scale fake town, cybersecurity experts train to protect unsuspecting citizens from hackers. Two tabletop CyberCity settlements in New Jersey and Colorado, built by the SANS Institute, react to cybercriminals as they would in the real world. If hackers derail a train, the city’s tiny model train actually derails. If they fire the rocket, a Nerf projectile goes off.  Because they are scale replicas, the pee-wee ships feel like real ones, said Capt. Jaen. How they turn and respond to different water depths, plus their line of sight and horsepower, create the illusion of being on a colossal counterpart.  That said, the lakes’ birds and fish look like giants against the scale models. Rough winds rock a model ship much more violently. And everything happens faster on the smaller scale, making the exercise mentally taxing, trainers and trainees said.  One criticism of these mini-ships, said Capt. Joseph Murphy, a marine transportation professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, is cost. Weeklong training sessions can run upward of $10,000. The models themselves cost hundreds of thousands, and they simulate only the ship in whose likeness they are built.  The Panama Canal Authority shelled out roughly $500,000 for each of its two model freight carriers and is buying a third.  In a computer simulator, the “ship” can morph from a tanker to a cruise to a cargo carrier, said Mark Woolley, chief of staff in the Office of the President at SUNY Maritime College in New York City and a former executive for a simulator-development company.  “Simulation technology is so advanced, I don’t really see the need to go out on a small pond in a boat,” said retired U.S. Navy Captain Woolley. He said he has never boarded one.  The Canal Authority is banking others will see the need. It hopes its manned-model unit will draw mariners from around the world.  “You feel the adrenaline,” said Capt. Rankin, the pilots-union representative. “To me, it’s the best training we have gotten here.”
Pilots who will guide ships through the new, expanded Panama Canal are practicing on miniature locks with scale replica boats.