"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.