After the windows, the design and layout of controls and equipment at each operating station — upper pilothouse, lower pilothouse, and doghouse — are the most important considerations for maximizing operator performance. Get this wrong, and you undercut the people actually running the vessel.
The criticality of thoughtful design cannot be overemphasized. Each instance of unnecessary compromise, corner-cutting, or hasty decision compounds the others. Combined, they significantly degrade an operator’s situational awareness and ability to pilot the vessel safely.
There should be a special place in hell for the creators of menu-driven user interfaces for the most critical and frequently adjusted radar controls: gain, tune, sea clutter, rain clutter, variable range markers, electronic bearing lines, and parallel indexing. Add target acquisition and deletion for an ARPA (automatic radar plotting aid) unit. In pilotage waters, this is a serious problem. Particularly aboard vessels with solo operators, including tugboats and other small vessels, menu-driven controls can be incredibly distracting, aggravating, stress-inducing, and counterproductive to navigational safety. Operators are literally fighting with the very equipment meant to improve safety. We need knobs and buttons, thoughtfully laid out.
Communications are vital to navigational safety. Awkwardly placed radios with difficult basic controls don’t help. Master and slave units don't always play nice. Cheap antennas with cheap coax cable installed haphazardly in random locations often bleed all over each other every time a mike is keyed. Imagine having to constantly adjust volume and squelch up and down on three or four radios just to talk because if you don’t, the feedback sounds like Jimi Hendrix playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. That is reality.
We’ve all heard it hundreds of times: safety first. Stay safe out there. Keep it safe. We all need support and help to do that.
