The Feel of 13,000 Containers: How Pilots Learn to Navigate Changing Logistical Environments

Abstract

This article analyses how the 2016 expansion of the Panama Canal changed the work of the pilots responsible for navigating massive ships through the chokepoint. For pilots, the expansion meant learning to maneuver Neo-Panamax vessels that dwarfed anything in their experience. The pilot training associated with the expansion reveals a paradox at the heart of a shipping industry that pursues efficiencies through economies of scale and automation. In the confined waters where maritime routes converge, increased ship size and traffic may render a pilot’s embodied capacity to ‘feel’ how ships handle in particular environments more – not less – important. Combining analysis of historical shipping transitions, interviews, and observations at a 1:25 scale physical model training facility where pilots maneuver miniature megaships through a miniature canal, I argue that the Panama Canal Authority's institutional recognition of the importance of ‘feel’ in contemporary interoceanic transit indexes the emergence of a logistical environment that elevates the status of some forms of embodied knowledge, even as it diminishes others.