A buoy named Suez

You remember Driver's Ed, right? Poor Mr Adkins, at Towson High, had the uncool job of sitting in the passenger seat of a BA Chevy Biscayne while young drivers careered through the streets of Towson and surrounding communities. Driver's Ed wasn't mandatory then, but if you passed it, you saved on insurance, so, yeah. Nerves of steel, that man had. Oh, and he had a brake pedal on his side of the car, but no steering wheel.

You also will recall earlier this year when the Ever Given cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal waterway in Egypt. The BA ship was turned sideways by high winds and a sandstorm, and anyone who remembers trying to parallel park that Biscayne between two stanchions surely remembers the feeling of being wedged in.

There is a sort of Driver's Ed program in Port Revel, France, and the hope is that cargo captains can learn to avoid the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald Ever Given by taking the course, which uses replica boats in the middle of a French forest and is supposed to teach those captains and pilots how to navigate the Canal.

It's a scale model -  one twenty-fifth the size of a passage in the real Suez.  The philosophy is, if you can learn to get a ship through in this tiny likeness, you'll have no problem with the real thing.

"It's a bit hard to recreate sandstorms," said  Francois Mayor, the managing director of the Port Revel training facility. "But we have gusts of wind which will push our ship to one side or another."

Instructors know what to expect on the real waterway, so they create fake steering problems and engine outages to see how trainees handle themselves.

"You have little space to maneuver. You have to be particularly focused," said Mayor.

And just to keep it really real, they also have a mini-San Francisco Bay, and an ersatz Port Arthur, Texas, to teach docking and maneuvering cruise ships and tankers through those crowded ports. Turbines beneath the surface create currents and waves.

Mayor expects to see lots of trainees soon, as shipping firms try to avoid another massive snafu like the Ever Given incident, which blocked a vital shipping canal for six days and cut global trade off.

"After each accident... we see new clients coming," said Mayor. "The cost of training at Port Revel is nothing like the cost of having a vessel like that stuck for a day."

Attention, Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration! This could be a great idea for some of our less-than-adroit motorists. Send them to France!

Not for training. Just send them to France.