I was going to write something clever about beating this dead Class B AIS horse, but dagnabbit, this horse ain’t dead! More accurate might be to say that it’s stillborn, so far, at least in the United States.
That’s sure the impression one gets from Ben Ellison’s Class B Call-To-Action over at Panbo. Be sure to read the comments, too.
I don’t claim to know for an absolute fact that Class B AIS will produce for smaller vessels the significant safety enhancements that Class A certainly has for large vessels. But it might. Maybe not during its first year. Maybe not in three or four or five years.
But at some point, AIS or something similar is going to prove beneficial for small boats in crowded waterways. This I believe. At some later point, perhaps a decade or two from now, recreational boaters are going to consider AIS, or some similar offspring technology, as essential to safe navigation as GPS.
But you can’t get that ball rolling if you don’t let it out of the starting gate. Wow, I’ve really mixed up my metaphors again. 
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