A Casual Pickup Encounter

    While conducting an aviation safety audit of air charter operator in the Houston, Texas area, I had to return to my hotel about noon to retrieve some work material. I was driving a rental car and had the windows up and the air conditioner on. The airport south perimeter highway was median-divided with two lanes on each side and saw little traffic at that time of the day. I was doing about 45 mph in the right lane with no cars in front of or behind me.
A beat-up early model pickup truck towing an open trailer, both filled to the brim with household furnishings and junk, slowly entered the highway about 100 yards ahead of me. My initial reaction was to pass it, but with my turnoff about a half mile ahead I decided to just stay on the right and coast along, accepting the narrowing distance between us.
Finally, the pickup truck gained some speed, but not much, and then its right turn signal came on. All this somewhat irked me because now I shook my head regretting not passing the mobile traveling junk yard earlier. At this point, I was probably five car lengths behind the trailer and closing, I was moving at 30 mph, and the pickup truck seemed to be coasting along now.
I checked my rear and side mirrors (no cars in view), but not the left side blind spot, in preparation to pass and then looked forward. Now appearing from nowhere were a few lengths of iron water pipe extending at least 12 feet beyond the end of the trailer. Yes, you guessed it, there was no red or otherwise colored flag or warning marker attached to the ends of the pipes. The pipe ends, ever enlarging and engaging in my view, were at the approximate height level of the middle of my car’s windshield.
In slightly more than a nanosecond, I instinctively swung the car to the left (blind spot never checked) and ducked my head as the car’s hood swooped under the pipes clearing them by a few inches and the pipe ends about two feet from the windshield.
When I partially recovered, the pickup truck had turned off the highway none the wiser. I pulled over and stopped before my turnoff and was in a state of shock mixed with anger at the pickup truck driver and a sense of amazement of having come ever so close to being decapitated.
I have always prided myself in my professional visual powers of aircraft physical defects and pattern recognition, micro and macro. But in this case, my visual ability failed me. Yes, the other driver was definitely negligent for not using some kind of warning marker, but this would have been little comfort to my wife looking at my closed coffin or at best caring for a lobotomized accident survivor spouse.
My intuition had been right on; at first sight I had an inkling or suspected the pickup/trailer should be treated with extra caution, but I gave in to my disdain of the unseen driver. In the days since starting the audit I had seen quite a few dilapidated vehicles on the roads of Houston, reminding me of my Buffalo, N.Y. youthful driving exposure. And the drivers and riders in these clap-trap vehicles were obviously not at the middle or upper end of the local socioeconomic order and I had allowed my social bias to affect my good driving instincts.
And so when first approaching the pickup/trailer my thoughts were somewhat drifting about the road-site-blight of this traveling junk yard and maybe a snobby view of myself being better than the other driver. The bottom line is that I could have, and should have, been more defensive and used my negative social views in a positive safety way. In other words, given the obvious mobile junk yard situation, I should have worst-case assumed the driver was of the same safety-absent-like character and maintained much more space between the pickup/trailer and my car.
In the safety profession, we often speak of safety objectives and cultures and the desirability of companies becoming learning organizations. If every employee could break free from the fears of management recrimination and/or co-worker humiliation to tell a story of their personal work experience where safety was compromised, then the aviation community could learn to be a safer place for workers and the aviation traveling public alike.
Learning organizations, in order to successfully function as such, must be made up of learning employees. And this goes double for aviation safety consultants too. If one is going to “talk the talk,” then one must “walk the walk” as well.

Bart J. Crotty is an airworthiness/maintenance/flight operations/safety/security consultant, expert witness and the maintenance human factors chairman for the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.
703-569-4431 or bjcrotty@verizon.net