
A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads - lifeisstillgood
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/
======
scott_s
> _Not convinced? Okay, go to a mirror and look repeatedly from your right eye
> to your left eye. Can you see your eyes moving? You cannot. Now have a
> friend or partner do the same thing while you watch them. You will see their
> eyes moving quite markedly. The reason you couldn’t see your own eyes move
> is because your brain shuts down the image for the instant that your eyes
> are moving. Experiments have shown that it is impossible to see even a flash
> of light if it occurs within a saccade._

When you have your phone in selfie mode, the latency is low enough that it can
feel like a mirror. When you move, you see yourself in the camera app move.
But if you do the above experiment, you can definitely catch your eyes moving.
Then you can shut the screen off and do the above experiment using the screen
as a mirror and you cannot. It's a neat demonstration of the latency.

------
mitko
This was eye opening (pun not intended) and make me a bit worried as a
recreational cyclist - many of my clothes are dark and it seems worth
investing in brighter ones.

As a driver, I found that using BGE setting of the side mirrors (it's wider
out, slightly overlapping with rearview mirror), coupled with keeping an eye
on the road gives me a much better situational awareness, and prevents the
need to turn my head in many cases - "Nope, there's a car in my blind spot,
not changing lanes yet". It's a minor convenience but really helps with
fatigue of the neck muscles, and keep my eyes forward, so I can react if
anything happens in front of me. I've been driving BGE for nearly 10 years
now, and I feel a lot safer that way. It takes some getting used to not seeing
the side of the car, so if you consider doing it, I'd recommend getting used
to it on a chill road, before getting on the highway.

[https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzonegla...](https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzoneglaremirrormethod.pdf)

~~~
baud147258
>many of my clothes are dark

I've taken so many risks like this when I was using a bike: dark grey coat:
check, black pants: check, dark grey backpack: check, black shoes: check. And
usually my light (only in the back) is barely visible because of using old
batteries and forgetting to change them.

~~~
polaritron
Partly, the instinct is about feeling trashy, and having to replace worn-out
old junk as it accumulates stains, scuff marks, battle damage.

It feels wasteful to have to discard perfectly useful items, because they look
worn out. We all know that black, dark items tend show the least amount of
wear, and in the interest of efficient frugality, some of us gravitate toward
that instinct.

You look at a white t-shirt, and you know it's going to show pit stains by the
end of the year. A black t-shirt might show some white accumulation inside the
armpits, but not outside, and you really are only going to have to trash it,
once some holes show up. Same with socks.

So too with hi-viz stuff. You just don't want to buy something, and throw it
out, the moment it gives a sense of unintended imperfection. It's more an
equipment maintenance perspective, than a live, situational awareness point of
view. The best equipment is the stuff you have, and the stuff you have is the
stuff you keep.

Being a little OCD, but that's what's going on under the hood, from my own
perspective.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Everything costs money. Everything has tradeoffs.

Safety is no exception. It's all about management of risk. If you seek to
mitigate all risk you'll find yourself with even more risk because your bank
account is now empty. The internet is great at telling other people how to
spend their money so of course everyone will tell you you need the "best"
helmet and the "most" reflective jacket, etc, etc.

~~~
def_true_false
If you don't care about looks, you could just get some reflective tape (the
kind used for trucks, e.g. V82). Use it on the bike and helmet and you'll
probably be more visible than someone in a fancy jacket. Spending couple bucks
on safety seems like a decent tradeoff.

------
btrettel
Transportation cyclist here. This is a great article, but it only indirectly
touches upon one of the most effective tools a cyclist could have: an air
horn.

I have an Air Zound air horn and I feel much less safe riding without it. I'll
often give a few toots before approaching an intersection to increase the
chance that I am seen. And it has probably saved me from some major crashes
when I lay down the horn on someone. Many drivers seem to automatically brake
when I honk.

The horn is also great for giving bad drivers feedback. Most people who drive
poorly around cyclists seem oblivious.

Some drivers unfortunately see horn use as hostility. I have dealt with a few
road raging drivers who were very angry that I honked at them. I am pretty
certain most of these drivers would be angry with or without the horn, so it
doesn't much matter to me. The safety benefits also are far too large even if
these folks would not tend to be angry either way.

~~~
irrational
"see horn use as hostility" Of course they do. When people in cars honk at
other people in cars, the majority of time it is a sign of hostility. They've
been conditioned to perceive the use of a horn as a sign of hostility.

~~~
celticninja
Cars need to 2 horns:

A) excuse me/I'm here/the light has changed

B) you are a fucking idiot

~~~
rabidrat
A) dit B) dah

------
toomanybeersies
> Remember, lights are just as much about being seen as being able to see

I cannot emphasis this enough. It's terrible the amount of drivers who think
"I can see fine, I don't need to put on my headlights". Whenever I'm driving
on open roads (100 km/h areas) I'll always turn my headlights on. Like
aeroplanes, I think that anything on the road should have lights on it for
visibility.

~~~
cube2222
It's actually mandatory in most (if not all?) of the EU. You must have your
headlights on at all times.

~~~
ygra
Motorcycles maybe, cars have (by now) mandatory daytime running lights, but at
least in Germany for older cars it's not mandatory to have lights on during
daytime.

~~~
_pmf_
I remember that one country reverted its decision for mandatory daytime light
for cars because it decreased visibility of motorbikes (for which daytime
lights were mandatory).

~~~
lloeki
That would be France. The idea is indeed to increase visibility of the most
vulnerable vehicles. Motorbike riders behave differently than car drivers,
hence it is critically important to be able to distinguish them easily in
traffic (we downright suck at evaluating movements of light sources compared
to solid objects). This is also a factor as to why always-on daylights are
mandatorily placed lower than headlights.

------
exDM69
Not too long ago, I was very close to having a "constant bearing, decreasing
range" (CBDR) accident that the article is talking about.

I failed to slow down adequately to a T-junction and almost drove straight in
front of a truck, despite having looked in that direction _twice_ before
entering the intersection.

I'm pretty sure my vision was (partially) occluded by the corner pillar and/or
a snow pile on the side of the road and therefore tricking my brain exactly as
the article describes.

All it takes is a change in speed to avoid this accident. I now take extra
caution in these situations, especially T-junctions or 4-way intersections
without traffic lights.

~~~
phaedrus
I drive a Honda Element. The A-pillars are huge and cover a ridiculous percent
of the field of view. "Constant bearing, decreasing range" ought to be printed
on the side mirrors, or perhaps it should have been named the "Honda CBDR".
(Note: I love the car, this is just one of it's few less-than-perfect
attributes.)

On certain left-curving roads it's possible to drive 10 - 15 seconds being
unable to see _anything directly in front_ of you.

I compensate by bobbing and weaving to look around the A-pillar at every
intersection or when passing. Maybe it even makes me a safer driver because
there's no illusion - I _know_ there's a lot I can't see so drive accordingly.

~~~
theluketaylor
My biggest fear of driving a modern car is pedestrians and cyclists hiding in
the think A pillar when turning. I am also doing the bob and weave like a
prize boxer to make sure things don't escape my vision. I'd much rather run
into another car than a pedestrian since at least vehicle collisions are a
fair fight.

I'm so much more comfortable when I drive my vintage car. The greenhouse is
massive, so you can see everything without even turning your head. I also
drive that car much more consciously since it requires real effort. The trade
off is if I ever run into anything I'm under no illusions about the safety it
provides (which is none)

I can't wait for A pillars that are screens so they become invisible.

------
ruddct
Interesting read, up until this point.

“[As a cyclist], look at the head of the driver that is approaching or has
stopped. The head of the driver will naturally stop and centre upon you if you
have been seen.“

Please, please do not rely on this. Correlation is not causation, a driver’s
head might face your direction for lots of reasons (focusing on something
behind/in front of you, spacing out, looking at their phone, etc). Friends and
family have been bitten by this ‘trick’ before, thankfully not with deadly
consequences. When someone’s head is facing you, it does not mean they see
you.

A little surprising to see this advice in an article that’s mostly about the
eye being fallible.

~~~
icc97
It's not just the face, I always aim for eye contact.

But also as they say in the article it's about judging risk. If the face is
towards you you're very unlikely to be in the peripheral vision, so there is a
good chance the driver saw you.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> It's not just the face, I always aim for eye contact.

I do the same. It failed me once though: a young woman in a SUV was looking me
in the eye and drove forward; I managed to stop in the last moment.

------
Tomte
Relevant Twitter thread: "You want to know something about how bullshit insane
our brains are?"

[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624)

~~~
aembleton
Easier to read here:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html)

------
crispyambulance
This is sound advice.

The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was
going past an off-ramp.

The weird thing was that I thought the driver "saw me". It was late morning,
no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact,
she was looking "through" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person
on a bike was not what she was looking for.

Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo)

After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even
daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.

~~~
hammock
Off-ramps exist on separated-grade highways, which by definition exclude
bicycle traffic. What were you doing on such a highway?

~~~
crispyambulance
Not sure If I understand the exact traffic engineer definition of "off-ramp"
but I was going straight on an urban street that the off-ramp exited onto.

FWIW it was
here..[https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2686291,-76.6312124,3a,75y,1...](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2686291,-76.6312124,3a,75y,186.8h,88.78t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s6agwYLfVYPRBz3eV8wSbVQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

------
rconti
The part about the eyes not focusing near the pillars makes so much sense.

I've often griped about how hard it is to see out of modern cars with thick
airbag-equipped pillars, but still wondered how I managed to "miss" something
that clearly cannot completely hide in an A-pillar. (eg, because the pillar is
diagonal, the pedestrian's head or feet or both will still be visible even if
their midsection is obscured.

I used to commute through an area with an endless sea of stop signs, which
almost NEVER had cross traffic. My car had a rearview mirror that came down
too far and tended to block part of my view forward and to the right, and
sometimes pedestrians or cross traffic would 'hide' in the pillars. It's one
of those things where, if there had been no stop signs, I would have been much
more likely to notice cross traffic, but having to look at the sign and stop
line takes your focus for that last 2-3 seconds as you slow to a stop, so even
if you're "sure" you scanned for peds/cross traffic, maybe once every 6 months
I would begin to proceed and then suddenly see the movement of a vehicle or
person in my peripheral vision.

Those pillars and the rearview mirror didn't block what i was looking for, but
they must have cued my eyes to not look 'too close' to them. Interesting.

------
Jemm
This advice should be part of driver's ed curriculum.

------
lloeki
As a former pilot wannabe I do apply a similar set of practices and they do
work wonders.

Some other tips I carried over from training:

\- Don't look at bright lights at night, look slightly off, for two reasons.
First retina persistence will occur somewhere in your (larger) peripheral
vision, rather than in the small hi-res patch of your retina that is critical
to conscious sight. Second we are naturally driving towards where we look, and
lights are especially alluring. This is also valid for obstacles (static or
moving), don't look at them, look past or next to them, ideally away from the
direction of their movement (which is, as hunters, counterintuitive and
unnatural). This can save your life (and has for me).

\- Always perform pre-flight checklists, both metric, visual and tactile. This
is about checking the usual fluid levels (brakes are obviously key) and tire
pressure (don't be fooled, a slightly deflated tire can be invisible to the
naked eye or touch yet still be dangerous) but also inspection of wipers,
tires (tread and sidewalls) and wheels, brake discs, car underside, pedal
feel, turning wheel behaviour. Look for evidence of leaking fluids, wiggles,
wear, uneven surfaces. Don't hesitate to use touch. Pilots routinely
manipulate parts of their planes such as flaps to check they're in no obvious
non-working order.

\- Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. A properly maintained car emits
basically no unusual noise. I can't count the number of people who have undue
noise in their cars. At the very least a noisy car is an inefficient one! Plus
even if the noise is due to a harmless cause, it can cover other noises that
hint at more serious problems.

\- Respect the flow. It is critical to act as if traffic is a fluid, and
anything that disrupts the flow creates perturbations, which means more chaos
(hence less predictability) and increased risk of collisions. Think of those
beautiful fluid dynamics simulations and what happens visually when you
disrupt the flow at the edge, in the middle, introduce a narrow point or a
second inlet mid-stream.

\- Be humble: don't text (you're not looking at the road), don't phone (you're
context-switching to a virtual space with the person you're talking to, not
_in the car, driving_ ), don't drink (even a slight drink slashes reaction
time by serious amounts, possibly by orders of magnitude).

\- If at all possible, take extra classes on a track to experience vehicle
behaviour near, at, and above its limit in various situations. This will help
you in recognising when you're approaching the limits outside of controlled
conditions and backing off in the safe zone. Don't be fooled by the fact that
taking such a class makes you magically able to recover from, say, an
uncontrolled spin though: again, be humble.

\- Your body is constantly lying to you. As mentioned in the article, visual
perception is a tricky thing, and other senses can be deceptively abused[0].
Some may appear with reduced frequency due to the vastly reduced amplitude of
degrees of freedom in a car as well as visible cues compared to an airplane,
but situations may happen where those axes are involved (cars do tilt along
all axes!) or visual cues are lost (heavy rain, fog, night). Be aware of that,
and combat that with failsafe cues and training.

\- The OODA loop[1] is a thing that works well when driving, leading to
anticipation, but needs practice to be leveraged in emergency situations. So,
practice it regularly in safe situations, and neural plasticity will carve the
required neural pathways to operate efficiently under more stressful
conditions.

As with the helmet example, the ultimate goal is to _avoid collisions
altogether_. You're driving several metric tons of metal at unnatural speeds.
Unnatural as in: as low as 50km/h a brutal shock has a non-trivial chance of
outright ripping your aorta to shreds, and driving an armor-clad, comfortable
wheeled machine can't change that. As with most catastrophes, many dramatic
events on the road are not due to a single root cause but death by a thousand
cuts, some more aggravating than others.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Expecting the general population to do a pre-trip more involved than "yup, my
tires don't look flat" is a recipe for disappointment. It's also not
efficient. Mechanical failure causes a negligible portion of road accidents
and the overwhelming majority of those only affect the vehicle that had the
problem.

~~~
lloeki
Indeed. People expect cars to be appliances. Sadly they're not.

I'm not talking about mechanical accidents such as a tyre popping though. I'm
pointing out that the guy on a B road entered a curve, failed to account for
the clues that grip was closing in to limit due to underinflated tires, looked
into the approaching headlights which were blown up by its dirty windshield,
blinding him, pushed the brakes which further reduced grip both front (due to
wheels being turned) and rear (due to weight relief), misinterpreted the car
reaction due to loss of visual information and overcorrected, throwing his car
into a spin, and crashed into the incoming car.

Change "car" to "plane" and you get a thorough investigation pointing at the
chain of events that led to the crash, but somehow with cars society accept it
as normal, the go-to explanation generally being "he drove too fast", skipping
all manners of root cause analysis. But hey, it's more efficient to lay out
speed traps and reduce speed limits (both having proved to be inefficient
long-term) to satisfy lobbies of crying families hit by careless people and
looking for an easy scapegoat. Plus it rakes in cash like nothing else. Speed†
being a byproduct of movement, as long as you have movement you have a risk of
collisions, so the rhetoric can be recursively applied until we reach perfect
standstill; interestingly enough, some other means of travel proceed at much
higher speeds yet are statistically much less dangerous, because training,
procedures, infrastructure design, and maintenance.

† Speed _does_ have consequences, due to simple enough energetic calculations.
Nonetheless "speed" is not a _cause_ , it's an effect.

~~~
kqr
> But hey, it's more efficient to lay out speed traps and reduce speed limits
> (both having proved to be inefficient long-term)

Are these measures ineffective or is reduced speed ineffective? (When the goal
is to reduce fatal or serious accidents.)

------
sandworm101
Take the fighter pilot thing with a grain of salt. Some of this stuff belongs
more in the sky than on the road. The mirrors thing is a good example. Fighter
pilots seek to reduce head movements. During g and/or turns, turning your head
can lead to disorientation, even nausia. (It is about the little canals in
your ears.) That isnt an issue on the road. Dont try to reduce shoulder
checks.

The focus on being seen is also something to think about. Google "target
fixation". At night, drunks tend to drive towards bright shiny things.
Airstrips amd cockpits use this to hold a pilots attention. There is something
to be said for staying hidden, or at least not relying totally upon cars
seeing you. Better to stay where you cannot be hit in the first place, and
actively avoid cars. That might mean not riding with traffic approaching from
behind, or not trusting that if they see you they will avoid you.

------
dsego
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422378)

------
barking
In the past at a dangerous junction with limited visibilty owing to corners
and high speed traffic I found myself looking one way then the other
repeatedly before moving. Now I look to one side until I'm certain it's free I
look the other way and if I see nothing, I go. It feels like I'm fighting my
instincts but so far so good!

~~~
seszett
In this situation, I learnt (driving school in France) to first look to the
left, and once it's free then look to the right. If it's free, go.

I have to admit I don't remember the explanation I was given then but it made
sense, and as far as I know everyone's taught to do that here.

In a car or on a bike, it doesn't matter. You also do that at pedestrian
crossings.

------
upofadown
>... when passing junctions, look at the head of the driver that is
approaching or has stopped.

That doesn't really work any more with the steeply sloped windows of
contemporary aerodynamic vehicles. All you see is a reflection of the sky. If
the vehicle has tinted rear windows you don't even have a chance to see a
silhouette...

------
elchief
I've done the whole "where the F did that guy come from? I totally looked"
more often recently

Does it get worse with age?

------
alex_hitchins
Looks like this is from 2013, but still a good read.

~~~
xattt
There’s still bikes and cars on the road in 2018!

------
lifeisstillgood
To mods: A complete aside, but I posted this yesterday (say 30 hours ago) not
today.

is this some reset for labour day or other deeply cunning ranking algorithm?
Or maybe i fat fingered it ...

~~~
cesarb
This has happened before to a submission of mine, IIRC it was explained that
it's a manual reset by the mods to give an interesting submission a second
chance.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
thank you, could easily be that.

