On 23 January 2018 a helicopter and a fixed wing plane crashed after a mid-air collision near Philippsburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, in south west Germany. Four people, two from each aircraft, died. Both crews were conducting training flights under what the aviation world terms ‘Visual Flight Rules’ where the principle of “see and avoid” applies. The tragedy happened despite what was described as a dramatic last moment evasive movement by the fixed wing plane.

Does any of this sound familiar?

It should, since the roads also operate under our own version of Visual Flight Rules and the principle of ‘see and avoid’ also applies to us.

The key point of Visual Flight Rules is that BOTH crews should be looking out for each other.

Yet what do we do on the roads?

The driver who doesn’t have priority has to look out for, then avoid the driver who does. Rather than set up the rules so that BOTH road users have equal responsibility to avoid a potential collision, the notions of ‘priority’ and ‘culpability’ creates a situation in which one of the collision partners firmly believes that it wasn’t THEIR job to look out for a potential crash.

“The driver didn’t look properly.”

“The driver should have looked harder.”

I’ve lost count I’ve heard riders saying just those things after a near-miss or an actual collision.

So does this reliance on ‘the other fellow’ work? Does it, heck!

You, me and everyone else on the roads is human. Humans frequently make mistakes, often misjudge the threat level, and occasionally take extreme risks.

So WHY would we believe those statements of error?

Because we are routinely told this is the problem. Just do a google on ’cause of collisions driver failed to look’ and you’ll see what I mean. I’ll just give you a single example and leave you to find your own.

“‘Failed to look’ is number one contributory factor”

That’s the Road SafetyGB website, dated July 6 2015. The text continues:

“The IAM says a Freedom of Information request to the DfT confirmed ‘failure to look properly’ as the most common contributory factor which is included in more than 30,000 collisions annually.”

Sarah Sillars, then the IAM’s chief executive officer, said:

“These figures show conclusively that simple human errors continue to cause the majority of accidents. Drivers cannot blame something or someone else for a collision happening… the message is clear that drivers must apply their full attention to driving…”

‘Drivers cannot blame something or someone else’… but isn’t that EXACTLY what we do when we claim a driver didn’t look properly? “It’s not my fault, mate, I wasn’t supposed to be looking.”

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WHAT IS SCIENCE OF BEING SEEN? (SOBS)

SOBS is my in-depth investigation into the
‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You (SMIDSY) collision
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of the pilot Biker Down courses, our team was
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Each year, there are calls for more training, more penalties, yet if the IAM repeated the exercise today, nine years later, they’d discover the ubiquitous ‘failure to look properly’ is still top of the list. Yet, the fact is that when a ‘looked but failed to see’ collision happens, it’s often the case that the vehicle that caused the collision was VISIBLE to the other driver in the run-up to the crash. Two to Tangle.

But most riders and drivers believe that the OTHER driver should be keeping them safe. Just think about all the “be safe, be seen” campaigns there have been over the years.

The trouble is, taking that to be our ‘system of road rules’ effectively means that half the road users at any one moment are ‘flying blind’ and NOT looking out to see why they may need to avoid another vehicle.

Ask yourselves, how many of us put any REAL effort in to ‘flying’ our bike to the equivalent of aviation’s Visual Flight Rules? How many of us are actually ready to ‘see and avoid’?

When will road safety stop telling us that collisions are the ‘fault’ of the person who made the initial error? Isn’t it time that we changed our thinking and took some responsibility for staying out of crashes like this? When will we all be encouraged to take some personal responsibility for searching out the drivers about to make an error?

Junction collisions are ‘Two to Tangle’ incidents – one road user’s error sets up the collision, but there are no rules that say we have to ride into it. Let’s apply our own ‘Visual Riding Rules’ by looking out for ANYONE who could pose a threat…

…and stop putting ourselves in the line of fire simply because the Highway Code says it’s someone else to keep us out of trouble?

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