A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads
As a former pilot wannabe I do apply a similar set of practices and they do work wonders.<p>Some other tips I carried over from training:<p>- Don&#x27;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&#x27;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).<p>- 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&#x27;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&#x27;t hesitate to use touch. Pilots routinely manipulate parts of their planes such as flaps to check they&#x27;re in no obvious non-working order.<p>- Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. A properly maintained car emits basically no unusual noise. I can&#x27;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.<p>- 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.<p>- Be humble: don&#x27;t text (you&#x27;re not looking at the road), don&#x27;t phone (you&#x27;re context-switching to a virtual space with the person you&#x27;re talking to, not <i>in the car, driving</i>), don&#x27;t drink (even a slight drink slashes reaction time by serious amounts, possibly by orders of magnitude).<p>- 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&#x27;re approaching the limits outside of controlled conditions and backing off in the safe zone. Don&#x27;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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>As with the helmet example, the ultimate goal is to <i>avoid collisions altogether</i>. You&#x27;re driving several metric tons of metal at unnatural speeds. Unnatural as in: as low as 50km&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sensory_illusions_in_aviation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sensory_illusions_in_aviation</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OODA_loop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OODA_loop</a>