This is why Trainees should be supervised, not run as a team!

Wrong. Its very plain and simple. At 5mph you may as well stop in the roadway and set the brakes. Both drivers in the wrong. The FCC driver obviously didn't avoid a collision that could have easily been avoided. The CRST could have just as easily avoided putting motorists lives at risk. The driver created a lethal situation that any person with an ounce of common sense would not have done. Whats done is done. Age doesn't equal experience...neither does driving schools.

 

You have a big problem. For some reason you have got a chip on your shoulder for older drivers that have been out here for a long time. We are not all the same just like all newbs arent the same. When it gets to the point you want to bash old guys so badly that you condone the actions of trainees that put human life at risk..then its pretty sad. I guess you and your beloved Swift have been slammed so many times by loudmouths on the radio that you literally hate just about all drivers at this point. Pssssttt....not everyone does that ( rambler whispers). Very sad.

 

I see flashers, I move over into the hammer lane. Both were at fault. The trainee couldn't recover from a missed shift or didn't know he had throttle left, the trainer shouldn't be snoozing. The dead driver should of been paying better attention. I'm sure fatigue played a role on his part.

Back in the old days we didn't have near the traffic on the roads as we do today.
I'd rather have 100,000 students on the roads with trainers than without. That would be real interesting.

About pilots being smarter? Nope, back in my ATC days I seen plenty of stupid things just like in truck driving. Some pilots you had to yell at to obey commands. Pilots that wouldn't stop for runways when you tell them to hold short, etc. I was working ground control one day and told a guy to taxi to runway 25. The idiot took off from the taxiway. Plus there was the one's that could barely speak english... There's smart and dumb in any profession.

 

No chip here. It's too bad you didn't read my comments in that other thread about this same incident. My response here is due to the fact of what was posted here before my comments. Nobody wanted to assign blame equally around, where it belongs.

Since it's such a chore to track that other thread down, let me briefly paraphrase what I said before: The student was wrong for not waking his trainer up when he knew he was in trouble. The trainer was wrong for underestimating his student's abilities. The FCC driver was wrong because he wasn't fully aware of what was going on around him. And the passing driver was wrong for not trying to warn the FCC of the slow CRST.

See there? Everybody gets a little bit. It's not all on one person.

Again, I ask: forgetting names on wagons. What do you do when you drop a drive line? Not like you can go anywhere. You're dead in the water where ever she comes to rest. And it might be in a travel lane. I already know the answer. You put on your four-ways and, sometimes, place your triangles out. I know...we're supposed to always do that. You've seen probably far more than I have of drivers just sitting there with their flashers going and no triangles. Regardless, the vast majority of drivers avoid collisions with slower trucks and breakdowns every day...whether they are out here for 40 years or 40 days.

I haven't checked for this and I don't know whether it's even tracked, but I'll say it anyway. The stupid s*** like backing collisions, pulling trailers over hoods, ripping doors off, tearing up DOT bumpers and aiming for those yellow guard poles is done by newer drivers.

Catastrophic life-taking crashes at higher speeds are usually caused by people right around ....(listen close here) ...MY experience level. Why? Overconfidence. Overestimation of abilities. More interest in speed rather than safety. Brand new drivers are too chicken to go fast through a construction zone. They are not used to the dimensions of the vehicle...so they are the ones getting hollered at to hurry UP, already! By someone with between 3 and 7 years of experience. Noobs are afraid of that Jersey wall. It WILL jump out and bite that front fender. Those in the low-medium experience level will be the impatient ones.

Drivers with 10 or more years experience tend to be somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. However, if someone with a "mega-fleet" messes up, they WILL say something about it. They have caused their share of crashes. Like the 25-year vet in Pennsylvania that ran a stoplight at an intersection he has been at hundreds of times.

What was going on here was a bunch of people saying "lookie there! CRST really did it this time. Any one factor could have changed and this crash would never have happened.

All four drivers bear responsibility in this.

 

This thread is more about common training practices than it is about the company's that use these practices.
Almost all of the training company's treat trainees as team members for most of the time they are on a trainers truck.
This is what needs to change.
They need to take the cpm pay out of being a trainer. The trainers need to all be company driver. No lease Ops. And they need to be paid salary while they are training.
No mileage rate used at all during training.
That truck needs to be used as a solo truck for the first 3 weeks. Then a few weeks running like super single. Meaning 3/4 team miles. At these miles they can still have the trainer next to the trainee for the shifts they drive.
Then after they have 5 weeks of training in or so they can go to full team for 2-3 weeks.
By then they can start looking at upgrade.

The training company's look at trainees as a profit source. This needs to be changed. The trainee needs to be an investment in the future. Not a source of cheap miles. They will be a source of cheap miles for a year or more anyway, while they are receiving sub standard trainee pay of less than .34 cpm.

 

By the way.
This set up is based on the current training model that is used by most schools of very limited training in schools and quick turn around.

If/ when the FMCSA puts new training rules in effect for getting a license the times will change.
If a trainee has 2 weeks class. 2 weeks backing. and 80+ hours actual driving time in schools before going to a company, they will not need as much training time at company's.
If/ when this happens they can change the solo with trainer time down to 2 weeks. And the additional time with a trainer down to another 2-3 weeks. In which time the trainer and trainee can team some.
The trainer and trainee should still be paid a salary for the first few weeks. And I still do not believe a mileage rate is permissible for any of the time. Nor do I believe that lease Op's should be training at any time. Since they have too much reason to want to make the trainee a profit source.
A trainer should be getting making 10%-20% more than their normal pay while training. But they should mostly be training due to wanting to teach.

 

This exact same thing happened to a company i was with:

This was westbound 40 right after 81 spills into 40, so knoxville. Our driver had his turbo go out and he was in the middle lane going really slow. An american freightways (this was before they became fedex freight) pulling doubles rammed into the back of our truck and tore the rear 3/4 of our trailer off literally and the am freightways truck flipped over.

We were found at fault and had to pay (insurance paid the claim).

i am perplexed at the findings as i feel there is generally no excuse for rear-ending a vehicle---unless, as pointed out, there is a deliberate applications of the brakes of the vehicle that was rear-ended or someone pulls out suddenly from the shoulder etc. But i will say that our driver could have handled the situation better.

 

Middle lane. CRST was in the Granny lane. Maybe that's the difference.

 

little bit of highway hypnosis can happen to anyone. you're mentally running along at 2:00 a.m. and all of a sudden you realize you've been looking at something for a couple minutes before it registered on you. had it happen to myself more than once. middle of snowstorm chugging along still able to see headlights and the centerline. when you start coming up on another vehicle front vis goes way down but you are still catching the taillights, all of a sudden your focus changes and you realize its a plow truck doing 30 mph. when your eyes don't have something specific to focus on they automatically focus about 3 feet(or something) so if you are not scanning to avoid this your eyes can be so unfocused as to not see the hazard until its too close to avoid. no matter whether you have driven 1 mile or 1 milion accident free the only 1 that counts is the next 1. its life sometimes the first time you really screw the pooch big time is the last time