Safety Management

Excellent post. It clears a lot of things up for me in regards to the industry particularly given that you have some flight experience. I do remember the DownEast airlines accident well and have studied it in detail. It follows your theme in the post above with deadlines, hazardous weather and organizational pressure. Not to mention pilots, like drivers need to get paid.

In a lot of ways it sounds like there is a tremendous amount of pressure put on drivers. The idea that drivers (and loads) are easily replaceable is eye opening to me. The culture seems very challenging from the view of an outsider.

Thanks again for the post. Very helpful.

 

Your post is very insightful. I fully admit that I have a lot to learn about the trucking industry. This is frankly opening my eyes. Flying was similar to this years ago but you are absolutely correct that in aviation, most play by the rules because it is terribly unforgiving to mistakes. And it's really an expectation. I would think that it would be just as easy to get killed in a truck as it would in an airplane and we deal with the same issues - get there itis, bad weather, time pressures, etc.

It does seem that trucking has unique challenges that would be difficult to control. At the end of the day, all of us want to be safe and go home.

 

It's understandable but unfortunate. It's ironic that the true cost of an accident is much higher than investing in safety. That doesn't even count the human toll that an accident causes. I feel for the drivers honestly - lots of risk and no support to manage it. Culture seems to be a major factor in the industry.

I'm truly uneducated on the trucking industry so I hope I'm not out of bounds talking about these issues but the discussion is very interesting.

 

Here's another way to look at it- top level company execs only see the tip of the iceberg while the drivers know 100% of the safety issues. Just no way to report it or have it acted on and no culture that encourages that.