Transport: Safety Anomalies

Last week 125 of the numerous people in the U. S. who are professionally preoccupied with the traffic problem went to Ann Arbor, Mich, for the two-week National Institute for Traffic Safety Training, held at the University of Michigan. In Ann Arbor they paid $10, got a room at the Michigan Union, signed up for classes. Several things they were taught might have surprised many a citizen:

¶ That a “high grade moron” makes a better driver than an intelligent man, because intelligent people are apt to think of other things while driving.

¶ That people with bad eyes and slightly deaf ears drive better than people who can hear (and worry about) every body squeak and can see a pretty girl two blocks off.

¶ That after a blowout, as after a skid, it is dangerous to put on the brakes until the car has slowed down and come under control.

But the biggest anomaly on the curriculum was a demonstration to disprove the popular notion that driving would be made safer if governors were put on cars to limit their top speed. The students saw three demonstration cars almost pile up when a car with a governor, overtaking another, found itself with inadequate emergency power to pass quickly as another car came in the opposite direction.

. . .

From Washington came more spectacular news of the mischievous effects of limiting emergency power. Month ago, when a Lockheed 14-H (on Northwest Airlines’ Flight Four from Seattle to Chicago) fetched up against a pine tree after taking off from the Billings Municipal Airport in Montana, all sorts of wild guesses were hazarded about the cause of the accident. Investigators of the Bureau of Air Commerce went to Billings and tried the experiment of recreating the circumstances of the accident. In a similar Northwest plane with the same load they took off under similar conditions and quickly discovered the accident’s cause: The pilot had taken off without a long enough run, and his plane had stalled because of inadequate speed. They discovered also on the ship with which they experimented that a mechanism had been installed to limit the forward movement of the propeller pitch-control lever. They looked for a similar mechanism in the wreckage of the crashed plane, and found it. The investigators concluded that the crash would probably not have occurred even after the pilot’s error, had he got full emergency power from his propeller when he threw the lever forward as far as it would go.