SecurityDriver News

Protective Driving Operations

3-DAY PROGRAM SEPTEMBER 13-15, 2010
PROTECTIVE DRIVING OPERATIONS
ESI’s TRAINING FACILITY IN COLORADO
$950 (Limited Discount Price)

ESI and Tony Scotti’s VDI will be sponsoring a 3 Day Protective Driving Operations in Grand Junction Colorado.

The course provides participants with a unique opportunity to build upon their existing training and further develop the knowledge, skill and ability required to perform one of the most challenging aspects of protection, providing safe and secure transportation in a high risk environment.

This is accomplished through a series of informative discussions and hands on practical exercises, students will develop an understanding of what the driver/vehicle combination can and, most importantly, cannot do when confronted with a potentially life threatening situation while behind the wheel. An emphasis is placed on how the driver can most effectively manage the limited time and distance available to them as a safety or security incident unfolds.

Classroom discussion will include the role vehicles play in mission strategy and tactics. Students will learn how armored vehicles affects the decision making process, and how to select the proper vehicle for the mission – or how to maximize the effectiveness of the vehicle given.

All hands on exercises are scenario based and designed to train and measure driver ability. Hence students will be objectively tested, and are required to attain a standard. All test and standards are based on the laws of physics as applied to vehicle attacks. The scenarios used during the testing are from case studies of vehicle ambushes.

At the conclusion of the program students will have the knowledge too combine mission objectives, with the vehicles supplied, and if necessary, have the skills needed to escape the Kill Zone.

CLASSROOM

DYNAMICS OF A VEHICLE EMERGENCY

CASE STUDIES OF VEHICLE ATTACKS

ROADSIDE BOMBS

KILL ZONE THEORY

TACTICS AND SECURITY VEHICLES

ARMORED VEHICLES 

HANDS ON EXERCISES

BACKING-UP EXERCISE

ROLLING AMBUSH

ATTACKS AGAINST THE CONVOY

VEHICLE FAMILIARIZATION

RUN FLAT EXERCISE

VEHICLE COMBAT

DRIVE DOWN DRILLS

 For more information contact Brandon Delcamp at 888 718 3105

The problem with Unintended Acceleration has brought about discussions on brakes and braking. The following is some quick hits on braking. Some of this is repetitive from a previous post, but it is worth repeating.

The most powerful control on the vehicle is the brakes. Basically the brakes produce larger changes in speed than the gas pedal.

Our school cars – police packaged Ford Crown Victoria’s – can accelerate from 0 to 60 in about 9 to 10 seconds. With a trained driver – the vehicle can stop from 60 to 0 in an average of 3.5 seconds. The Crown Vic can stop from 60 MPH in about one third of the time it takes to accelerate to 60 MPH.

Because the brakes have an enormous potential, they can be the producer of both good and evil. According to the Society of Automotive Engineers most accidents start out with improper braking techniques.

 A small increase in speed will produce a large increase in stopping distance.

The fact is that if you double your speed you increase your stopping distance by a factor of four.

 If you increase your speed from 40 to 50 mph, speed has increased by 25 % but stopping distance has increased by 50 %.

The above is true even if you have ABS brakes. ABS cannot repeal the laws of physics, make you immune to road conditions, and most important, cannot overcome stupidity.

It makes no difference if a driver brakes with their left foot – threshold brakes – or uses a parachute to stop. If the speed is doubled the stopping distance increases by a factor of four.

 A major component of braking to avoid an emergency has nothing to do with braking, its all about where you look while the emergency is unfolding. Simply stated – your hands go where your eyes look.

 As soon as the emergency presents itself look for a place to put the vehicle. Look where you want the vehicle go and your hands will follow your eyes.

 Many times the driver’s eyes fixate on the object they are trying to avoid, and the result is they drive into it.

 SUMMARY

 Be careful about increasing speeds – for every 10% increase in speed it is a 20% increase in stopping distance.

 When confronted with an emergency press the brake pedal as hard as possible.

 Look where you want to put the vehicle.

 Bottom line you cannot arbitrarily increase your speed, it’s literally deadly.

Whether driving to the mall, driving the boss to work or driving in a high risk environment most driving is done in the Comfort Zone. The Comfort Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking where the vehicle reacts as the driver expects it to. The Red Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that creates big changes in the way the vehicle responds, changes that are not expected, and create anxiety. Unless it is a race, the Red Zone is not a place a driver would go to on purpose, it is a place visited only when bad things are happening.

 It  may be difficult to think of a 10,000 lb armored Suburban as “sensitive”, but a car’s controls are very sensitive to speed, the faster you go, the more sensitive the vehicles braking and steering become. This area of sensitivity is the Red Zone.

 Research indicates that going from the Comfort Zone to the beginning stages of the Red Zone, happens with an increase of a fraction of an inch on the steering wheel, and/or an increases of speed as little as 2 MPH. To complicate the issue research has also shown the driver gets into their own personal Red Zone way before the vehicle does. As the driver enters Red Zone the vehicle will send feedback that makes the driver feel uncomfortable (the researcher’s way of saying scared). At this stage of the Red Zone the vehicle is still controllable, but the level of skill needed to keep the vehicle under control has gone up dramatically, and the window of opportunity to maintain control is extremely small.

 Look at it as the vehicle has a limit and the driver has a limit. The drivers limit is much lower than the vehicles limit. Basically the driver is uncomfortable with a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that are below the amount of speed – steering and/or braking the vehicle can take. 

 It is the transition from Comfort to Red that creates a training challenge. In an emergency a driver will be required to quickly transition from their Comfort Zone, into the Red Zone, there can be no hesitation. Common sense dictates that a driver has to be trained to recognize and manage this transition. In our opinion this transition is the essence of driver training. One of the goals of a driver training program is to raise the amount of steering, braking and speed a driver is comfortable with.

All vehicles are supported by a cushion of air contained in four flexible rubber tires.  If you could place a car on a glass floor and look at it from below, you would see four patches of rubber, most folks are surprised at the size of these four patches, depending on the vehicle – each patch a little smaller than a hand.  These are the only points of contact between the vehicle and the road.  Each of these four small patches of rubber is known as the “contact patch”. It is these four patches that create the traction which makes the vehicle – go – stop and turn. It is these four patches that send the feedback back to the driver, and it is these four patches the driver has to manage. Consider them to be the source of information needed to control the vehicle.

 How Much Rubber Do You Have?

If you conduct training and want to know the size of the contact patch your vehicle creates, jack up your vehicle, put ink on the bottom of the tire, and let the car down on a piece of paper (we use finger print ink). Have someone keep their foot on the brake as you let the vehicle down, it keeps the tire from rolling, and lower the tire on the paper – the tire will leave a mark on the paper that represents the tire contact patch. The paper should be outline paper dived in one inch blocks, it makes measuring the contact patch easier.

 Once done you have a “picture” of the tire contact patch, and can easily measure the size of the patch in square inches (width of the patch times the height of the patch). If you take that number multiply it by four that is how much rubber is on the road.

 In our vehicles, police package Crown Vics with P225/60R16 tires with 32 PSI, we have 36.75 square inches per tire and all four tires will give us of contact area of 147 square inches of rubber touching the road.

A while back I contributed a short article to the “Training Log Book” by Rob Pincus. Rob came up with a rather unique and ingenious idea, a book that documents your training.  The book contains over 2 dozen essays from training industry professionals offering their advice in regard to defensive and tactical training. Whether you do a little or allot of training the book is a must. The essays are worth the price of the book.

For more info

A short article I did for State Farm Insurance

We have developed an iPhone Application on Distracted Driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) driver distractions are the leading cause of most vehicle crashes and near-crashes.  The App came about when we looked at a study released by the NHTSA and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI).  The study discovered that 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involve some form of driver distraction – and the distraction occurred within three seconds before the vehicle crash!   For those in High Risk Security that number “three seconds” is familiar. It is the “Kill Zone”.

The Kill Zone Concept is used to train our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid a vehicle ambush. Our iPhone Application uses the same theory to explain and avoid the dangers of Distracted Driving.

The theory is simple; a Kill Zone is a time-distance relationship. How much time does the driver have and how close is the problem (distance)?  The Kill Zone is directly related to the speed of the vehicle when the incident occurs.

An example of how Kill Zones relate to Distracted Driving look at the following scenario – You are 300 feet from a traffic light moving at 40 mph which is 60 feet per second. You get a text message; it takes 3 seconds to read the message – that means you drove 180 feet (3 seconds x 60 fps) without looking at the road. 

You were 300 feet from the traffic light, but as you were reading the text message, you moved 180 feet. When you looked up from the text message, you are 120 feet (300 -180) from the traffic light that has now changed from yellow to red.

You are 120 feet in front of the red light and closing in at 60 fps.  You are in the Kill Zone, a time distance relationship, the distance is 120 feet and some quick arithmetic tells you that you have two seconds to react. And you are driving deeper into the kill zone.

If you can get you foot on the brake in a half-second (that’s fast), you will travel 30 feet (half of 60 fps).  So at the point of applying your brakes, you are 90 feet from the traffic light (the initial 120 feet minus the 30 feet it took to reach for the brake). 

You will have to stop a car moving at 40 MPH (60 feet a sec) in 1.5 seconds. Life is going to get terribly exciting.

Our App uses case studies in the form of presentations, similar to the one above, and offers lessons learned.  The objective is to keep you out of the kill zone. 

You can direct any questions or comments to

tonyscotti@securitydriver.com

lawrence.snow@sjcwebdesign.com

Depending on your occupation, there is no doubt there are scenarios where one may need to drive fast. The difficulty associated with driving fast depends on three issues, the skill of the driver, the vehicle they are driving and the environment they are driving through. On an ice covered road 30 MPH can be exciting, on a four lane highway with the sun shining, 80 MPH could go unnoticed. In a three vehicle motorcade, the driver of the lead vehicle may not think 70 MPH is a problem, but the driver of the third vehicle may disagree with that assessment.

Driving fast is a complicated issue. Let’s be clear that driving fast in a straight line is not difficult, unless you are sitting in a Dragster that consists of a metal tube with a 6000 HP engine behind you, and you are planning on going 300 MPH in a quarter mile. Driving fast becomes difficult when you need to operate one of the other controls (brake – steering) of the vehicle. In a non racing scenario it makes little difference how fast you’re traveling in a straight line, the skill (and excitement) comes in when you need to do something with the car, like driving around a corner or making an avoidance maneuver, at that point it becomes not an exercise in high speed straight line driving, but an exercises in high speed braking or turning. All this requires training and practice, and there is an enormous difference between driving around a corner fast, and driving out of an emergency.

SOME BASIC THOUGHTS ON DRIVING FAST

As speed increases, drivers’ eye tends to focus on objects just a short distance in front of the car’s hood. Common sense says that the faster you drive the further ahead of the car your attention should be focused. In a high risk environment you need the eyes of everyone in the vehicle coupled with a method of communicating what they see to the driver, or drivers, this requires training and practice.

The faster you drive, the more often you should consult your speedometer. You cannot rely on your own judgment; the faster you drive, the more your perception of speed becomes distorted.

Don’t drive faster than you can see. If you are driving at 60 MPH you are moving approximately 90 Feet a Second, most researchers say that you need 2.5 seconds to react to what you see, that means at 60 mph you would need 225 feet to react to what is happening. It is my opinion that training considerably cuts down those 2.5 seconds.This is the most important issue and training point – When you increase speed, you are suddenly driving a very different car from the one you were in control of a few moments ago. If you double your speed from 40 mph to 80 mph, the forces acting on the vehicle, has been increased by a factor of four. Turning the steering wheel at 80 mph will put four times as much stress on the car as the same maneuver at 40 mph. And no matter what braking method you use, it will take you four times longer to stop the vehicle.

 It may be difficult to think of a 10,000 lb armored Suburban as “sensitive”, but a car’s controls are extremely sensitive to speed, the faster you go, the more sensitive the vehicles braking and steering become. Small changes in speed (as little as 2 MPH) will dramatically change the vehicles response to the drivers input. Controlling a vehicle while driving into a corner or through an emergency maneuver is a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and measured.

To give an example of how sensitive vehicles are to speed; A competent driver can drive through our slalom exercise at 30 MPH with little or no problems; at 32 life will start to become exciting; at 35, doable but very exciting; at 37.5 the car will be sliding, but again doable; at 40 MPH the driver will not be able to complete the exercise. A change of about 2 MPH will be the difference between successes and failure. How this translates to the real world is that you can be driving 100 MPH in a straight line (easy to teach, it’s the pedal on the right – press on it) but if you need to make an emergency maneuver or drive around a corner you will have to slow the car down from 100 MPH to a speed that the driver – vehicle – environment can handle, and that is not easy to teach or master.

DESIGNING DRIVING EXERCISES

The purpose of  placing a student in a given exercise or scenario is to evoke a response from the driver/vehicle which introduces or reinforces specific skills or skill sets , and to afford an opportunity to coach the student on applying those skills and, of course, measure their baseline performance and quantify their improvement. None of this can be accomplished without understanding of vehicle dynamics. This understanding leads to questions that a professional driving instructor asks and can provide answers to:

 How far apart are the cones in the slalom?

What is the width of the barrier in the lane change?

What is the maximum capability of the vehicle, measured in G’s, in each exercise?

What is the maximum rate of de-acceleration of the vehicle?

At what speed does the student approach the vehicles maximum capability in each  exercise (or scenario) that you place them in?

Why are the answers to these questions so important? Because if the instructor does not know the maximum capability of the vehicle and what conditions and/or limitations an exercise will impose on that vehicle, it is impossible to measure the capability of the driver. And if the instructor cannot determine what the driver was capable of at the beginning of their training and then compare that to what the student is capable of at the conclusion of their training, there is no way to determine if the training was effective; in fact, there is no way to establish and meet objective goals for the training.  Perhaps more importantly, without measuring the student’s capability there is simply no way for them to fully recognize what they can, and cannot, do behind the wheel.

 Ultimately, you cannot separate vehicle dynamics from driver training; hence instructors MUST have a thorough understanding of vehicle dynamics and the ability to apply that knowledge to driver training.  Because once they have that understanding, they then have the ability to provide training that incorporates the three critical factors of survivability behind-the-wheel emergencies – the driver, the vehicle and the environment – into exercises that not only provide a mechanism for measuring the driver’s improvement, but also closely replicate the types of emergencies he or she is likely to face.

 For an example of just how advantageous this understanding  can be to the instructor, we  just need to look  back at a an Instructor-level Vehicle Dynamics and Exercise Design program TSVDI conducted for a Federal Agency. When we passed out the calculators (standard issue for the vehicle dynamics savvy instructor), one of the students was looking at the calculator like a monkey might look at a watch – confused. It wasn’t long before he came up to Tony and expressed his displeasure that he would have to learn math to pass the course. He, like many others we have trained, pointed out that during his high school days; (with some it even extends into their college days) math was the bane of his existence. In a roundabout way he made the point that he was concerned that he would not pass the course because of the math. Tony’s answer was the same for him as it has been for scores of others with the same concern – hang in for a few days, and give it your best shot, while we give our best shot to teaching you the math.

 Three days later, as we were on the track designing a training exercise to recreate a specific incident that involved their unique vehicles and the difference a new found knowledge of math and vehicle dynamics made was quite obvious. Tony had put together some guidelines for the students regarding the exercise design elements, and this same guy that had , just a couple of days before, been concerned about passing the course walks up to him  and says “I don’t agree with the way you suggested we design this exercise”. He then proceeded to walk Tony through nearly a full page of calculations he had worked out to express how he thought the exercise should be designed and thoroughly explained why he thought that. In just a few days this instructor had gone from being intimidated by the math required to design driving exercises to combining his knowledge of the laws of physics (and, god forbid, math)  with his operational knowledge of the agencies mission objectives, the unique vehicles they operated and the types of incidents they had faced in the past to develop an exemplary driving exercise; one in which the drivers capability to resolve the problem while maintaining control of the vehicle was able to be objectively measured and, more importantly, drivers would be able to recognize that they were fully capable of resolving successfully.

 At the end of the day, that is the real value provided by an instructor who understands vehicle dynamics and how they apply to drivers training.

From an article by Joe Autera  jautera@vehicledynamics.net 

and Tony Scotti  tonyscotti@securitydriver.com

1 – Surveillance Detection is Critical

The most import issue is Surveillance Detection. In both the attacks it is apparent that surveillance of the target and the route played a critical role in the attack planning process. My 35+ years working in the armpit places of the world tells me that in many situations surveillance detection is not just the best protection; it may be the only protection. That is why it has become essential for security providers to learn how, when and where an attacker is likely to conduct surveillance as well as how to plan, manage and conduct effective surveillance detection operations.

2 – You Need the Right Tools for the Job

You need to have the right equipment – in our world that usually means a vehicle that can do the job. In a high risk environment doing the job is defined as an armored vehicle that will stop whatever rounds it is they are going to shoot at you. If you are in a Level 4 vehicle and they are firing Level 7 rounds, it’s is like taking a knife to a gunfight.

3 – The Attack Begins Long Before the First Gunshot

If your day is interrupted by the pitter patter of rounds hitting the windshield, it is not the first time the bad guys have had eyes on the target (that’s you). In one of the scenarios the attack was carried out by a large group with most of the rounds directed at the principal’s vehicle, this is an indication that the attackers had done their homework. More than likely they had surveillance in place up to the moment of the attack. Refer to Point 1.

4 – Training, Training, Training

In a recent vehicle ambush in Mexico, which lasted for minutes, not seconds, the principal’s vehicle was hit multiple times, at least once by grenade fragments, and was partially disabled due to a flat tire. Despite all of this, the drivers of both vehicles did exactly what needed to be done to ensure the principal’s survival, indicating excellent training. Your training must (not should) include Surveillance Detection.

5 – If the Vehicle Stops You Lose.

Time and time again we have seen that in a vehicle ambush the worst possible scenario is for the vehicle to come to a stop in the kill zone. Getting back to point 3 – training must include the “Science of the Kill Zone”. Even in attacks against an armored vehicle, once the vehicle is immobilized the attackers have control over the movement of the target, and that is not a good thing.

The complete article   http://www.vehicledynamics.net/articles/taleoftwo.html