It’s quite a remarkable sight if you’ve never seen it: an entire house, a 90,000-pound compressor, or even a rail locomotive strapped to a flatbed trailer, rolling down the highway. But sometimes, says Mike Clayton, the drivers in the escort cars leading the truck or trailing the massive load from behind, really have no idea of the weight of their responsibility.

Clayton, who runs Trailblazer Pilot Truck and Hotshot Service with his wife Karen in Leduc, Alta., says the pilot car business, an ever-growing spin-off industry of heavy-haul trucking, is no stranger to untrained drivers and fly-by-night operations. While each province regulates pilot car equipment and signage, he says rules are rarely enforced and there are no safeguards against incompetent drivers. Clayton wants the industry cleaned up with some sort of certification program to weed out unqualified operators.

It’s not a new issue. One of the first major discussions on certifying pilot car drivers began in New Brunswick in the mid 1990s after a cyclist was hit by a wide load. A coroner’s inquest concluded that the responsibilities of the pilot car driver were not clearly defined.

Peter Krenz has known than for a long time. “You think (truck) owner-operators are independent? They’re nothing compared to some pilot car guys,” says Krenz, director of safety and loss prevention for Mullen Trucking in Aldersyde, Alta. At the same time the inquest was happening in New Brunswick, Krenz was meeting with colleagues about training standards for pilot car drivers in Alberta.

“Every jurisdiction had a standard of what the pilot cars had to be equipped with. Nobody had a standard for the basic skills the operator required,” Krenz recalls. Tired of difficulties with some of Mullen’s leased pilot car operators, Krenz went ahead and created a training program and said that any pilot operator who wanted to work with Mullen had to attend. “It was just basic, basic stuff we were going over. Mostly reinforcing communication and formalizing rules and responsibilities,” says Krenz. “It was so simple it was ridiculous. But I know it worked because our incidences involving drivers and pilot car operators went down to zero.”

Krenz talked about the success of Mullen’s program during meetings of the Task Force of Vehicle Weights and Dimensions Policy, a committee of transport regulators and trucking industry groups. Intrigued, the task force established a formal working group involving carriers, government officials, and the B.C. Pilot Car Association to look into creating a certification program for pilot car operators in Western Canada. The work is being done in the context of agreement that is virtually completed on harmonizing oversize and overweight permits for British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. “The second time around I was at the right place with the right bunch of people,” says Krenz. “There was no magic. We got lucky with the people in that room.”

Task force secretary John Pearson says the committee is reviewing pilot car driver training certification programs in place elsewhere, particularly one developed by the Evergreen Safety Council in Seattle, and another by the New York state government. Using New York’s escort vehicle specifications as an example, the standards the committee is designing may look something like this:

General provisions would require drivers who escort oversize/overweight loads with a width greater than 3.65 metres (12 feet), and/or length greater than 27.5 meters (90 feet) to be at least 18 years old and pass an “escort driver’s certification test” and be in possession of a certificate, which would be valid for five years. The training and subsequent test would cover traffic signals, road markings, drivers signals, following distances, defensive driving, stopping under special conditions, traffic control, two-way communication, passing, and an accident-prevention formula.

Perhaps one of the more important certification criteria the draft outlines is methods for flagging traffic. In this example, the policy specifies proper flagging equipment, where to stand, how to warn traffic to stop, how to move traffic, and special procedures such as clearing bridges. For now, any sort of training is left to each pilot car operator or carriers they are subcontracted to.

The problem is, as Clayton puts it, too few operators conduct any training at all. Clayton says Trailblazer’s policy is to have rookie drivers ride in the passenger seat and observe for the first couple of months. After that, the driver gets his own truck, and with the signs down and lights off, follows another escort to learn and listen in on communications between the other pilot car driver and the truck operator. If, after a couple of hauls, he seems to understand the job, the new driver will follow a load that’s being led by a veteran. “This stage builds confidence and experience,” says Clayton. “You keep him on a run that requires two pilot cars until you feel you can send him out on his own.”

The amount of ongoing education purely depends on the type of person you hire, says Clayton. To accentuate the point, Clayton admits his driver meeting room consists of little more than a few chairs and a pool table. He says if a driver needs to clarify a company policy or is unsure about a certain procedure, Clayton will demonstrate the correct manoeuvre with toy cars and toothpick highways on his pool table. No PowerPoint presentation, no $500 training videos, just common sense.

“I hire on personality and attitude. Experience comes later,” says Clayton, adding that his company has never had an accident in the six years he’s been in business. “Hire the right guy from the start, and train him properly, and any sort of reinforcement will be minimal.”

In the pilot car business, hiring someone with the right personality and people skills is perhaps more important than in any other sector of the transportation industry, says Randy Shail, operations manager for R&R Pilot Car and Hotshot Service, a 15-pickup truck fleet based in Dawson Creek, B.C.

A 225,000-pound load sandwiched between two pilot cars and a line of a dozen passenger cars all doing 90 km/h can be a volatile mix. A frustrated motorist late for work might not look kindly on the pilot car driver who has to stop traffic to clear a bridge or intersection to let the load pass. “It doesn’t happen often, but there’s some that see that the driver of the pilot car is not a uniformed officer, so why bother obeying him?” says Shail. “Some of these pilot car operators become targets for road rage. That’s why you have to hire someone who is calm and can deal with the public, as well as knowing his job.”

Communication is the key to this line of work, says Shail. Not just with the public, but with the truck driver as well. Shail makes sure all the procedures of the run are spelled out between the truck and pilot car operators before either ignition is turned on. That includes an agreement of what route to take, the speed travelled, what frequency on the VHF they will communicate, what equipment needs to be taken along, what intersections or bridges may need to be cleared, what weather will force the vehicles to slow down or pull over, and, more important than anything, a verification that both operators are well aware of the over-dimensional regulations and safety codes in each jurisdiction they will cross.

If Shail could impress any theme in the upcoming certification standards, it would be this emphasis on communication and the importance of training pilot car operators to be fully aware of what to do and where they have to be positioned in certain situations.

“For example, a driver has to know how to describe to the truck driver who is behind of an upcoming obstacle, or traffic situations,” he says. “It’s also important to instill some sort of standard of where you’re supposed to be when the lane splits and becomes a three or four lane highway. Do you move in front? Do you go behind? Every situation calls for a different action.”

Both Shail and Clayton also make sure their drivers have knowledge of over-dimensional loads, Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS), and dangerous goods — basically, a general understanding of whatever is on that flatbed. Apparently, they both say, too many pilot car operators think all they need to know about this job is how to steer a car or pickup between two lanes. Clayton adds that it’s good practice to hire drivers with basic mechanical knowledge.

“You have no idea what’s going to happen to your truck up in Nunavut,” says Clayton. “It’s not just about you anymore. You have two other companies depending on you, so if something minor goes wrong with the pilot car, you want to have a guy who can take care of it on the spot and then get moving again.”

It is this triangle of dependence that is perhaps most unique to an escorted, over-dimensional haul, says Krenz. “I think when you’re hiring a third party to lead you down the highway you want them to portray the same image that you want your own drivers to,” he says. “If that pilot vehicle is doing something contrary to that, then it reflects not only on the transport company’s reputation but also the company that you’re doing the job for.”

Although Krenz’s goal to have a certification standard in place sometime this year seems out of reach, he seems optimistic that this new committee has the personnel to hammer out an agreement by 2003, provided the initiative doesn’t tangle itself with more bureaucracy.

“We really have to move in this direction. It’s just good business,” he says. “And really, it’s one of the last portions of the transportation industry that doesn’t have any type of standard in place.”

SIDEBAR: Pre-Flight Check

The purpose of a pilot car driver certification standard is, before all else, to define the driver’s job responsibilities. The standard in New York state has separate elements for front and rear escorts. Among them:

Responsibilities of the front escort car include, but are not limited to:

o Warn oncoming traffic of the presence of the oversize/overweight load.
o Help the truck driver by using the two-way radio to identify safety hazards and react appropriately.
o Make sure the load driver is following the route prescribed on the permit.
o Find safe places where the load and the escort vehicles can clear the roadway so traffic can safely pass.
o Control traffic in advance of the load at intersections.

Responsibilities of the rear escort operator:
o Warn traffic approaching from the rear of the presence of an oversize / overweight load.
o Tell the truck driver about flat tires and objects coming loose from the load.
o Notify the front escort driver and the truck operator of traffic buildup and other delays to the normal flow of traffic.
o Notify the truck operator of motorists attempting to pass.
o Slow traffic where necessary to facilitate the permitted load to reduce speed where required.
o Assume the lead escort position when the front escort driver stops traffic on two-lane highways.