Preliminary Loss Reports (PLRs)

A 26-year-old Sergeant assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado, died in a PMV-4 mishap 26 October 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at 1030 local. The Soldier was operating his vehicle with a passenger when they collided with a fuel truck. The Colorado Springs police and fire departments responded to the scene. The passenger was transported to the local hospital for treatment, where their current status or prognosis is unknown. Speed is suspected to be a causal factor. The involvement of alcohol or seat belt use are currently unknown.

Since FY20, the Army has lost an average of 36 Soldiers a year to PMV-4 mishaps. This mishap was the first PMV-4 fatality of FY25 and less to the number of fatalities for this same time last year.

Safety tip

Top 10 Tips to Avoid Distractions While Driving

• Fully focus on driving. Do not let anything divert your attention, actively scan the road, use your mirrors and watch out for pedestrians and cyclists.
• Store loose gear, possessions and other distractions that could roll around in the car, so you do not feel tempted to reach for them on the floor or the seat.
• Make adjustments before you get underway. This includes adjusting your seat, mirrors and climate controls before hitting the road. Also, decide on your route and check traffic conditions ahead of time.
• Finish getting ready at home – instead of once you get on the road.
• Snack smart. If possible, eat meals or snacks before or after your trip, not while driving. On the road, avoid messy foods that can be difficult to manage.
• Secure children and pets before getting underway. If they need your attention, pull off the road safely to care for them. Reaching into the backseat can cause you to lose control of the vehicle.
• Put aside your cell phone. Never text, read email, play video games or scroll the internet or social media while driving.
• If you have passengers, let them be your co-pilot so you can focus safely on driving.
• If another activity demands your attention, instead of trying to attempt it while driving, pull off the road and stop your vehicle in a safe place. To avoid temptation, turn your phone off or store it somewhere you cannot reach it before heading out.
• As a general rule, if you cannot devote your full attention to driving because of some other activity, it’s a distraction. Take care of it before or after your trip, not while behind the wheel.

Tips provided by AAA.

A 26-year-old Sergeant assigned to Fort Bliss, Texas, died in an on-duty government motor vehicle (GMV) mishap 26 October 2024 on the installation at 2030 local. The Soldier was pinned between a HEMTT PLS/trailer and a box truck while the vehicle was backing into an enclosed ammunition supply point vehicle holding area. He was transported to University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. No other injuries or damage was reported. The U.S. Army Combat Readiness Center is leading an investigation into the mishap.

Since FY20, the Army has lost an average of five Soldiers a year to GMV mishaps. This mishap was the first on-duty GMV fatality of FY25 and below the number of fatalities for the same time last year.

Safety tip

While the investigation into this mishap is ongoing, the following tips are based on historical information for like events that could prevent future vehicle mishaps and mitigate injuries:

• Ensure vehicle operators do a thorough walkaround the vehicle prior to moving it.
• Proper use of a ground guide will prevent Soldiers from being pinned between vehicles.
• Ground guides should never position themselves directly in front of or behind the vehicle they are ground guiding.
• Operators should stop the vehicle immediately if they lose sight of the ground guide.

For more tips and information, see https://safety.army.mil/ON-DUTY/Government-Motor-Vehicle/Ground-Guiding.

A 26-year-old Staff Sergeant assigned to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, died in a PMV-2 mishap 12 July 2024 in Crestview, Florida, at 0200 local. The Soldier was riding his motorcycle when he took a sharp turn too fast, lost control and crashed into a church. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Motorcycle training, personal protective equipment, and alcohol or drug use is currently unknown.

Since FY19, the Army has lost an average of 28 Soldiers a year to PMV-2 mishaps. This mishap was the 36th PMV-2 fatality of FY24 and below the number of fatalities for this same time last year.

Safety tip

Motorcycle Night Riding – Top 6 Safety Tips

How To Stay Safe When You Ride at Night?

You will find precious few statistics on night riding specifically; however, it should be obvious that riding at night is more dangerous than riding during the day.

Riding a motorcycle at night is a lot like driving a car at night, except you have less than half as much rubber keeping you on the road. And your "windshield" is much smaller. Even if your ride of choice is a Honda Goldwing, you're still less visible than a Toyota Camry on the road. Where a car has fenders and bumpers separating its driver from traffic, you have little more than your wits and your limbs doing the same job when you're on your motorcycle. The stakes are a lot higher. You need to be a lot more careful. You need to know what you're up against and take steps to protect yourself in order to stay safe when you ride at night.

Tip 1: Contact patch
This will come up again, but your "contact patch," the little patch of tire touching the pavement or asphalt, is what keeps you from flying off the road when you ride your motorcycle around a corner. It's not obvious at first, but your bike has less than half the rubber on the ground as your car – even though it has exactly half as many tires.

Why is that?
It's because your bike leans through corners. Your car's suspension is designed to keep your tires straight up and down when you drive around a corner. Your bike's suspension does no such thing. Your motorcycle's tires are designed to rest on their "fat spot" when you lean your way through a corner.

What does this mean for motorcyclists?
It means you need to be more careful. Regardless of what kind of motorcycle you ride, it's capable of hair-raising speeds around corners. That doesn't mean you have to put all of your bike's grip to good use, especially at night, when you might not be able to see the road and its hazards as well as you can during the day. It pays to slow down when you ride at night. We'll talk more about this toward the end of the article, but the first thing you should do when you ride at night is SLOW DOWN.

Tip 2: Safety equipment

We swear by "ATGATT," and we think you should, too. What does ATGATT stand for? It stands for All The Gear, All The Time. All the gear means all the gear. It means wearing a helmet, leather gloves, an abrasion-resistant jacket and pants, and a good pair of riding boots every single time you leave the house on your motorcycle. A road racer wouldn't dream of going out on a hot track wearing anything less than a one-piece leather suit, armored boots, a back protector, gauntlet gloves, and a good helmet with a sparkling clean visor. For some reason, many motorcyclists think it's OK to head out on the street – with all of its hazards, including cars and debris on the road – wearing significantly less gear.

It's not OK. It's not safe.

You shouldn't ride your motorcycle during the day without gear, let alone at night, when visibility is significantly reduced.

Tip 3: Visibility
It's not your visibility you should be worried about. You have plenty of control over how well you see at night. You can take steps to ensure you can see as well as you possibly can:

• Ensure your visor is clean by wiping it down with Windex and a paper towel
• Get your eyes checked
• Make sure you're wearing the right corrective lenses

Your family will thank you after you finish telling them the story about how Bambi ran out in front of you and lived to tell his family about it, too.

You need to be able to see and see well if you're going to ride your motorcycle at night. By the same logic, everyone else on the road needs to be able to see and see well, too. But you have absolutely no control over other people's eyes, windshields, and judgment. How can you protect yourself against people who are too lazy to keep their windshields clean or too distracted to see you?

You can't.
All you can do is assume nobody on the road can see you and ride accordingly. This is how I ride all the time, even during daylight hours, but it's at least twice as important after the sun goes down. I never, ever assume someone else can see me. The stakes are too high when I'm riding my motorcycle. If I assume they can see me, and they hit me because they can't, the consequences are bigger than a fender bender. Like every other rider in the world, I don't like missing out on my life because I'm laid up in the hospital after someone hit me on my motorcycle.

Even if it's someone else's fault, I don't want to have to deal with it. I don't want to deal with missing work, with being hurt, with having to think about my family worrying about me when they get the news that I went down. That's why I assume nobody can see me when I'm on my motorcycle, and why I ride accordingly.

Making yourself more visible.
Although it's a good idea to assume nobody can see you when you're riding your motorcycle, there are steps you can take to make yourself more visible to other people on the road. Your nighttime gear should be covered in reflective tape. You can buy gear with reflective tape or add it later. Depending on the motorcycle laws where you live, you may want to consider modifying your headlights and brake lights, making them flash when activated by installing a modulator.

If you hang out with a lot of guys who ride, a huge part of motorcycling is social, you'll hear stories about how motorists are attracted to flashing lights, especially when they're drunk and driving at night. The story usually involves a person who installed a flashing light on his bicycle and was hit by a drunk driver attracted by the flashing light. As a motorcyclist, you have to be riding too slow to be safe in order to have a driver attempt an unsafe pass on a two-lane road, drunk or not. The flashing light on the rear end of your bike, assuming it's legal where you live, goes a long way toward making sure drivers know you're in front of them.

Tip 4: Maintaining your bike
We don't often consider basic maintenance a safety measure, but we should. Compared to a car, your motorcycle is a finely tuned machine. The torque-specs on its fasteners are lighter. Depending on your choice of bike, the engine itself may be a load-bearing part of the frame. Compared to a car, your motorcycle makes a ridiculous amount of power for its weight.

That's what makes it so much fun to ride!

The stakes are high enough during the day. But they get even higher at night.

Let's say you're coasting to a stop at night, using the engine to do most of the braking, when your chain snaps because you went all summer without checking its tension. Your bike lurches forward, and you dive on the front brake before you run into the F-150 stopped at the light in front of you. But it's nighttime! Remember? You fail to see the patch of gravel on the road and tuck the front, falling down before coming to a stop underneath the F-150. If you're lucky, you can use your bruised ego to help you pick your bike up again and call someone to tow you home. If you're not so lucky, your family will get some very, very bad news about you.

If you don't have the skills or the tools to maintain your bike by yourself, make sure you budget enough money every year to have it done for you. Motorcycles aren't as good at staying shiny-side-up when they break as cars are, so make sure your bike is in tip-top shape before you ride it. You should have a pre-ride checklist, on paper or in your head, and you should treat riding your bike more like flying a plane than driving a car by using the checklist to make sure everything is safe before you ride.

Tip 5: I'm not joking – SLOW DOWN!

"Faster and faster… until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death."
– Hunter S. Thompson

You probably ride a motorcycle because you like to go fast. You like to go fast because it's thrilling, because it makes you feel like you're cheating death. As motorcyclists, going fast makes our hearts race, and that's exactly what makes riding a motorcycle an exciting way to get around. But the number one thing you can do to stay safe at night on a motorcycle is slow way, way down!

You can't see as much at night, including road debris that will bring you down faster than a banana peel in a Warner Brother's cartoon. You see even less when you're going faster than you should be going. You need to be even more careful if you ride a custom bike because there's a good chance your bike could go fast enough to outrun your headlamp if you bought it from an aftermarket retailer!

How could you possibly outrun your headlamp, given the speed of light is really, really fast?

Let's do the math.

At 80 miles an hour, you're screaming along at about 120 feet per second. If your headlight is just bright enough for you to see 120 feet in front of you, that gives you 1s to react to objects as they come into your field of vision. Even if you have reflexes fit for the drag strip, you will take at least 0.5s to react, leaving another 0.5s to do something about what's happening in front of you. I don't know about you, but I want more than a half a second to cheat death when I'm riding my motorcycle at night. That's why I slow way, way down.

Tip 6: Adjust your attitude

Motorcyclists aren't known for being cautious. If we were that cautious, we would all trade our bikes in for Volvos and call it a day. Popular depictions of motorcyclists paint us as revolutionaries, renegades, and criminals who care as much about other people's safety as we do our own. Very little, at best.

There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. If you ever get a chance to hang around a group of motorcycle racers, you'll find they often refer to themselves as "pilots" instead of "riders" or even "racers."

That's because they recognize the dangers inherent to what they do, and they take steps to mitigate those dangers. A racer's number one job is to go fast. His next job is to conduct himself in such a way that going fast is as safe as possible, both for himself and his fellow racers. As a responsible motorcyclist, it's your job to take a cue from pilots and racers who make it a point to stay safe when they push the limits of their bodies and machines.

As a motorcyclist using public roads, your number one job is to stay safe regardless of what time of day you ride – for yourself, your family, and your fellow motorists. If you haven't already, it's time to stop pretending like you're invincible and start adopting an attitude concerned with safety and caution. Your future depends on it, and your family will appreciate the fact that you have stories to tell about riding your motorcycle instead of crashing it.

Tips and article from Michael Padway

A 28-year-old Staff Sergeant assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, died in a PMV-2 mishap 27 October 2024 in Tennessee at 1300 local. The Soldier was riding his motorcycle on the interstate when he was involved in a fatal traffic accident. Information regarding rider education courses, licensing, personal protective equipment usage or contributing factors is unknown. Local law enforcement officials are conducting the investigation.

Since FY20, the Army has lost an average of 29 Soldiers a year to PMV-2 mishaps. This mishap was the fourth PMV-2 fatality of FY25 and below the number of fatalities for the same time last year.

A 22-year-old Specialist assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, died in a PMV-2 mishap 20 October 2024 in Tennessee at 0200 local. The Soldier lost control of his motorcycle while negotiating a curve, departed the roadway and crashed. He was wearing the proper personal protective equipment but reportedly riding at a high rate of speed. The completion of the Basic Rider Course or whether the Soldier had a motorcycle endorsement on his license are currently unknown. Alcohol is not suspected to be a factor.

Since FY20, the Army has lost an average of 29 Soldiers a year to PMV-2 mishaps. This mishap was the third PMV-2 fatality of FY25 and below the number of fatalities for this same time last year.

Safety tip

Perhaps no corners strike greater fear in the hearts of motorcyclists than decreasing-radius corners. What's a decreasing-radius corner, you ask? There are essentially three general types of corners we encounter as riders. A constant-radius corner maintains the same arc throughout the entire turn. These are the most predictable corners on the road. Even if you can't see the exit, you can tell from the entrance exactly what speed is safe to navigate the corner all the way to the exit. An increasing-radius corner is one in which the bend gets less sharp the further into it you ride. In this type of corner, you can start rolling on the throttle much earlier because the corner is getting straighter. A decreasing-radius corner, then, would be one in which the corner gets sharper as you progress into it. So, what may have been a safe speed in the initial section of the curve could be too fast as the corner tightens up.

However, the corners themselves aren't really the cause for the concern. It's really the surprise of entering an unfamiliar corner, setting your speed and your line, only to suddenly have the rules change midway. Remember that, despite the surprise, if your bike isn't dragging hard parts, you have the ground clearance to lean the bike over even more — probably more than you think.

Before we discuss the challenge of decreasing-radius corners, we should quickly review an easy one. This will make sure we have the same techniques in mind. In an idealized constant-radius corner, the rider can see from entry to exit. So, the bike's approach would be wide at the entrance with the appropriate speed set before the turn-in point.

A rider should look through the corner, initiate the turn and begin rolling on the throttle. Rolling on the throttle settles the suspension and keeps the bike from falling into the corner as the bike heads toward the apex. After the apex, acceleration can increase as the bike begins to stand up, putting a larger footprint on the pavement and following its line to the outside of its lane at the exit of the corner.

The ideal line through a constant radius curve starts wide at the entrance, tightens to the apex, and then exits wide. Photo courtesy of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation.

If the entire corner could be seen at the entry, the tightening of a radius could be planned for from the beginning — just like with our idealized corner. So, in order to address the fear of the decreasing radius, we should look at the proper way through the corner and then backtrack to see how we can apply this knowledge to corner entry — even when we don't know a decreasing radius lies ahead.

Motorcycle Cornering Clearance – What To Do When It Runs Out
If you're taking the classic line through a corner and the radius tightens — even just a little — it will have the same effect as early apexing a corner: The bike will run wide at the exit. So, when approaching a decreasing-radius corner, the best tactic for a street rider would be to set the entry speed for the tighter portion of the curve, hold a wide line at the entrance of the corner, and dial in more lean angle until the line heads towards the apex of the tightened radius.

If we treat a decreasing-radius corner like a constant-radius one, the line takes us off the road as the curve tightens. Holding a wide line gives us maximum flexibility to modify our line as the corner's radius tightens.

Newer riders will want to set a slower speed at the actual corner entry. For more advanced riders, trail braking through the initial corner to the tighter section can be utilized as long as you're cognizant that traction for braking is reduced by cornering forces. Smooth application of the brakes is paramount, as an abrupt spike in brake pressure — or abruptly chopping the throttle — can cause traction loss and send you tumbling.

While traction for braking in a corner is limited, entering the corner trailing the brakes and having the bike's weight shifted on to the front end actually helps with steering input. The fork's rake angle decreases as it compresses, making the bike respond more quickly to steering input. You have also compressed the tire, giving it a larger contact patch and more traction.

However, the harder you're cornering, the thinner the line is between having enough grip to brake while leaned over and a low-side crash. Once initiating your line in the tighter section of the corner, begin accelerating for the exit as you normally would.

In the example above, we assumed we could see the entire corner and, therefore, could plan accordingly. However, on the street, you will frequently enter corners where you can't see the exit. While you can draw clues for where the corner goes from trees or telephone poles or fence lines, these can be misleading. (Have you ever been following a row of telephone poles for miles only to see them go straight off into a field while the road makes a turn?)

Proper Motorcycle Lane Positioning
So, when riding on an unfamiliar road, you should always hold a minimum of 20 percent of your skillset, traction, and ground clearance in reserve for the unexpected — which could come in the form of a tightening radius, an obstacle, liquid, a bicyclist, or any other of the myriad of things you might encounter in the real world.

The rider's wide initial line gives him the time to detect a decreasing-radius turn and begin tightening his line.

The prudent street rider will set road speed based on the radius of the corner at its entry (while keeping that 20 percent reserve) but will still maintain a wide line. Once the corner's exit is spotted, the final line, which clips the apex, can be selected. A wide line gives the maximum view of the road ahead, increasing the time to react to the unexpected. Even while holding the wide line, you can accelerate through the corner to settle the suspension as you normally would. If a corner begins to tighten up, you have that reserved cornering clearance to dip in to.

If you suspect the changing radius will ask for more ground clearance than you have, you can modify your speed — or prevent it from increasing — by lightly applying the rear brake and maintaining a neutral throttle. If the corner requires that you slow even more, roll off the throttle — do not chop it — and smoothly apply the brakes. When practicing this technique, notice how, when you decelerate while leaned over, your line will naturally tighten, aiding in achieving your desired path through the corner. After you've set your new line, treat the corner's exit just like every other corner.

The rider has chosen his line through the tighter section of the curve and is already looking ahead to the next corner.

One other tactic for solving the decreasing-radius corner dilemma should be mentioned, although it applies more to the track or roads with which you are familiar. When you know a corner has a decreasing radius before you enter it, double apexing a turn essentially turns one corner into two, with each being dealt with separately. However, we'll discuss this technique in a future article.

Motorcycle Downshifting Techniques
Decreasing-radius corners are just another part of the enjoyable challenge of riding motorcycles. If you practice these techniques, you'll have them to draw on in an instant when a blind curve becomes more challenging than it initially looked.

Tips provided by Evans Brasfield at Motorcycle.com.