Risk Management Magazine

Have you ever been in a situation where you weren’t paying attention to the road or anything else going on around you? For whatever reason — maybe you were on a familiar route or distracted by something inside your vehicle — most of us have displayed some amount of inattention on the roadway.

As aviators and crewmembers, we are highly trained professionals. We are expected to operate with great attention to detail. But once we are off duty, why do we find ourselves taking risks we might not take on duty?

Looking back, I realize how lucky I was I didn’t kill myself. The truth is I was safer jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft than I was riding on that motorcycle. I’d been trained to jump out of airplanes, but I hadn’t been trained to ride a motorcycle.