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Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life
scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
I'm sure that the insurance guys will love this explanation!
In a CHiPs episode!
Seriously, well done sir. I love it when I solve problems in real time with engineering.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ok Slashdot, let's hear the cynical posts! C'mon trolls...bring the best you have.
If you can find something cynical here, then I truly pity you.
I'm still wondering why he didn't tap the "X" button to make a bigger explosion. He could have easily popped his car into the oncoming traffic and get like a 100x chain reaction bonus.
Kudos to everyone involved in the story.
A rarity. Thanks.
All rites reversed 2010
that 90s show: real life stories of the highway patrol:
i, did, not, know, what, to, do. but, i, knew, i, had, to, act, fast.
I wanted to hear how he used a F22 fighter-jet to stop a truck. But he used a minivan. Boooriiinng.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The headline could've easily been different had his maneuver failed: "Crazy middle aged driver plows vehicle through intersection. No survivors."
I don't know I could risk the lives of my children in this manner, even to save a life.
He's a hero and deserves praise, no doubt about it. But I think there's still room to discuss whether what he did was fair to the passengers in his car, whose safety was obviously put at risk. Story says they were his adult children. My children are young. I would not have put them in that sort of danger. (Putting aside the fact that I doubt I would have had the presence of mind to think of doing what he did.)
This is how it looks when it works. Imagine the news story had it not saved the man's life and one of his kids had been killed instead. The guy took a HUGE risk here, which is an intrinsic part of being a hero, but I pity his kids a little. Were it just me in the car, okay, maybe. But with my little ones in tow? Not a chance. I guess that's why I'm not a hero and he is, eh? At any rate, the safety of the nameless citizen won out over the safety of his own, which strikes me as odd.
Who says 'delta difference'? 'Difference in speed' or 'delta speed' please. This could've been really bad if the truck driver was actually just leaned down to pick up some fritos off the floor.
According to TFA, he had a heart attack two days earlier and didn't know it. This restricted his circulation to the point that he ended up passing out at the wheel. There doesn't seem to be anything he could have done, except maybe go to the hospital every day just to make sure he hadn't had a heart attack recently.
No, it won't. One of the specs for designing brakes is that they have to easily beat the engine at full throttle.
I read this on FARK yesterday and I finally had a tiny bit of hope that maybe, if I'm in trouble, someone will be like me and just attempt to do what should be done. This morning, I go the restroom at work, and see that plastered in front of the urinals and on the backs of stall doors (for your easy reading, of course) are lists of ways you're required to respond to emergencies:
In the case of fire:
Calmly exit the building
For no reason, re-enter the building until given the OK by emergency responders
In the case of a shooting:
Run, hide, and call the police. Don't try to stop the shooter.
In case of violence:
Run, hide, and call the police. Don't try to intervene.
And the lists go on. I'm surrounded by warnings that if a good actions puts yourself at risk, then the action is BAD. And I weep a little...
What on earth must have the unconscious driver thought when he regained consciousness? Driving one minute, then waking up fine else where the next
The article says he matched speeds. With matched speeds, the impact would have been minimal. He did not use the impact to stop the other vehicle, he used his own vehicle's brakes.
Captcha: harmless
Hey, he didn't sue the guy for trauma/whiplash - it might seem obvious to us that doing so would be a nasty move, but in this day and age not suing your rescuer is probably worthy of an honourable mention.
Something very much like this happened to me back when I was about 5 or 6 years old.
I was in the car with my siblings and our mother drove to the grocery store. She parked and ran inside for just a few minutes to buy something and my younger brother started playing with the steering wheel, pretending to drive.
This car was a 1962 Chevy Bel Air and the shifter did not have an a key interlock so as he was flailing around he bumped the car into neutral and it started to roll backwards towards a busy street.
Some guy who was getting ready to pull out of the parking lot saw what was happening and drove behind us so that the car t-boned his truck instead of rolling out into the street.
where do you live? and have you ever even driven a car? the first task in engineering a vehicle is to make sure the braking system is stronger than the engine.
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
I think you should get your brakes checked.
a car engine will easily overpower its breaks
I believe if you really look into it you will find that cars are designed so that (if properly cared for) the stock brakes can overcome the maximum output of the stock engine. This is a fundamental safety feature, which, if ignored, would certainly earn a offending car company a legal black eye. Feel free to give it a try on your way home today, but, if you do, your brakes will no longer be "properly cared for". You will stop though.
Dew not truss your spill chucker, you're spill chucker makes ewe seam like an ill iterate fuel.
BRAKES, dammit!
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The article says Pace's foot was resting on the accelerator. It must not have been down fully, which is lucky because a car engine will easily overpower its breaks (or the car that's heroically in front of you trying to slow you down).
Not quite... all cars (exluding those made for drag racing) can easily lock their brakes even at full speed, but how many cars capable of spinning wheel at full speed do you know. They both require equal amount of power (braking or engine that is).
Of course slowing down a much hevier car is not as straight forward, as it can outpower yours.
"That's why he was obviously an engineer."
You don't have the right to put your passengers at risk IMO. He's lucky nothing seriously happened or he'd be looking at jail time and rightly so.
Blar.
What? The engine will not overpower the brakes, barring something esoteric, like Leno's tank engine car. Try it sometime. Go out on a deserted stretch of highway, floor the gar, then stomp on the brakes. You will decelerate.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is completly wrong, it has been proven mathematically and with real life test that the brakes on a car are more powerful then the power that the engine produces.
The stopping distance is not that much greater even with a " pedal to the floor" situation
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept
Your average pickup truck has a bigger engine than your average minivan. The fact that the minivan's brakes can hold back the minivan's engine tells you nothing about how well the minivan can hold back a pickup truck's engine.
Uh, RTFA. Unconscious. Anything he would experience would either be trivial or catastrophic if the guy hadn't slowed in front of him.
GODDAMMIT! It's not 'breaks' it's 'brakes'! You and all those other posters sound like fucking idiots.
A 'break' is a chance occurrence leading to good or bad luck, or it's a crack or a discontinuity of some sort. It has NOTHING to do with 'brakes', which are the mechanism used to slow a vehicle.
This is a bad as those idiots who say "mute point" instead of "moot point". Mute and moot have totally different meanings, you have to be really stupid to mix them up.
(/rant)
The driver of the truck, who had only leaned forward to scratch an itch on his ankle, was a little bit pissed about the whole affair.
Once he realized that he would have to deal with his insurance company, he faked a heart attack to get out of it. It's what we all would have done.
Get your head around this: His passengers were his children.
However, knowing the physics, the risk to them was minimal. The only question would have been if his brakes could have held the pressure of two vehicles instead of one.
I still salute the guy. He saved a bunch of people, and did what was right. We need more people like him, and less people who want to "not get involved" because they might get hurt.
I did the same thing, but the other driver wasn't slumped over the steering wheel... they were reading a book. They didn't thank me either.
What if the other driver was drunk or tired? Who knows what he might do if started into alertness by an impact.
Be a hero, but don't take others with you...
Blar.
Depends on the pickup / minivan. The average minivan has more hp than the average compact truck (like a Ford Ranger), but both have less power than the average quarter-ton.
When I was a small kid, I was left by myself in the back seat of the car (back then, no one used seatbelts around here, specially in the back seat). For unknown reasons the car lost its brakes and started moving downhill and would exit through the front gate and likely hit the other house across the street. I was able to steer the car so that it crashed the gate instead of going out of our property.
;-)
I don't have clear memories of this as I was small. When my grandmother told this story there was one remarkably funny part.
She told me when people said stuff like: "It was god who turned that wheel and avoided a tragedy!" I promptly replied: "No, it wasn't god, it was me! I did like this!" and did a swinging motion similar to turning the driving wheel.
I wish I remembered this last bit. I could then tell everyone I was an atheist even as a kid.
Oh really? Minivans can be pretty damn heavy, especially after you put a few hundred pounds of sports equipment and seven or eight passengers in them.
The Dodge Grand Caravan SE and SXT, and Chrysler Town & Country LX, Touring, and Limited (basically the same vehicles underneath all the extra features) have V6 engines ranging from 170 hp 3.3L up to 251 hp 4.0L (2008, http://www.allpar.com/model/m/2008-minivans.html).
The F150 comes in sizes ranging from a 4.2L 202 hp V6 up to a 5.4L 380 hp V8 (2001, http://www.fordf150.net/specs/engines.php).
A top-end minivan has a bigger engine than a low-end F150, and in any case I’d say the margin of safety should be large enough for the minivan to easily stop the truck in just about all of those cases unless maybe you’re pitting the smallest minivan against the most powerful truck.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
unless you're Toyota
It holds back the minivan's powertrain at full throttle MANY TIMES OVER.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
I'm an electrical engineer working in an office full of mechanical engineers. They told me this during a lunch-room discussion. Apparently I was being had.
So what if they were his children? I don't give my parents the implicit right to risk my life in an attempt to save someone else.
There are MANY other questions. He didn't know why the driver was slumped, perhaps he was asleep or passed out. What if the driver awoke when he impacted? What might he do? Engine power is nearly always enough to over-come braking power. The slumped driver might panic, hit the gas and then both vehicles are pushed into the intersection. What if the bumping caused the driver to fall to the side, turning the wheel and sending his car into pedestrian traffic?
It's not about not getting involved because "might get hurt" it's about the reasonable and most responsible action given known information.
Blar.
I know someone who tried this same 'stunt'. It did not turn out well.
He was driving on the interstate when a vehicle (approaching) behind him started to drift and swerve. He was in his F250 with family and kids, and there were several smaller vehicles ahead and parallel to him. The other vehicle was a work cargo van.
He pulled in front of the van, and attempted to do this same thing. The problem was that the other guy was accelerating, and still swerving. Right before hitting the rear bumper, the van driver swerved over and back, catching the rear end of the truck with the front of the van. The van skit 45 degrees and then rolled, and my friend's pickup "almost" rolled - he was able to control the truck, up until the minivan rolled into him during the sidways slide, and pushed him over.
The van driver died (before the crash, actually - a stroke), and his wife needed facial reconstruction. His truck was totaled. He and his son were mostly OK (he got a nice scar from it and a broken arm). Thankfully, it could've been much worse, since the other vehicles in front of their's were all smaller (with at least two of them with families), and had any of them collided, the families would have certainly been killed.
Things turned out very well for the people in this story. High-speed vehicle collisions are no joking mater - speed and velocity estimation is tricky, and potential energy at those speeds is so very much more.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
well, that applies to single car, not for two cars as in this case. If it was a hard truck, or 300HP sportscar, there's no way minivan's brakes could stop it
Older cars weren't always engineered like that. Back in the late '60s and early '70s disk brakes were almost unheard of, but putting a 400 cubic inch engine with two four barrel carburators was common.
I know my '68 Mustang's engine could have easily overpowered its brakes. The car I have now? No contest; four great big disk brakes.
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At that point, it comes down to rubber surface.
Unless the follower vehicle has 4WD engaged, my 4 wheels can impart a shitload more stopping force than a Bughatti Veyron at 1,000 horsepower can impart in thrust on the two wheels it's pushing with. His wheels will start to spin, lowering his effective acceleration force to near zero.
Plus, if he starts to overwhelm me, I take my foot off the brakes, floor the gas, break contact, and turn. Done. No drama required. Truck continues on his merry way, I get out of his way and slow back down.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"The coward dies a thousand deaths. The hero dies but one."
I'd rather be the hero.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Isn't "delta difference" like saying, redundant redundancy?
Seattle Times could have spiced up the story a bit (wouldn't be the first time with these "hero" stories me thinks).
F22 Raptor & minivan don't quite belong in the same sentence. ...Innes eased his $250,000 Porsche 911 GT2 RS in front of the truck ...man and machine emerged without a scratch....
Dew not truss your spill chucker, you're spill chucker makes ewe seam like an ill iterate fuel.
Dew knot truss you're spill chucker, you're spill chucker makes ewe seam like an ill iterate fuel.
There I fixed that for you.
-- QED
Well, there is the slight problem of making sure you can stop *in time*. Even if the brakes on the van are stronger than the truck's engine (which, btw, ensuring that the brakes are stronger than the *van* engine doesn't guarantee they are stronger than the Truck's engine, although I'm guessing that would probably still be true, unless it's a very large truck). While I totally understand the principle the guy used to stop the truck, I would have been at least a little worried that the combined momentum of van + truck might've lead to a situation where I could brake gradually, but not before entering the intersection. (I guess it depends on how far down the road the intersection was - if it was far enough away, you maybe wouldn't worry about it). However, since the truck was going about 40mph, I guess his foot couldn't have been 'flooring' the gas pedal - probably was only part way down, so not as much of a problem with it taking a very long time to brake.
One time I was riding with my brother down a familiar stretch of busy road. All of a sudden we saw a burst of smoke and someone tumbled out of the car in front of us. After dodging her we realized that there was no one driving the car anymore and it was approaching a busy intersection. We looked at each other, nodded, and I proceeded to pull alongside it. He jumped from his door into the car and attempted to regain control, while I sped ahead to get in front of the car with my own, just in case he couldn't. As he regained control of the car I let it run into the back of mine while flashing my lights. He pulled the car over after the intersection and we proceeded to look for the previous occupant. A state trooper then arrived on-scene. Apparently the driver thought her car was going to explode so she jumped from it. She had some cuts and a little road rash but was no worse for wear. The state trooper told my brother he was a hero, to which he nonchalantly responded "I was just doing what was right." Just another day.
the first task in engineering a vehicle is to make sure the braking system is stronger than the engine.
What about burnouts? Isn't that done by mashing the brake and gas pedals? I suspect it might be to do with brakes biasing towards the front. I've never hooned my car since it's unreliable enough without me also beating on it!
More likely he has been watching too much star trek lately and was dying to yell out "brace for impact."
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
This'll seem crazy at first, but...
Each life should be valued practically the same.
Letting go of your valuations based on who is near to you (by space or relation) helps you to improve the lives of others around you, and, if everyone around you felt the same way, your well-being and the well-being of those near to you would be far better looked after than if you were competing for resources. Caring for others improves your own lot.
It's counter-intuitive at first.
Imagine some liver cells being selfish. That doesn't help the whole body, which in turn jeopardizes the well-being of the liver cells. Like it or not, we're all in this together. Right now we have pieces of body subverting the health of other pieces.
We're on the cusp of great technological changes. Indeed, we are already experiencing great technological change. Even if it weren't the case, acting in cooperation instead of selfishly would be enough to help each of us achieve a comfortable life. With the advance of technology being what it is, cooperation would have everyone achieving fantastic levels of life satisfaction. It would be immoral and ironically self-defeating not to cooperate.
Well, yes. You have drastically increased the drag without increasing the thrust, so you will decelerate. But will you stop ? Nevertheless, I do agree with your main point, if for no other reason than that the driver of the truck obviously wasn't flooring the accelerator (since he was doing 40 mph, according to TFA). Most car or truck engines are making only a fraction of max HP at 40 mph.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
A Veyron is four wheel drive.
because both vechicles were about the same weight and horsepower. Now if it was a pinto trying to stop a F550 Dualle things would have been different.
Damn, I misspelled "knot". I also misspelled "yore". See what happens when you trust your spell checker? I messed the whole comment up!
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yea i herd of such story's. i had a smiler experience of a car that crashed in front of my shop and took out 2 of my cars. i owned a car sales shop. the poor man had a hart attack his car rolled into oncoming traffic and hit his car. his car then rolled into my cars finnly stopping it. i called 911 and managed to get his car door open it was pretty damaged. of course i knew not to move him. but he was so messed up he kept trying to keep driving he wasn't even aware his car was destroyed. 911 arrived by then and i left it to them.i later found out the man died from his hart issues. yes i could have sued the family for the damages to my 2 cars but i never did i just wrote em off. the man dieing and all i figured hey where having it bad enough.
...Innes was near the right Pace at the right time.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
First task? I guess I'm doing it wrong because I'm already getting started on the electrical system and the suspension team won't start on the brakes until a while later.
I did that once to avoid a major multi-car crash and all I got was trouble.
The damn b**ch hit one of my rear wheels on a STRAIGHT ROAD. My car turned 90 degrees and hit her front bumper sideways. My "engineer mode" did kick in and I noticed she completely lost it in panic, and took off her hands off the wheel, so I kept steering and hitting the brakes/parking brake until both stopped. I may have avoided both crashing on at least a dozen parked cars, but my car was almost totaled.
Her insurance company was ridiculously difficult to deal with and tried to get me a half-ass repaired car for three months (my car was brand new at the time). Her father tried to harass me and threatened to sue. Both never thanked me for saving their miserable lives from a much worse fate. So much for actually trying to save someone, if there is a next time I'm going to ram them as hard as I can.
It's getting worse. I've started seeing that incorrect use in books from (apparently) serious publishers. It makes me feel like writing back to them asking if they would like an editor, as they're clearly missing one.
The guy obviously did the right thing, but how could he see the driver was slumped over the wheel after he passed him? Though that is most likely the reporter's fault.
Batman
Everyone needs to be a bit more like him. Doctors, engineers, lawyers and race car driving as well as many more particular careers give you an edge, certain awareness, almost above average, to the point that making split decisions become second nature, and the confidence that comes that is inspiring. We all need to travel more, abroad, soak in different cultures, and learn more languages, we all need multiple career choices of which one should give you access to better mental stimulation of the nervous system, to fully understand the way the mind works under stress, and also be able to master quickness and accuracy in certain conditions. I think if we did that, there would be more stories of people like this guy, that used his knowledge to make quick decision and saving a life, possibly more...
Knowing all your escape exists, and where each fire extinguisher is each time you enter a new building seems extreme, but many navy seals, and black ops agents need to do a 1000 more things like this in the same amount of time to be able to have a situation under control. I am not saying become a navy seal, but merely showing that if the mind can be trained to that level, surely learning where your exists are in every building you enter does not sound that bad in comparison.
I think the problem is that these days, people read a lot more internet than books, and rely far too heavily on their spell checkers.
Also, the educational system sucks.
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Could someone explain it to me with a free body diagram? The story makes it confusing for me.
Anyway, +1 for solids mechanics.