Staying Alive. Staying Alive.
Why did we choose Professor Emeritus Hugh H. Hurt Jr. as the 2006 Motorcyclist of the Year and recipient of the Greg McQuide Memorial trophy*?
It's pretty simple. If it weren't for Harry Hurt, there's a good chance a lot of us would be dead right now.
Everybody who's ridden a motorcycle in the last 25 years owes a debt of gratitude to this legendary scientist, teacher, researcher and truth-teller. Because he's the man who, more than anyone else on the planet, has spearheaded the ongoing effort to find out exactly what happens, and why, in a motorcycle accident-and to figure out how to keep it from happening again. To you, say. Or me.
He's also helped keep you alive if you've ever flown in an airplane or a helicopter, ridden in a car, driven a truck, pedaled a bicycle, crossed a street-or even strapped on an experimental rocket plane and blasted into the ionosphere.
Hurt was the driving force behind the Hurt Report, the most influential study ever done on motorcycle accidents. Hurt, with characteristic modesty, doesn't use that term. Officially, it's the DOT Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures Study. Let Hurt be politically correct (for once), and (typically) accurate. The rest of us are free to give credit where credit is due, including credit to Hurt's colleagues and coauthors on the study, Jim Ouellet and Dave Thom.
Issued in 1981, the Hurt Report was the first truly scientific study ever made on why, and how, motorcycle accidents occur. Before Hurt and his team applied themselves to the task, in the mid-'70s, motorcycle-accident reporting was as much mythology as reality.
In Hurt's words: "The motorcycle accident would happen, and the joke was that if it was a little motorcycle the policeman would say it was a Honda, and if it was a big motorcycle he'd say it was a Harley. And that was it. The cause? It would always be: 'The motorcycle came out of nowhere, going real fast.' It was stupid data collection that was goin' on. And it was giving the public a distorted view of what was really causing motorcycle accidents."
The Hurt Report revealed a number of crucial facts about motorcycle accidents-facts that otherwise might never have risen above the din of prevailing prejudice, folklore and superstition. Such as the fact that the single most significant cause of a motorcycle accident is a car driver turning into the bike's path, after failing to see the oncoming motorcycle at all. Or that DOT-only certified helmets do just as good a job of head protection as do Snell-rated helmets. Or that a typical motorcycle/car collision actually occurs at an average speed under 22 mph-even serious and fatal crashes. Or that most motorcyclists, when confronted with an oncoming car, typically fail to use the front brake well, if they use it at all.
In short, the Hurt Report changed everything.
Harry Hurt is not just an icon in the field of motorcycle accident research. He was also, in the beginning of his stellar career, a well-regarded rocket, helicopter and jet-fighter scientist. He was also part of a University of Southern California team that developed and taught the methods that are used, to this day, to investigate and reconstruct airplane crashes all over the planet.
In the 1950s Harry was a bright young aerospace engineer, fresh out of Texas A&M, working at North American Aviation. He worked on the preliminary design of the F-100, America's first supersonic fighter. And the X-15, an experimental rocket plane that flew right out of the atmosphere and into space, as high as 354,000 feet, at a top speed 6.7 times the speed of sound-that would be about 4500 miles per hour. Without the vital space-flight information gained by the X-15 project, John Glenn might never have orbited the earth, and Neil Armstrong might never have walked on the moon.
One of the consultants Hurt worked with at North American was also a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California (USC). Dr. Charles F. Lombard talked Harry into going to work at USC on a project to train aviation safety officers for the U.S. Air Force, the Navy, the Army, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB), and others.
"We trained 'em by the hundreds," said Hurt, "to the point where our grand poobah figured that whenever an airplane crash occurred anywhere in the world, there was a 97 percent chance that a USC grad would investigate it."
Dr. Lombard and his team, including Hurt, were also working to develop more effective helmets for Air Force pilots and aircraft crew members.
"We would take the prototype helmets, with electronic sensors inside them. The test subject-some poor graduate student-would sit there on a bench, and a big pendulum tester would come down and, Pow!, hit him on the head. We did a lot of human-subject testing, really good stuff. We did a lot of research into the mechanisms of injury, how much energy is required to cause concussion, and to cause various types of brain injury. And Dr. Lombard developed the concept of the hard outer shell and the energy-absorbing foam liner, and he patented it."
Dr. Lombard formed a helmet company, Toptex, to produce helmets to his design. The first client was the City of Los Angeles. It ordered 3000 helmets for all its motorcycle officers. Before that, the LAPD motorcycle unit averaged about five deaths a year. The next year it dropped to zero.
Hurt stayed on at USC, and started working on investigating highway accidents, supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). The idea was to introduce a scientific accident methodology to the data collection of everything: car accidents, truck crashes, pedestrian accidents, motorcycle crashes, bicycle accidents-the whole works. And it became clear there was a great need to fully understand what was actually happening in motorcycle crashes. The DOT agreed to fund a landmark study-and Hurt's group at USC won the contract.
There was already an excellent model of how to collect accurate data on accidents-the work Hurt and his colleagues at USC had done to revolutionize aircraft-accident investigations.
"We took the aircraft stuff and threw it like a blanket over the motorcycle problem," said Hurt. "We took people who had motorcycle experience and trained 'em to do motorcycle-accident investigation-interviewing, reconstruction, examination of the motorcycle, the helmet, the whole thing, just the way we had done it with airplanes. And it was really scientifically complete. It all came from the science of aircraft-accident analysis, applied to motorcycles."
In the time since the Hurt Report was issued in 1981, Hurt and his colleagues have remained at the forefront of motorcycle-safety and head-protection research. His Head Protection Research Laboratory, operated out of USC for years, now functions as an independent, non-profit research facility that continues to provide cutting-edge accident research, helmet-testing and helmet-development services.
Hurt is 78 years old, yet can recite off the top of his head complex engineering reports from aerospace projects he worked on in the '50s. He patrols his lab with the aid of a walker-in a painful bit of irony, he was rear-ended in a serious car accident a year ago, and his legs have not fully recovered. When asked why he doesn't retire, he has a characteristic reply: "I retired years ago. I just didn't stop working."
Motorcycle fatalities are climbing steadily in the United States-they are up 85 percent since 1997. And just as he did in the late '70s, Harry Hurt wants to find out why. If all goes well, there will be some kind of major motorcycle accident study authorized and funded by the federal government in the next few years-a new-millenium version of the Hurt Report. And if he has his way, Harry Hurt, the godfather of motorcycle accident research, and our 2006 Motorcyclist of the Year, will be right in the thick of it.
Motorcyclist staffer Greg McQuide died while covering the Honda Hoot for us back in the summer of 2000. His friendship, work ethic and overall goodness as a human being prompted us to name the Motorcyclist of the Year trophy in his name. We still miss him.