Mastering the Ride

After you've been riding for a while, you can appreciate the fact that motorcycling is a lot more complex than you suspected when you first started. There is a definite progression of skills and knowledge, starting with the basics and continuing to deeper levels, that can only be realized through time, dedication, and effort. What does it take to move from novice level to master level in motorcycling? In my opinion, the elements include not only acquiring miles on the road and refining skills but also developing the right attitude toward riding and learning to ride smarter.

Developing the right attitude is crucial; that includes thinking of this aspect of motorcycling as a crash, rather than an accident. Crashes have the potential to be prevented, with skill and experience.

Developing the Right Attitude

As those of us who have been riding motorcycles for any length of time know (much better than the nonriders who issue dire warnings), motorcycling is potentially very risky. Even if you become highly skilled at street motorcycling, you can't remove all the risks. Riders who treat motorcycling as nothing more than a game or a stunt don't seem to last long. To master the ride, you must begin by being serious about what you do. (Don't worry-the thrill and excitement of it all will still be there.) Developing the right attitude toward every aspect of riding is just as critical as developing the correct techniques in every aspect of your riding.

Crashes, for example, are one of the areas in which riders need to have the right attitude-one with better odds for survival. The right attitude begins with thinking of crashes as crashes, not accidents. The word accident implies that no one could have done anything to have avoided what happened. I believe, however, that someone always has some ability to change the outcome.

The general attitude in automotive safety is that accidents happen; no one is at fault. So the solution to preventing injury is to protect occupants with belts, air bags, shatterproof glass, crumple zones, and other safety devices. That's why, when it comes to motorcycles, automotive experts focus on helmets to deal with accidents.

Motorcycles, however, don't fit well into the transportation industry's safety ideas because motorcyclists don't take well to flying through the air and splatting into immovable objects. On public roads we have all sorts of nasty objects to crash into, including curbs, poles, cable barriers, wild animals, and other vehicles. Although I wear "all the gear, all the time" (ATGATT), I know that crash padding can only do so much for a motorcyclist.

Airplanes, like motorcycles, don't crash well. That is why the primary approach to avoiding injury in aviation is to avoid the crash. The pilot's focus is on doing everything exactly right, even during an emergency. The motorcyclist who intends to avoid injury would be wise to develop a similar attitude.

Riding within the Envelope

Pilots often describe their tactics as "flying within the envelope." The envelope is an imaginary balloon representing the physical limits of the situation, including the pilot's skill. For example, let's say a particular airplane needs a minimum of 140 knots to lift off from a runway at 5,000-foot elevation, assuming a maximum temperature of 75 degrees Fahrenheit. If speed doesn't exceed 140 knots, the airplane won't leave the ground. The envelope is ever changing.

A motorcyclist also has an ever-changing envelope. Consider a motorcycle that can corner at a lean angle of 45 degrees on clean, dry pavement with a camber of at least 5 degrees and the rider hanging off the inside of the saddle and easing on the throttle. If the surface camber changes, or there is a splash of diesel oil, or the rider panics and slams the throttle closed, the bike won't make the corner.

Whether you've been riding for two years or five years or more, whether you ride a dual-sport, a cruiser, or a sport-tourer (above), the learning must be constant if you want to acquire higher skills and keep moving up.

Acquiring Higher Skills

People often ask me how they can become better riders. There is so much to learn that I'm often stumped to provide answers that aren't overly complicated. An inexperienced rider might think becoming skilled is just a matter of taking the basic beginning rider course to learn how to operate the clutch and roll on the throttle, how to apply the brakes, and what traffic laws apply specifically to motorcycles. The veteran rider knows that the learning, a mix of formal training and self practice, must be constant, a drive to acquire new and higher skills, including precision cornering tactics and avoidance of surface hazards such as tar snakes and V traps, and a drive to develop a better understanding of the complexities of motorcycling, such as the physics involved in cornering and other maneuvers.

SMARTrainer

Bearing in mind that risk-management techniques are similar for pilots and motorcyclists, we could learn something from the way pilots are trained. Commercial pilots take high-quality courses in what's called ground school, then spend time in a flight simulator practicing procedures, before finally moving up to flying the airplane under supervision of an instructor pilot. Even after getting certified to fly a specified airplane, the pilot studies the operations manual at every opportunity to keep his or her knowledge fresh and undergoes additional training and/or testing on a regular basis. How often depends upon the type of certification.

The airplane industry has a very complex system for training pilots, because crashes are not only tragic in terms of lives lost but also expensive and bad for business. Every time a jetliner crashes, ticket sales drop. One of the important features of pilot training is the use of flight simulators to provide opportunities to practice skills and procedures in an environment in which an error won't be expensive or dangerous. Flight simulators look, act, and feel almost like real airplanes, including the sensation of motion.

Honda's SMARTrainer is a tool for developing situational awareness, but in comparison to a flight simulator, it is simplistic. However, it's the best we have so far.

The full-motion flight simulators used in pilot training have realistic cockpit controls and indicators and a wide image projected on a wraparound screen in front of the cockpit windows. Hydraulic cylinders provide motion to give the pilot a realistic "seat of the pants" feel.

Various motorcycle manufacturers have attempted to develop riding simulators, but there really isn't sufficient motivation (motorcycling crashes don't affect business as airplane crashes do). Of course simulators can be shockingly expensive. The best that anyone has managed to come up with so far is a "sit down" video game called the SMARTrainer, developed by Honda.

The SMARTrainer is useful as a situational awareness tool, but unfortunately it has some operational warts that detract from its usefulness. For example, it direct steers like a trike rather than countersteering like a bike. The screen depicting the situation ahead is so small that it can't show anything like a real-world view. Some of the handlebar switches are used to control the program, not the "bike."

Let's hope that before too long someone will come up with a more realistic motorcycling simulator that's affordable. The computer-games people could certainly do it. In the meantime, I suggest that you take a spin on the SMARTrainer if you have the opportunity to do so.

Because the risks for motorcycling are just as high as the risks for flying, I wish that we could require motorcyclists to undergo the same sort of rigorous, recurrent training that airplane pilots are required to. (See SMARTrainer on the opposite page for further discussion of training.) That, unfortunately, isn't possible at this time.

However, in addition to the basic beginning rider courses offered in every state, there are an increasing number of courses that offer more intensive and in-depth training springing up around the country. Before taking a look at some of those courses, let's briefly review the history of motorcycle training in this country and see how certain training developed some serious shortcomings.

Rider Training History

Back in the 1980s, states began making training (frequently subsidized from surcharges on motorcycle licenses) available to the public. Gradually, from 1980 to 1997, the number of motorcyclist fatalities dropped. The safest year for motorcycling in the United States was in 1997, with 2,116 fatalities, and a fatality rate of 55.30 per 100,000 registered motorcycles. However, in the time frame from 1997 to 2008, the more riders who were trained, the greater the number of fatalities. So what changed? The training itself changed and clearly not for the better.

The motorcycle industry was, and is, very much in favor of rider training, as training encourages more people to take up motorcycling. The problem is that in order to ensure that as many people as possible could become motorcyclists, the motorcycle industry's training developers created a very simple "learn to ride" course and a very easy skills test.

In some states the same industry organization that designed the curriculum also came to manage the training and license testing. As a result, since the late 1990s getting a motorcycle license has, in general, become quicker and easier....