Semi Trailer Brilliant Recovery!

John.
I think you are spot on. It appears to be suddenly corrected and THEN the trailer sways. He continues and it pulls the rig straight again. Keeping going is the only thing he could have done. ONLY after it was over did he brake or change anything, which people saw and interpreted that as a magnificent save. Just lucky his inattention didn’t crash it. He was most likely fully awake afterwards though. Adrenalin is a great reviver.

I also concur with your thoughts. Driver drifts off the road to the left either through distraction or carelessness. He is lucky. That sudden correction when realising that they have drifted off the road has resulted in the serious injury and death of so many drivers on our roads, both young and old. It takes a great degree of skill to fight the startle reflex that makes you jerk the wheel to correct the errant drift off the bitumen.

I'm in agreement with all. Nothing "brilliant" about a swerve back onto the highway, after running off the road due to plain carelessness - or outright distraction, as is more likely the case.

This sheer carelessness when driving, gets a lot of people killed - and truck drivers (particularly those driving B-doubles and road trains) are expected to have superior driving skills and experience.

But unfortunately, the level of driving skills is still too low in many sections of the trucking industry.

I recently followed a tandem skip-bin truck along Reid Hwy (W.A.), heading towards Midland, at around 6:00AM.
It was still dark, and raining lightly, and as I came up behind the truck, I could see both right rear tyres were more than half flat.

But the driver was sitting on 90kmh, and totally oblivious to the half-flat tyres.
After several kms, the traffic all pulled up at the lights at the intersection of Roe Hwy, Gt Northern Hwy and Reid Hwy.

I pulled into the lane to the right of the skip-bin truck, got out and went back to the truck driver to tell him he was running two half-flat tyres on the rear.

But he had to take his music earpieces out of his ears to be able to hear what I was saying - and at the news, he looked quite surprised.

Despite being able to see the bulging tyres in his rear view mirror, if he'd looked, it was pretty obvious he hadn't looked in the mirror for some time, he was just one "switched-off operator".

Cheers, Ron.

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Interesting that the truck driver hit his hazard lights as soon as he had it stabilised. Wonder how long he left them on? Maybe until he had finished changing his underpants? lol

Here's another brilliant example of the quality of todays truck drivers - a truckie who flies down the ranges into Adelaide on the South Eastern Freeway, at excessive speed, using only brakes - instead of holding the truck back at a low descent speed in low gears, and only touching the brakes occasionally.

The result is entirely predictable - the bloke loses his (smoking and fading) brakes, and runs through a red light at the intersection at the bottom of the descent - narrowly missing another vehicle.

How do these blokes get behind the wheel of big rigs with so little truck-driving knowledge and instruction??

Truck drivers near miss on Sth Eastern Fwy, Adelaide

Cheers, Ron.

John, Trailers can get out of hand very quickly as the further back you go the worse the sway flick is compounded and he was lucky to get that one back from the brink.

I see a lot of rhetoric here about truck drivers but as usual, much of it just picks on individual cases or supposition.

Now to start with a very, very high percentage of truck drivers are well over 50, many in the 60's and some like me who lasted into their 70's before giving it away. They are not pups but on occasion do make mistakes the same as EVERYONE on the road, that is except for the perfect ones.

Now if others would like to read the following correct quote regarding heavy vehicles please do and get a true picture and these are 2019 stats.

Heavy Truck Involvement
Heavy truck accidents cause considerable more damage than normal vehicle accidents. Contributing factors are the time it takes trucks to respond to unexpected road conditions because of their total weight. It takes a truck considerably more time to slow down and stop than it does for a regular vehicle.
Over 80% of crashes with heavy truck involvement are classified as multiple vehicle and only 10% are counted as single vehicle incidents. Comparing this to the statistic that 45% of non-truck involved road crashes are classified as single vehicle, reveals that truck drivers are much less likely to crash on their own than normal car drivers. 15% of all road crash fatalities and 4% of all road crash injuries involve heavy trucks, but only 20% of those crashes are attributed as the truck driver’s fault, demonstrating that on average truck drivers are safer drivers than other vehicle drivers.