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A Pilot of the Highway

Posted on October 24, 2011

THE Pilot Car driven by Mildura’s Justin Briers was leading the road convoy of police and semi-trailers with its 125-tonne load on the Stuart Highway outside Port Augusta in South Australia when the car towing a trailer approached.

The convoy was rounding a tight corner, guard railings on both sides, and the load took up most of the road, so Justin waved the woman driver to the side of the road, asked her to wait, and alerted the rest of the five-vehicle convoy to exercise caution.

The policeman following Justin in a marked highway patrol car, lights flashing, also stopped to advise the woman, who had her husband as a passenger and two kids in car seats in the rear, to stay put until the convoy crept past.

But for some unknown reason, as soon as the police car disappeared, the woman ignored the warnings and headed into the bend…just as the first of the semi-trailers came in from the other side.

The two-way radio activity was frenzied, as the truckies, police, Justin and the driver of the second Pilot Car sent warnings to each vehicle.

By the time the trucks rounded the bend, the woman motorist was at the point of no return. Realising her predicament, she slammed her car in reverse…forgetting she was towing a trailer loaded with the family’s holiday gear!

The trailer jack-knifed, smacking into the rear of the car before bouncing off and slamming into the steel guard rail as everyone in the convoy came to a halt.

And then Justin, the truckies and the police were astounded to see the woman driver abandon her vehicle, husband and kids, jump the guard rail and run off across the paddock!

It was the most unusual incident the 41-year-old Pilot Car heavy vehicle escort professional has seen in 25 years on the job. He told how the hubby, with the passenger side door jammed up against the guard rail, had to jump the console to get into the driver’s seat and, helped by the police and truckies, extricate the car and trailer from the mess.

“The convoy was okay to move on, but we were all having bets as to what the outcome would be when the woman returned,” Justin said. “We’re not sure to this day if she even did come back, and if she did, whether or not the husband bothered to wait for her!”

Justin has many other stories about life on the road behind the wheel of one of his Pilot Vehicles, as he and his staff and sub-contractors cross-cross the nation on escort duties for some of the biggest highway loads in Australian history.

There was the motorist in a hurry who ignored a police escort and the flashing signs of a pilot van, and swept around their convoy, with all four wheels off the road in the gravel…he lost control and rolled the car, coming to rest upside down on the water pipeline alongside the road in a remote section of the Northern Territory.

Thankfully, Justin said, the family of four survived the crash, but the whole convoy was held up as the drivers and police administered first aid until paramedics arrived to take over.

“Some of the things motorists do in an effort to save a few seconds or a few minutes are unbelievable,” Justin said. “I could write a book on the experiences, especially from some of the grey nomads and their caravans.”

Justin got into the Pilot Car business as a 16-year-old, living in the Riverland, and while still on ‘P’ plates helping his Dad escort trucks carrying swimming pools from Adelaide to places like Renmark, Loxton and Mildura.

He continued this as a part-time job until 2000, when he completed a MADEC ‘start your own business course,’ and launched the Mildura Pilot Car Service.

Justin admits he was virtually a one-man show, doing vehicle escorts in an old ute with a flashing light and yellow warning sign on the roof, barely making ends meet, but things are a little different today.

His Pilot Car service now has four (?) full-time staff, four new Pilot Vehicles – vans and utes, 50 sub-contractors, and 100 clients across Australia. When he first started in the business, as a teenager, Adelaide-Mildura was a long haul, and a swimming pool was a big job. But now, Justin and his team criss-cross the continent, escorting loads weighing up to 300 tonnes, and can be away from home for months at a time.

His latest job, leading a convoy ferrying heavy braided steel conveyor belt cables the 3500 kilometres from Mayfield in NSW to the Worsley Aluminium Mine in West Australia. The braided cable is as thick as a man’s arm, there’s 9.1 kilometres of it on each giant reel, each rolled-up reel weighs 135-tonnes (a total of 240 tonnes with the semi), and the two-truck convoy has a total of 136 tyres on the road!

And Justin said he was told by the heavy haulage company, Tutt Bryant Heavy Lift and Shift, that the combined two reels of steel ‘wire,’ 18 kilometres in all, is just for one side of the huge conveyor belt onto which bauxite is loaded from the mine. The belt, inspected and X-rayed fortnightly, is replaced every two to three years!

Other unusual escort jobs have included houseboats, huge mining equipment and other large machinery weighing as much as 250 tonnes, school classrooms, the nose cone off a submarine, decompression chambers used by Scuba divers suffering ‘the bends,’ and the superstructure of a ‘super’ yacht, being built by a NZ multi-millionaire for his daughter!

Justin says there’s no way of knowing just where his job will take him, although there’s been some hectic mining activity lately, with some big loads of heavy equipment travelling from the eastern states to the mines in West Australia.

On average, Mildura Pilot Days are involved in up to 10 escorts a week, and Justin, who has accreditation in every State and Territory except the Northern Territory, hits the road with his team as often as he can.

“I like to be hands-on, and most of my clients like to see me at the helm,” he said. “It can get pretty busy, especially this year…I’ve been home four days in the last three months.”

The companies he works for take care of insurance for the loads, which can be worth as little as $5000, and as much as “in the multi-millions,” but Justin has a $10 million public liability insurance cover to protect his company.

So far, touch wood, he hasn’t had to make a claim, and says the key is safety first, meticulous planning, knowing the different rules and regulations in every State, hand-picking the team for each job, and never trying to rush a job.

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