Many people have asked me about my experiences when I used to do Special Escort Group work, and very few believe that sometimes things go wrong. Well, here is proof of the pudding that things can and do go wrong, no matter how well trained you are or how good you think you are, none of us are indestructable (and this is not in any way meant as an apportioment of blame in this case as nobody yet knows the full cause) Lets hope everyone makes a speedy and full recovery Prince Harry's police motorbike outrider crashes head-on into taxi | Mail Online
Ouch! I would say both rider and driver are very lucky. From the footage, it looks like a textbook SMIDSY. Hopefully all concerned will go on to make a full recovery. Slightly off topic. Anyone else here a bit turned on by the term "Special Escort Group"? No? No one? Just me then.....
Difficult one, that. The car driver wouldn't necessarily have seen the outrider as he would have been focussed on the car and made a split-second judgement that he could get out of the junction and on the other carriageway prior to the car getting there. However he wouldn't have been expecting an outrider to have been riding on the outside of the car (possibly over the white line?) as you wouldn't expect a normal motorcyclist to be making an overtaking manouevre there nor to be riding along with the car. On the biker's side, under normal circumstances he would be riding more defensively, particularly w.r.t approaching a junction with a car waiting to pull out and turn right. However he can't ride defensively in this situation as his job is to outride the car and add protection to it. Should the outrider have presumed the driver was going to pull out and back off, with the effect of lowering the protection of the vehicle it was escorting?
When I read T.C. saying he used to do "Special Escort Group work" I thought he was making an admission to a very dodgy prior career (albeit, a potentially lucrative one!!!)
