EDR Course
May 9 and 10, 2002
Washington State Criminal Justice Training Center

How do you start an article about Rusty Haight? Anyone that has attended one of his classes in the past knows, without hesitation, that he will keep your interest and keep the class moving whether it is with his anecdotes, real life examples of what can happen, or a clip of one of his many test crashes.

Would anyone of us be willing to intentionally drive one car into another at fifty, that's right, fifty miles an hour? To date his fastest crash test has been 49 point something something miles per hour. In my book that's fifty miles an hour. And he has done all this for us. He brings examples to the classroom, which no one else would consider attempting to capture. It is this level of devotion to the profession that sets Rusty apart from almost other instructors.

When you take the personality of Rusty, coupled with the CDR material, I think you have a home run. If you were able to attend the WATAI Seminar on Wednesday afternoon, you were treated to an expanded history of Crash Data Recorders and how they have developed, first in the aircraft industry and now in automobiles. Further you received a look at were they are headed.

Starting on Thursday, Rusty went into the "how" the system works and "why" this technology has given us another tool to use in collision reconstruction. Yes, this is just another tool for you to use. It is not the "All-Knowing Black Box" that will tell us everything that we would like to know about a collision. All we need to do is look at the aircraft industry for that example. Commercial aircraft have had crash data recorders for years. Even today when a plane goes in, it takes a team of investigators months and even years to come up with "what happened", and sometimes they still cannot answer all the "what happened" questions.

On Friday, Rusty again went the extra mile using his rental car to demonstrate an actual near deployment. (The next time you rent a car, you may want to ask if Rusty has been in town lately.) And everyone had the opportunity to go through an actual down load from a Sensing Diagnostic Module.

The most important information that I believe came from the session was, "What can go wrong with the data and why." Through his personal experience and frequent conversations with the engineers designing the systems he was able to show examples of what can happen to the data and how to detect when you have to question what is reported.