Drunk driving: the absolute horror
A last one before the road
created on June 12, 2005 - updated on March 17, 2007 (bottom of the page)
Before addressing the subject of drunk driving, a memory from my past comes back. I was a student at Supaéro. It must have been in 1959 or 1960. The school was still located in Paris, on the boulevard Victor. It welcomed (and I suppose it still does) two types of students. The first were civil engineering students, the second were students coming from Polytechnique who joined Supaéro "as an application school". After two years of study, they became "military aeronautics engineers". One of them was named Gildas Rouvillois. He had a Renault Dauphine and a nice pipe covered with seal skin. It was the fashion at the time. One day we had the opportunity to be invited to a chalet for skiing. Duvillois was supposed to bring us all with his car.
Before being assigned to Supaéro, he had wanted to be a fighter pilot and had stayed at the Meknès base in Morocco. There, he was assigned to the Dassault "Ouragan" subsonic single-engine jets, ancestors of the Mirage III, which were used as training aircraft.
The Dassault "Ouragan" plane
They trained the pilots to shoot by making them dive toward targets being towed, on which they fired with their "movie camera". But Rouvillois (who later became a general engineer at the DGA, the General Directorate for Armaments) had a very personal method for making his shooting passes. He would dive toward the target and give a sudden push on the stick and rudder at the last moment to avoid collision.
After a few months, his instructors gently explained to him that he would have a better chance of living longer working in an office. He was recalled to France and assigned to the military aeronautics engineers corps.
He told me this story himself. Probably frustrated at no longer flying jets, he had bought a Renault Dauphine, obviously much less powerful and without wings.
The Renault Dauphine
Rouvillois didn't drink, but on the road he hadn't lost his reflexes as a young fighter pilot. Thus, when he overtook a car, he would dive toward it with his foot on the floor (at the time the Dauphine, extremely unstable due to the rear position of its engine, reached a maximum of 120 km/h). When he was almost on the "target vehicle", he gave two sudden turns of the wheel to overtake.
We didn't pass Meulun.
When Rouvillois attacked his last target vehicle, it was downhill. It was a small black truck moving at a moderate speed, staying well on the right. A first turn from our polytechnician put the Dauphine on its right wheels. He then immediately gave an opposite turn, putting us on the left wheels. The third turn sent us rolling over on the left side of the road. The truck driver, unaware of anything, continued his way innocently. How could he imagine that he had been mistaken for a towed target by an ex-fighter pilot who still thought he was at the controls of a jet?
Safety belts did not exist at the time. Crossing a small embankment made us leave our seats. I clearly remember that, floating inside the front part of the vehicle, I saw the car turn. I also saw Duvillois leave the car through the door that had opened upon impact, and start a glide of several tens of meters (maybe it was normal, after all, for a pilot).
What struck me was the silence that followed. The car was lying on its side. I could get out through the door. Rouvillois had landed in a tree, miraculously unharmed. He slid down like a ripe fruit. I had a white shirt and I noticed that it was red with blood. I thought I might have lost an ear or some other body part. As I was getting out of the vehicle, I did some checks. My nose was still in place, my ears too. My hands were unharmed. But where did all that blood come from? Did I have a hole in my head?
One of my ears had been torn off.
Rouvillois had regained consciousness. He said:
- "In the front trunk... my jacket with my wallet, my... papers..."
There are people who, after a violent shock, first try to recover their identity.
I had moved about ten meters away from the car, whose wheels were still turning. But instead of walking toward it, something stopped me. I was right to do so. The fuel tank, containing forty liters, caught fire. It happened exactly like in Belmondo's movies. The car was immediately surrounded by a bright yellow fireball. In a few seconds the five tires exploded. I stepped back more than a hundred meters from the vehicle to avoid being cooked by the intense radiation from the fire.
While the fuel was still burning, I tried to stop a car on the country road with heavy traffic that we had just left through the air. But the drivers, seeing the burning vehicle and me waving with my red blood-stained shirt, accelerated and swerved to avoid me and continue their way.
I counted seventy of them.
I managed to stop the seventy-first by standing right in the middle of the road, arms crossed. He managed to avoid me but, thinking I might have noted his license plate, he stopped a few tens of meters further on. I ran to catch up with him before he also took off, opened his door. He then said to me:
- "Do you need help?"
I congratulated him on his remarkable observation skills. He took us to the hospital in Meulun. Rouvillois, visibly shaken by his landing in the tree, kept repeating:
- "I must have a crushed spleen. There are people who have accidents. You think they're fine, but in fact they have a crushed spleen and die suddenly..."
We were admitted to the emergency room. The engineer's spleen had held up. The blood on my shirt came from my right ear, which was only held on by a piece of flesh. The intern offered to remove the piece, but I protested:
- "Try to sew it back. If it doesn't hold, it will still be time to remove that ear lobe."
The experience proved me right. Everything was quickly back in place. In the bus that took us back to Paris, Rouvillois asked me:
- "Which French cars are stable?"
The Dauphine was well known for not being a stability marvel. But the way he drove, I think he would have been able to make a tank roll over.
I returned to the accident site the next day, still by bus. I will never forget what I found there. Everything had been vaporized, turned into the finest ashes, in the center of which were packages of glass representing what remained of the windshield and side windows that had melted from the heat. There was no trace of fabric, leather or plastic, nothing. No ob...