SIMI VALLEY — When Barbara and Doyle Payne hit the road, people tend to get out of their way.
That's what the flashing yellow lights, florescent orange flags and large, oversize-load signs on the Paynes' two pickup trucks are for: to warn motorists that they are about to encounter a giant traffic-inducing nightmare barreling down the highway.
The husband and wife team, who run Uneeda Pilot Car Service out of their Simi Valley home, travel more than 50,000 miles a year escorting really big trucks carrying really big things across Southern California and beyond.
When an object is too large for a train or plane to transport, trucks and their required escorts pick up the slack.
The Paynes have helped transport hundred-ton space shuttle parts, Boeing 707 and submarine fuselages, power station transformers and prefabricated McDonald's restaurants. Some loads are so huge that a 13-axle truck with another cab in the rear is needed to move the object.
But the Paynes don't push, pull, own or insure the oversized loads. They just escort them along routes approved by the California Department of Transportation, making sure the loads don't slam into overpasses or squash motorists.
"It's a weird business," said Barbara recently, hours before the Paynes left for a five-day trip to Cape Canaveral with a multimillion-dollar satellite in tow. "Never in my life did I imagine myself doing this for a living. I hardly knew what a pilot car was."
Whenever the Paynes tell people what they do, the next question is always, "What's that?"
Other escort drivers complain about late-night telephone calls from people looking for dates.
A former corporate secretary, Barbara was ready for a change six years ago when she was introduced to a woman who drove a pilot car in the Bay area.
Not long after, Barbara traded in her business suits and high heels for a CB radio and a set of flares and quickly mastered the art of dodging flying tire treads.
"I didn't know anything about the business," said Barbara, 60, who is vice president of the California Professional Escort Car Assn. "I had to learn everything from scratch, even the vocabulary."
Although Barbara now spouts off phrases like "four-wheelers" (motorists in cars) and "field goal the signals" (successfully guiding a tall load between a set of signal lights), she purposely avoids other lingo on the CB.
