Speeders can’t see Joe Kingsman soaring 1,500 feet above
southbound U.S. 101, but the California Highway Patrol officer and
pilot can see them.
Speeders can’t see Joe Kingsman soaring 1,500 feet above southbound U.S. 101, but the California Highway Patrol officer and pilot can see them.
“I’ve got a champagne sedan a half-mile out at 82 (miles per hour),” Kingsman broadcast to two CHP patrol cars waiting on the side of the Cochrane Road on-ramp Wednesday morning. “He’s in the No. 1 lane. You can start down the ramp.”
Officer Matt Ramirez, first in line, moved from the grassy shoulder onto the ramp, looking over his left shoulder for the sedan.
“He’s on your bumper,” was the broadcast from Kingsman as the sedan in question sped past the on-ramp and Ramirez flipped on the patrol car’s lights and sirens. “You’re door-to-door.”
Ramirez moved left into the fast lane, now directly behind the Nissan Sentra, to pull the car over to the right-hand shoulder.
It was the third of 13 tickets five officers, plus Kingsman overhead, would issue to speeders in 45 minutes during the morning commute. The CHP is using Kingsman and his Cessna Stationair Turbo 206 more frequently during “maximum enforcement” to catch drivers who speed, drive drunk and otherwise violate the rules of the road. Last week, on another stretch of 101, Kingsman said he caught 15 cars in less than an hour, each going between 83 and 94 mph.
“A lot of times, the officers that are issuing the tickets never even see the speed violation,” said Kingsman, a 15-year veteran of the CHP.
He became a pilot 16 years ago and started flying the CHP plane, kept in Paso Robles, eight years ago. Issuing speeding tickets by air, is easier, more efficient and safer for ground units, he said.
“And I go to court less, especially considering the number of tickets I issue,” Kingsman said. “If you stop someone at 80 or 90 (mph) – they know.”
That’s not to say the CHP won’t ticket drivers going slower than that, and above the 65 mph speed limit. But when Kingsman took to the air just after 7am Wednesday, the slowest speeder he ticketed was traveling at 81 mph.
The driver of the Nissan Sentra stopped by Officer Ramirez told him she didn’t know what her speed was when Kingsman paced her at 82 mph. She was talking to her passenger and simply wasn’t paying attention – one of the more common speeding excuses Ramirez said he hears.
Kingsman caught that speeder by pacing her in the air. He flew directly above her, matching her speed with his plane that travels between 50 and 150 mph. He stayed with her as she passed a marker on the side of the highway, painted by Caltrans for this purpose. One mile down the road was a second marker line, giving Kingsman a second method with which to calculate their speed.
After Ramirez finished writing the woman’s ticket – Kingsman is recorded as the issuing officer – he exited the highway at San Martin Avenue to drive back north to Cochrane, where other officers waited for Kingsman to identify speeders. Some drivers noticed the small cluster of CHP cars that gathered at one point and visibly slowed down.
“There’s not that many of us (officers) to work such a large area,” Ramirez said, referencing a recently-released report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office that says officers are spending more time working fender-benders and crashes and less time enforcing speed and other laws. “The mentality is, people think they’re not going to get caught, so we want to be highly visible.”
The officers were highly visible Wednesday, at some points pulling over two or three cars within sight of one another.
Cars exiting at Cochrane were not exempt, either. At least twice, officers sitting on the on-ramp, drove up the grass embankment to the off-ramp just north of them, to snag speeders. One of those speeders, in a Jeep Cherokee stopped just before 8am, turned out to be a suspected drunken driver.
A few minutes later, Kingsman paced a white sedan and pick-up behind it, both traveling 85 mph.
Ramirez pulled over Phani Kalagara, in the sedan, who said he commutes from San Jose to Monterey for work every day and said he had never been caught speeding by the CHP plane.
“I was just flowing with traffic, actually,” he said.
“That’s why we stopped traffic behind him, too,” Ramirez said.
