What are some defenses against a ticket that someone might receive from the Florida Highway Patrol’s airplane?
Answer: Well the big thing is, every one of these aircraft speed tickets issued by the Florida Highway Patrol, the pilot trooper needs to call out not only the speed in which the violator was driving, but the time that he actually committed the violation, because that’s what’s printed on the citation. So, on the citation, you have all of the violator’s information, the location of where the speeding occurred, also the time. And that’s where we find some issues. We find issues, if it’s an 88 or an 87—there’s a lot of those. You know, speed limits in Florida for the most part are 70, so they usually will start pulling people over when they’re 84 and above. But if there’s a time discrepancy between the citation and the officer’s notes—what we call the field notes from the sergeant in the air—if there’s a discrepancy, in most instances they will err on the side of the driver and end up dismissing it. So one of the things that we always look for when we have these aircraft speed details is we always look at the pilot’s logs to make sure that there’s consistency between the notes that they took while they were flying and the information that’s located on the face of the citation.
