Eyes in the Sky : CHP Enforces the Speed Limit From 1,000 Feet Above the Ventura Freeway

One thousand feet above the ocean, state officers zero in on a little white hatchback whizzing past the other cars on the Ventura Freeway. They radio the ground. And smoothly, a black-and-white patrol car leaves a pack stationed at the State Beaches on-ramp.

Nabbed at 78 m.p.h.

Is this Big Brother? The pilot and his partner don’t think so.

“We’re doing a job and trying to do it the safest and best we can,” said Bruce Golbek, a CHP flight officer who catches speeding motorists by clocking his single-engine Cessna as it keeps pace with cars on the Ventura Freeway at the Rincon.

Added pilot Al Berget: “When you get up there and it’s 110 degrees in the airplane . . . wearing steel-tip boots, gloves and a helmet--that can make you humble awfully fast.”

These are but two of 72 pilots and flight officers responsible for catching about 10% of the 1 million California drivers ticketed for speeding each year.

In Ventura County, speed is enforced by air about three times a month, predominantly on a five-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway near the Rincon beaches. But the plane, which usually works with five cars, can be responsible for up to 30 tickets an hour, said Sgt. Robert Johnson, aerial supervisor for the CHP’s Santa Cruz-to-Ventura area.

Faced with other responsibilities and the necessary conversation and research time, a CHP officer on the ground might only ticket about five people an hour and not all tickets will be for speeding, CHP Officer Jim Utter said.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, flight officers don’t use radar to monitor drivers. A simple stopwatch and a sharp eye are their tools.

“There’s always somebody that’s a little bit faster than everybody else, pushing itself through,” Golbek said. “After a while you get used to it. You can pick out the cars that are going faster.”

It’s illegal to clock cars. So armed with his wristwatch and a stopwatch, Golbek clocks the time that it takes the single-engine plane to travel from one mile-marker to the next. Caltrans has placed white line markers a mile apart on the shoulders of state roads from San Diego to the Oregon border.

California law says it is considered an illegal speed trap if the speeding vehicle itself is timed. But by pacing an airplane with the patrol car and timing it, instead, the CHP can legally compute the car’s time by comparison.

“We’re not timing the vehicle through those marks,” pilot John Lehman said. “We’re timing the airplane between the marks and pacing the vehicle. It’s a subtle difference.”

The local flight team, based in Paso Robles, usually works one direction of a straight stretch of a wide-shouldered road, away from the heart of a city, to avoid traffic hazards for the ground officers, Johnson said.

In Ventura County, the planes prefer the Rincon area because it’s not too dense or too sparse.

Occasionally, planes patrol the Simi Valley Freeway but would rather avoid it because of the air traffic into Los Angeles, he said.

Earlier this week, the team was stationed at the State Beaches entrances.

“I’m working a little white hatchback,” Golbek said, walking the ground officer through the motions. “OK, go ahead and start rolling up the ramp. . . . He’s 100 yards in front of you.”

Golbek, in a tiny cockpit 1,000 feet above the ground, said he always notifies the ground crew of each car’s type, color and the lane in which it’s traveling.

Many drivers who learn that they have been monitored by air insist that the officers confused them with another car.

But flying parallel with the highway and about 400 yards out over the water, the flight team can clearly describe the cars.

“How are you going to get them mixed up when you’re sitting right there with the guy?” Berget asked.

While the state has used planes to patrol the highways since the 1960s, it has increased their use since the early 1980s, when resistance to the 55 m.p.h. limit grew when the oil shortage passed, Johnson said.

The state also uses fixed-wing planes in the county to patrol for disabled or stolen vehicles, especially over remote areas such as Highway 33 through Ojai.

“It’s an excellent tool,” Johnson said. “It saves officers time.” They aren’t used more, he said, because of high costs and a limited number of people trained to operate them.

The dreaded speeding ticket frustrates many drivers trying to beat the clock, anxious to reach their destinations quicker.

Most people have tunnel vision when they drive and aren’t watching the sky.

“I can understand how some people would feel tricked,” said David Dalberg, who was ticketed three weeks ago on a back road. “But they’re trying to do their job.”

Berget and Golbek contend that there’s nothing sly about clocking traffic from air.

Planes are visible, especially to truck drivers who radio one another on CB radios, calling, “There’s a bear in the air.” Drivers with sunroofs often catch a plane’s shadow, Golbek said.

“We’re not hiding or anything like that,” Berget said.

Also, the officers are preventing collisions, officials say.

“We would prefer that people comply with the speed law on their own rather than going down the road with a ticket in their hand,” Johnson said.