Idiot.........

'Sheer stupidity': Calif. tech exec gets prison time for flying drone into firefighter plane

By Stephen Council

Peter Akemann, a longtime executive in the video game industry, has been sentenced to two weeks in prison for crashing his personal drone into an aircraft that was fighting Los Angeles County’s devastating Palisades Fire in January.

Akemann’s drone punched a 3-by-6-inch hole in the Super Scooper’s wing, putting it out of service for repairs on the third day of the blaze — and depriving firefighters of the amphibious plane’s huge water tank, as SFGATE previously reported. The executive admitted his mistake quickly after, and on Monday, a Los Angeles judge sentenced him to a 14-day prison term, 30 days of home detention, 150 hours of community service and $146,000 in restitution. 

“My decision to fly a drone in that time and place was a stupid and reckless thing to do,” Akemann wrote in a September 1 letter to the case’s judge, explaining that he’d flown the drone towards the fire out of curiosity and to look for a friend’s home near the blaze. 

Standing atop a Santa Monica parking garage, he lost sight of the drone and his controls lost connection; he only later learned that it had hit the firefighting aircraft. Akemann wrote in the letter, “Simple common sense dictated that I should never have put the drone up in the first place.” (Authorities had banned the use of drones near the fire.)

Of the restitution Akemann now owes, about $81,000 will go to Los Angeles County’s fire department, and the remainder will go to the government of Quebec, which owns the plane and had lent it for the all-hands-on-deck firefighting effort. He also owes a $9,500 fine to the U.S. government, the judge ordered.

Akemann’s lawyers had lobbied the judge to merely sentence him to probation, pointing to his remorse, his family and his quick admittance of guilt, which they wrote, “allowed the government to send a strong deterrent message to [drone pilots].”

“Mr. Akemann finds himself before this Court not because of greed, or malice or bad intentions; his fault in this case is a single decision of sheer stupidity,” the lawyers wrote.

But the judge opted to give prison time for the misdemeanor — unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. And after the two weeks, Akemann will be under supervision for a two-year term, the judge wrote. It’s a brutal turn for the veteran gaming executive, who helped create the Treyarch studio behind the Call of Duty franchise. Akemann has worked at various posts since, most recently as the executive director of technology at what his lawyers called in their note to the judge a “start-up entertainment and video game company.”

Akemann’s lawyers did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.