8/31/2011:
As Labor Day approaches, a time when many of you will be travelling, it’s important to remember to exercise caution on the road. You never know when you’ll drive into a speed trap.
Today, police use cameras systems and speed guns, but in 1966, such technologies were not available. However, on this date, Highway Patrol Sgt. Erwin Kobs, stationed out of Fargo, was patrolling the roads in a very creative way—via airplane.
Airplanes had already been used to monitor the roads in some other states, but it was a new in North Dakota. By this date, it had been in use for only a couple of months—with good results.
The Highway Patrol Superintendent said, “Its purpose is to catch violators. But we also hope it will have a deterrent effect. When people find out it’s up there, maybe they’ll slow down.”
The way it worked, the pilot flew at about 1,500 feet, watching the traffic below. Most traffic moved at about the same speed, so any unusually fast motion was noticeable.
A reporter who went along with Kobs wrote, “The pace (of a speeding vehicle) looked leisurely until you began ticking off in your mind the rate at which the auto was passing the sections of broken white centerline on the highway – and you realized he was burning up the road.”
Kobs used a stopwatch to time the distance it took a car to travel from one white airplane insignia painted on the road to another about a half mile away. He repeated the process, just to make certain, and then called it in, radioing a man on the ground, who would pull the car over to ticket the driver.
It might not have been the happiest of tasks, but it was useful. According to recent research performed by scientists in Canada and California, getting a speeding ticket can reduce a driver’s chance of being involved in an accident by 35 percent, at least for a few weeks. So, Patrolman Kobs could not only fly … he could also be saving lives!
Dakota Datebook written by Sarah Walker
Sources:
Fargo Forum, Wednesday, August 31, 1966
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97598&page=1