you can’t have rules where it’s okay to break them if nobody gets hurt. You can’t have investigative agencies where it’s okay to lie and obstruct them so long as there was no harm done.
If you skip the penalties in a case like this, you encourage people to do the very things your regulations exist to prevent if they think they it probably won’t harm anyone.
You’re not allowed to deliberately crash a plane without telling the FAA. You’re certainly not allowed to do it into random public land. You’re not allowed to send a plane out of control deliberately.
Those are incredibly dangerous things to do.
If you do those things and are lucky enough not to start a wildfire or kill anyone then there still have to be consequences.
And if you try to avoid those consequences then that needs to be punished too.
A wild fire has a slim chance of happening and so does a death of a bystander when you crash a plane into unpopulated forest. The danger is so minimal here that what he did is clearly will not lead to accidental injury or deaths of others. It's Just stupid, like a person who road rages and rams into a parked car, unoccupied car.
The consequences here should be a fine and loss of pilots license. Jail time isn't even a discussion here.
This idea that crashed cars or small planes explode in a ball of fire is from Hollywood. When a car or small plane crashes it just crumbles into hunks of metal debris. It has no relationship to the concept of fire starting.
Every action done here is completely orthogonal to fire risk and completely independent of the fire risk of the region.
Under your logic Making an illegal campfire is much much more of a crime here. And this logic makes more sense to me.
“Your honor my actions only had a 1 in 25 chance of causing a wildfire” is not a great defense in a state where in recent memory wildfires have destroyed tens of thousands of homes and killed hundreds of people. We’ll see how that one plays out.
I live in that state, and the actual numbers compared with the actual people living in that state unfortunately trivializes the events. More people die in car accidents so it's not like it's a huge tragedy that's on everyone's' minds. It may be if you are affected or close to people who are, but in general it's not top of mind.
It won't go there for the judge, it's too hypothetical. Likely gross negligence at worst without specifying details of a fire. The fire is just a hypothetical for discussion here.
The consequences might have been a fine and a loss of pilots license. Except he tried to avoid those consequences by concealing the facts and lying to the investigators. He wanted to do the dumb thing and get away with it.
We all are. Pests like this are a drain on our entire government and society. How many hours have been wasted on this stupid stunt that was entirely his doing for no reason at all. He then tried to cover it up and lied about it. He wasted our time this morning reading about it again because he is a selfish liar.
If he makes an insurance claim, that sounds like insurance fraud. That is a very real crime with a victim. Did that happen and why isn't that the headline?
