I was clocked going 79 in a 50 zone on a major 6 lane highway through Orlando (I-4). First why is the limit so dam low? nobody drives that slow.
Anyway I was clocked by an airplane using a stopwatch to time my car between two lines a 1/4 mile apart. The airplane guy radios the cops on the ground to pull over the cars. Should I fight this? How accurate is this with delayed reflexes on the stop watch and all? Also the bastard cop gave me a ticket for my tint and I was nothing but respectful to him!

 

Dunno if you should fight it, but to answer your question about accuracy - the measurements from the airplane should be pretty accurate. They usually use the hash marks on the side of the highway for timing purposes, i.e. start the stopwatch when you cross one hash mark, stop it when you cross another, and then calculate your speed based on the time it took you to travel between the two. Any delay in reflexes won't matter because there will be a delay both when starting and stopping the clock. Hence, the relative delays will effectively cancel each other out.

Good luck dude.

 

Airplanes are the easiest to get out of! Too many human factors involved!!!

 

Eh, at the speed you were going I doubt you have much of a shot. I tinkered with some numbers and determined that if your true speed were 72.6 mph the cop would have had to be off in his stopwatch reading by a full second to get 79 mph as your calculated speed. An entire second of error only overclocked you by 6.4 mph. Since the actual error is probably no more than a couple tenths of a second, you presumably were going within a couple mph of the cited speed. With a posted limit of 50, I think you're out of luck.

Of course, all the above assumes that the guy overhead had a good line of sight to the two lines on the road and was thus able to see when your bumper crossed each of them.

 

Yes, but you're talking about clocking them from and SR-71, judging by your avatar. You'd be too high up to make an accurate reading....

 

hehehe, this side of a satellite the SR-71 has some pretty darn good optical abilities on board. Fast A$$ plane too!

 

Nick - I sent you a PM, can I get your buddies number?

 

Tom, I sent you the info at 1:30 this afternoon through a PM, Did you not get it???

 

Got it - thanks!

 

There was a pretty well publicized case recently of some motorcyclist going some ridiculously high speed by an aircraft...however in court the biker showed that his bike was incapable of going that fast...not sure of the outcome, but it was well publicized that the aircraft is not the best measure of speed.