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 devastatingPalisades 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…