The sad thing is -- this guy will probably lose his license for a while..... (Or, if the stars align and the FSDO is kind and gentle, maybe a little counseling and a slap on the wrist? Probably not....)
Though to the lay man, everything he did seemed to be pretty reasonable for a homeowner watching someone stealing from his home, unless he can prove he was in the process of landing or taking off, which he pretty much publicly stated he wasn't (he admitted that he buzzed his house at 300 feet and there was no airport nearby), this poor guy admitted to the whole world he violated FAR 91.119, Minimum Safe Altitudes (reprinted below the article).....
[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE [/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--](CNN) A lot of things can go wrong in life that you can plan for, but some are just too far-fetched to bother with -- or so you'd think.
Just ask the man who stole a trailer from outside a Florida home, unconcerned about the small plane buzzing overhead.
Turns out the pilot of the single-engine Cessna was the home owner who just happened to be flying by when he spotted the theft in progress.
"We watched him just walk out right in front of us," David Zehntner, the homeowner, recounted Tuesday. "Two or three times, he literally looked up at us. At one point, he even stood with his hands on his hips and looked up at us."
The incident occurred Sunday afternoon, when Zehntner was flying back to Labelle, outside Fort Myers, from Franklin, N.C., where he and his wife had spent Christmas at their second home.
"The flight path and the landing procedure here in Labelle flies right over our property anyway," the 56-year-old retired auto parts store manager said. "So we always make a circle over our property."
As they reached an altitude of 800 feet, his wife noticed something odd.
"My wife says, 'Honey, there's somebody at our house. There's a truck parked in our driveway,'" Zehntner said.
Zehntner dropped the plane to 300 feet and buzzed their ranch home.
"We see this guy walking around our house looking in windows, checking the doors, scoping the house out," he said. "And it wasn't anybody we knew."
The man then picked up a 6-foot-by-12-foot red utility trailer that was parked outside the house, set it on the bumper hitch to a pickup truck, hooked it up and drove off, Zehntner said.
"My wife kept saying, 'Land, land,'" he said.
But Zehntner couldn't land; there was no airport nearby.
"I said, 'Honey, he's not going to get away. There's no way he's going to get away.'"
Zehntner followed the truck and trailer the seven miles into town.
"At no point did he act like he made any correlation -- like, 'Wait a minute, this guy is following me,'" Zehntner said.
At one point, the truck stopped at a red light in front of the police station, but Zehntner could do nothing.
He had a cell phone, but the prop noise would have drowned out any attempt at conversation.
When the truck pulled onto State Road 80 headed west out of Labelle, Zehntner made a quick landing and called the Hendry County 911 dispatcher, who put out a be-on-the-lookout call for the silver truck with a white top pulling a stolen trailer.
Within half an hour, he got a call from deputies flying a helicopter in nearby Lee County and gave them a description of the vehicle.
"They said, 'I think we've got him. Hold on. Somebody will call you back shortly.'"
Some five minutes later, a Lee County deputy sheriff called and asked for a description of the man. That was easy, since the view from 300 feet had been clear: Handlebar mustache, 6-foot tall, medium build.
A few minutes later, he got another call asking him to drive over to where they had stopped the truck on I-75 heading into Charlotte County and verify that the trailer was his.
Police said they had found guns inside the truck and wanted to know whether they were Zehntner's, he said.
They were not.
"We went back, recovered our trailer; they impounded his truck, took him to the Charlotte County Jail and we took our trailer home -- and we were happy," Zehntner said.
He said police told him the obvious -- he was lucky.
"Most of the time -- crimes like this -- they get away and it's hell for the police to try to find the stuff," he said. "I don't think my wife's still gotten over it."
Copyright 2013 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/02/justice/florida-plane-theft[/quote]
[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE [/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]ยง 91.119 Minimum safe altitudes: General.
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
a. Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
b. Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
c. Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.[/quote]
