High-tech eyes in the sky

As Jeff Hatteberg banked a Cessna 206 over Puget Sound on Friday morning, his fellow State Patrol trooper and pilot Troy Davis toggled a joystick controlling a high-powered camera attached to the plane's fuselage and zoomed in on a man standing on a ferry that had just docked at the Edmonds terminal.

Davis flipped a switch, and the ferry's smokestacks glowed white on the plane's on-board computer screen. "See how hot they are?" he asked, demonstrating the camera's heat-detecting capabilities.

Though the State Patrol has used airplanes since 1959 to catch speeders, aggressive drivers and marijuana growers, it used to be that pilots could eyeball incidents only from the sky and radio information to law enforcement on the ground.

Late last year, the State Patrol received a $982,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Terrorist Readiness Initiative Fund and equipped two of its Cessnas with FLIR — Forward Looking Infra Red — camera systems that can zoom in on suspects and detect body heat, said Lt. Tristan Atkins, who supervises the patrol's aviation section.

The FLIRs use microwave downlinks to provide real-time images to command staff at the patrol's King County headquarters in Bellevue or to portable receivers to help field commanders coordinate raids and rescues. The images captured by the camera can be instantly recorded and used as evidence in the event of a criminal trial.

Earlier this month, Davis said he used the Cessna's camera to watch a group of children board a school bus as a SWAT team waited nearby to raid a house outside of Gig Harbor. Once the SWAT commander saw on his receiver that the children were safely on their way to school, his team moved in and officers arrested 10 people and seized illegal guns, drugs and stolen cars, Davis said.

The Patrol's planes, housed in an airport hangar in Olympia, fly over the Seattle area every weekday during the morning commute. On Thursday, Davis was flying above Interstate 90 near Preston when he spotted a car driving 101 mph in a 60 mph zone.

He passed the information along and a trooper in a patrol car stopped the vehicle. The driver, Davis later learned, was driving with a suspended license and had in his possession a gas mask connected to a marijuana bong with a length of plastic tubing.

"Little did he know he was being tracked," Davis said, explaining that a stopwatch and markings on the highway help pilots and flight operators — the troopers who work the equipment — calculate a driver's speed. "It always feels good to get a guy like that off the road."

Back on the ground at Boeing Field, Atkins, the aviation section lieutenant, said Patrol pilots are often tapped to help federal and local law-enforcement agencies in investigations that are almost impossible to conduct from the ground.

Though the agency has its own plane, it's too big to fly below low-level clouds, whereas the patrol's Cessnas typically fly between 1,500 and 2,500 feet, he said. Atkins couldn't disclose too many details about the ongoing ICE investigation into drug and immigration violations, but said his pilots were able to track a car suspected of carrying a large shipment of marijuana and methamphetamine from Tacoma to Seattle.

Atkins expects, too, that the on-board technology will be increasingly used to find lost hikers, capsized boaters and even victims of natural disasters. Patrol pilots, Atkins said, recently videotaped a section of coastline south of Aberdeen as part of a tsunami simulation so state officials responsible for emergency preparedness could assess the area.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com