Only 1 year?
Seems pretty light.
I'd have thrown the flight manual at him.
A Canadian idiot has been sentenced to a year behind bars after he was found guilty of calling in a bomb threat because he was running late for his flight. Michael Howells, 37, pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal mischief and received 12 months in jail along with a fine of CA$3,844.88 (US$3,000, £2,200). Howells was …
Agreed, they should make him read and memorize the CARs and when he's done follow with the FARs followed by EASA and JAA regs. He doesn't get out until he writes a thesis comparing and contrasting all four.
Oh, he should also give all the passengers a refund plus a nice dinner for their troubles.
He won't miss the prison bus! I imagine that prison is a familiar place for him, since he was also carrying some hard drugs. Howells' attorney opined that Howells' addiction "clouded his appreciation of the consequences" of his actions. Yeah it did, Howells was actually flying high at the time!
Troll icon, for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
So searched and got a snap on cbc.ca.
(http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/michael-howells-bomb-threat-1.3773794)
Note to self:
It most be possible to look like a complete moron without wearing a baseball cap, by why bother when you can don one and save all the effort.
'It most be possible to look like a complete moron without wearing a baseball cap, by why bother when you can don one and save all the effort.'
That's a heck of a slur on the 2.3 million males in British Columbia, Sir. Almost every man outside Vancouver wears one of these things whenever outside his home and they cannot decently be removed without a crowbar or the playing of the national anthem. I've seen people with baseball caps eating at 5-star restaurants.
Incidentally, have you seen the headgear they make you wear while you receive a P.hD?
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Someone who caused a bomb threat at Geneva airport was fined 90,000CHFs (GBP71k, USD92k) to stop her husband running away with his mistress. That level of fins seems much more of a deterrent.
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Note to self: don't mess with the Swiss!
"That level of fines seems much more of a deterrent."
Yeah, for those that can *at a push* afford it, people who are either very rich or very poor will not care a bit if you give them a £100k fine, for the rich its pennies and they wont notice it, for the poor its such an inordinate amount that they will never *EVER* be able to repay it - so wont even try - you try and extract £100k from someone who owns nothing... see how that goes.
Given that the guy was a drug user (or at least that was part of his defense) I imagine that the fine that he was given was proportional to his means - i.e He will be able to repay it, but it will be a massive inconvenience.
From memory the fines were based on your income, to make it reasonably painful for both the wealth and the not-so-wealthy. Hence if you are super-rich and get caught speeding the fine can be...significant.
On the plus side, the local police donut fund is in good shape.
"...received 12 months in jail along with a fine of CA$3,844.88 (US$3,000, £2,200)."
$3,844.88 seems like an awfully precise arbitrary fine. I mean, this was a Canadian court, fining a Canadian resident for a crime that happened in Canada and yet the court selects a fine amount which (apparently, at that day's exchange rate) rounds nicely to a US dollar amount -- the which monetary system should have no bearing in the court. The only times that I've seen that sort of precisely-specified, non-rounded fine were when the victim's actual losses were calculated and a round number penalty was added on top of that. That, though, does't explain the nicely-rounded-to-the-nearest-thousand-in-US-dollars nature of the fine.
Something doesn't add up (Sorry!), or something got mis-reported, or I'm just missing something blindingly obvious.
Off the top of my head... since hardly anyone actually researches stories themselves my guess is:
- story is reported with fine stated in CA$
- story is picked up someplace else and reported, amount of fine is converted into other currency and rounded
- story is picked up again, converted, rounded amount is converted back to CA$, this time without rounding...
Ignoring the fact that cell handsets can be traced, or most airport lines are recorded, it is common practice amongst many air carriers that late arrivals, etc. are NOT boarded following a bomb, or other threat.
Kelowna is a city in the Okanagan Valley, in the south of Canada’s British Columbia. It’s somewhat being on a remote shore of Okanagan Lake, surrounded by provincial parks, pine forest, vineyards, orchards and mountains.
If they put the guy on a No Fly list, he would have a long way to drive ... anywhere!
Some airlines, if you piss them off can bar you not only from using their services but any other cooperating airline. Sort of like a no-fly list but more of a gentlemen's agreement between normally competing companies to prohibit certain named individuals from booking a flight.
In some cases they even blacklist the MAC addresses of the individual's digital devices so they can't even get an Internet connection on the premises.
Caveat: sometimes you can still book a flight if you ask them nicely and apologize personally, and have waited a year or two to allow the offense to "expire".
A similar agreement exists for ferry companies, getting on their list can be as simple as using the toilets "incorrectly", leaving a mess on seats and other seemingly minor offenses like complaining about their slow/canceled service online. This should be illegal FWIW but the Govt looks the other way because some services operate below cost "loss leader" especially in the quiet season.
(insert citation needed here)
Also, this is a well known phenomenon, a few years back someone got in trouble for a Robin Hood related Tweet.
I did notice that some new passports made after 2013 have a slightly different chip that no longer reads at all on an NFC reader, seems that the "fix" modifies the code so that it only draws power until it gets a specific challenge then responds with its 21 digit code and 4 entropy digits (to prevent cloning)...