How does aerial surveillance work for speeding?

Question

What is it called ?

Answer 1

This type of speed enforcement is called VASCAR. It works just another speed enforcement principle known as CLOCK or PACE.

Basically how this works is an airplane follows a vehicle for a certain known distance and an onboard calculator figures out that if the distance between Point A & Point B is x amount of feet and a vehicle covered that distance in a certain amount of time - what that vehicle's speed had to have been.

It's similar to clocking or pacing, only with those two you use a police vehicle and match a vehicle's speed over a distance and utilizes a calibrated speedometer to match speed's.

Answer 2

well if your the only car passing all the others its not hard to pick out

Answer 3

son in law is a police pilot, he does this all the time. he has a certified in timing officer with him to measure your time between white lines painted on the road<<

Answer 4

VASCAR: A vehicle average speed calculator and recorder uses a portable computer to accurately clock, calculate, and display speed based on the time a vehicle takes to travel a known length of road.

Like VASCAR, aircraft patrols are based on visual detection and identification of target vehicles.

Police time such vehicles over a measured distance, usually marked by lines painted across the road.

An officer in a low-flying aircraft radios speed information to a patrol officer who makes the stop.

Aerial surveillance can provide very accurate speed measurements and allow officers to focus on the fastest vehicles, but it is costly and can be difficult to use in locations with high traffic volumes.

Answer 5

The system is called VASCAR (Visual Average Speed Computer and Recorder) and is simply a speed calculation performed by measuring the time it takes for a car to pass between two points.

This can be done either on the ground or from the air.  From the air, an officer will push a start/stop button as you pass specific road markings designating a known distance - typically about 1/10 of a mile.  The road markings are often perpendicular lines in the lines in the lane or at the edge of the lane.  

Here is a picture of such markings - http://www.pepipoo.com/images/South_York...

Measuring how long it takes for a car to pass between two markers gives the speed.  VASCAR can also be augmented with video tracking.

The plane then radios for a ground car to intercept the vehicle, giving details on color/size/lane number.