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A drone owned and piloted by the ex-president of Skydance Interactive damaged and temporarily grounded a Canadian Super Scooper during some of the worst and most destructive days of the wildfires that left swath of LA no more than ash, but Peter Akemann has escaped a potential sentence of a year behind bars.
In fact, thanks to a plea deal with the feds and an apparent software glitch, Akemann won’t serve a single day in prison for “recklessly” flying the DJI Mini 3 Pro into the wing of the Canadair CL-415 Super Scooper on January 9, according to Acting United States Attorney Joseph T. McNally today. Appearing in court in downtown LA this afternoon on a criminal misdemeanor and one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft, the 56-year-old Akemann entered a guilty plea and soon afterwards walked out the door on a $15,000 bond.
Despite the loss of a pivotal aircraft for five days in the battle against the Palisades Fire that devastated most of the upmarket neighborhood and the risk the so-called illegal drone posed to the two-member crew of the Quebec plane, all the former video game exec will have to do is fork out a bit more than $65,000 to the Canadian province to cover the repairs to the plane Actually, the Culver City-based Akemann, according to DOJ, will also have to “complete 150 hours of community service in support of the 2025 Southern California wildfire relief effort.” – whatever that means now the hurricane force winds and fires have subsided.
“This damage caused to the Super Scooper is a stark reminder that flying drones during times of emergency poses an extreme threat to personnel trying to help people and compromises the overall ability of police and fire to conduct operations,” Acting USA McNally said Friday. “As this case demonstrates, we will track down drone operators who violate the law and interfere with the critical work of our first responders.”
Maybe, but some want a bit more than merely tracking down such individuals.
“This is not justice,” one industry Palisades resident who suffered greatly during the fires told Deadline after news of Akemann’s plea deal went public. “I’m not saying it would have, but that plane could have maybe saved homes and businesses if it hadn’t been damaged.”
The crash with the Super Scooper was widely covered on local and national media during the fires, with shock outside Southern California that private drones were even allowed in such a firefighting zone at the time.
The probe to find the operator/owner of the drone that damaged the wing of the Super Scooper earlier this month was led by the FBI. With AUSAs Kedar S. Bhatia and Ian V. Yanniello of the Terrorism and Export Crimes Section in the prosecuting seat, the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, the FAA, the LAFD, and CALFIRE also aided in the investigation the feds said Friday.
At the division of the David Ellison-run company from 2016 until around 2022, Akemann apparently took his drone to the top of a parking lot at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica on January 9 as the fires raged. The prosecutors say his intent was to get some footage of the blazes, but Akemann lost sight and control of the DJI Mini 3 Pro after it had flown about 1.5 miles away. It was then that the drone hit the Super Scooper, causing a y 3-inch-by-6-inch hole in the left wing and taking the vitally needed plane out of commission.
Emphasizing that their industry vert client is ‘deeply sorry” and “accepts responsibility for his grave error in judgment,” Akemann’s lawyers Glen T. Jonas and Vicki Podberesky said today that the loss of control was based in part on the drone’s “geo fencing safeguard feature” failing.
On January 13, four days after the crash in LA with Super Scooper, the drone company DJI Viewpoints brought in an update for is products. It read: “With this update, DJI’s Fly and Pilot flight app operators will see prior DJI geofencing datasets replaced to display official Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data. Areas previously defined as Restricted Zones (also known as No-Fly Zones) will be displayed as Enhanced Warning Zones, aligning with the FAA’s designated areas. In these zones, in-app alerts will notify operators flying near FAA designated controlled airspace, placing control back in the hands of the drone operators, in line with regulatory principles of the operator bearing final responsibility.”
