The local news just reported on someone being arrested in New York for pointing a laser at a couple of helicopters. They said that there were 4,000 incidents in the past year. ISTR last month an airline pilot was taken to the hospital after someone hit him with a laser on final approach.
Do people just not understand they shouldn’t point lasers at aircraft? ‘Hur, hur! I gots me a laser! Imma point it at that airplane! That would be cool. Hur, hur! That pilot’ll be like “Hey! I gots a laser beam in mah eye!” Hur, hur! Wouldn’t it be funny if the plane crashed? Whee, doggie!’
Every couple/few months I hear about someone being arrested for doing this, and people keep doing it. I’m guessing that most of these morons are as described above. Some might actually know it’s illegal, but do it anyway because they think it’s funny and they can get away with it, or else they don’t like ‘airplane noise’ around the house they bought or the apartment they moved into under the existing traffic pattern. Maybe some are doing maliciously because they want to be Outlaws or ‘for reasons’. Assuming the majority of these incidents are just numbskulls, do we arrest the ones we can catch and hope the others pay attention? Or do we need to start showing PSAs on the TEE-vee to attempt to educate them? Or many package the lasers such that they can’t possibly not see the warning against pointing the laser at people and vehicles? How about public shaming?
It doesn’t have to be very powerful. Ever shine a laser pointer into your eye? (Don’t.) A laser beam hitting the eye(s) can cause flash blindness. The attacks often come during the most critical phase of flight – landing. When you’re trying to put a quarter of a million pounds of airplane onto a narrow, short (in relation to the planet or a massive dry lake bed) strip, you’re probably going to want to see where you’re going. And there’s little room to recover. Helicopters also have little room to recover, as they tend to fly low. And helicopters are inherently unstable.
While even a little laser pointer can cause flash blindness, much brighter lasers are now available for a pittance.
The FAA and FBI are not joking around with this. When somebody gets lased, ATC will immediately vector a police helicopter to the reported location if there is one in the air, and the helicopter guides ground units in to make the arrests. These people are getting serious sentences. I read a story about one guy who was given 14 YEARS in prison for lasing a helicopter.
A common 5 mW (that’s milliwatt) common handheld laser pointer is sufficiently powerful to ‘blind’ (saturate) the retina of a pilot at 1200 ft altitude. You can buy lasers onl line up to at least 1 W sustained output in the 447 nm wavelength online without any license or controls, which would assuredly saturate at 5 kft or higher and could possible do permanent damage to a retina at >1 kft.
There are numerous standards and regulations pertaining to the use of laser instruments near aircraft navigation zones including ANSI Z136.6 “Safe Use of Lasers Outdoors”, and SAE Recommended Practics ARP5293 “Safety Considerations for Lasers Projected in the Navigable Airspace” which were codified in FAA Order 7400.2 “Procedures for Handling Airspace Matters, Part 6, Chapter 29: Outdoor Laser Operations”. Given the criticality of pilot vision upon final approach, the potential for catastrophic hazard is not inconsequential. The use of lasers to ‘blind’ pilots in the FAA Laser Free Zone around airports should likely be considered an act of deliberate terrorism insofar as the potential for injury of death to both passengers and crew, and people and structures on the ground, and prosecuted accordingly.
Yes, I really do think there are stupid people who think it’s funny and it doesn’t occur to them that what they’re doing in dangerous and can hurt other people.
Heck, at work we have to keep reminding people not to play in the cardboard baler or climb into the industrial sized trash compactor - last year six managers were fired for doing just that, never mind the mouth-breathing peons that make up about half our staff.
I think probably a few of those incidents are stemming from malice, but most are people who are just not using their brain cells.
If you shine a laser pointer at someone in a room, it just looks like a point of light. But if you shine it into a cockpit, it can be amplified by the curved plexiglass. This article shows what it looks like
I worry more about the people to whom it does occur that it’s dangerous. It’s a relatively easy way to potentially do a lot of damage. And based on the number of incidents reported earlier in the thread, I’m guessing that the vast majority of people get away with it.
I don’t think it matters much how well they understand it, they’re going to do it anyway. They don’t think they’ll be caught. People still drop rocks from overpasses. There are at least 35,000 new stupid people born everyday.
It’s amazing to me that people would do something that could distract a person operating an aircraft full of people. Does anyone else remember the guy who got caught shining a laser into a cockpit and tried to blame it on his little kid?
I’m going to go against the grain and suggest that most of these incidents are brain-off stupidity not malice. To be sure the aparrent increase in “me first, f*** you” so called “attitude” means in 2015 more people make a habit of thinking of nothing beyond their own interests when thinking or doing anything. But not thinking before doing has a long and storied tradition in humanity.
So you just got your fancy new laser. You shine it around inside the house a bit and say “Hmm, that’s a small very bright spot”
Now you go out in the back yard and shine it on the farthest thing you can see from your yard: the side of the neighbors house or a tree in somebody’s backyard. “Hmm, that’s a bigger still fairly bright spot. Shame that tree’s not real shiny; it sorta absorbs the light.”
“Hey lookee; there’s that shiny airplane a couple whole miles away. I wonder…” and with no more thought than that you push the button. You sure didn’t hurt the tree 100 feet away. It’s preposterous to think you could hurt an airplane a couple miles away with something you can (briefly) shine on your own hand.
But nobody is thinking of the airplane as being the person or two driving it. Who don’t have effective eye protection.
Bottom line: a passing aircraft is simply the most distant object most people have in line of sight from their homes & grounds. So it’s one of the things they aim at.
To be sure there are occasional criminals who shoot at airplanes with firearms. And have been for decades.
And I’d bet there are more folks willing to engage in what they think of as petty vandalism or just yokel fun with a laser who’d never shoot a gun at an aircraft just due to the difference in awareness of downrange risk and the extra risk of getting caught due to the noise of gunfire.
Is there some kind of polarized lens that would block the laser light frequencies enough for sight protection that would still allow sight for a pilots duties they could wear when near the ground.
Aircraft warning lights are red often, so how to get around that in a cost effective manner so that it would have a chance for acceptance by the pilots & the airlines.
Makinbg pilots safe from lasers has been an ongoing effort for many years now (what an idiot can do for yucks, an enemy soldier can do for advantage. And more acurately, too). There have been various saturable dyes used near the focal points of systems, and schemes for bringing an image through focus so that some abdsorber or scatterer can break up the beam before it does any damage. There are issues with such systems (there aren’t enough of them, they don’t block all wavelength ranges, and you can’t see when it;'s activated), but the biggest issue, relative to laser pointers, is that they aren’t powerful enough (usually) to trip such a system. It doesn’t take a lot to “dazzle” the pilot (as opposed to blinding him, even temporarily), so a relatively weak laser or laser pointer can still be a pain.
There are passive systems that can block particular wavelengths (including the powerful green laser pointer line at 532 nm, which has been popular since before green laserr pointers were around). I’ve worked on such blocking visors myself. The problem is, there are lots of usabnle laser wavelengths, and you can’t block them all — you have to use some wavelength for seeing.
So some protection is available – you cvan block key wavelengths with absorbers, coatings, and holographic constructions. You can make some systems that will block a powerfrul beam of a broad range of wavelengths. But AFAIK there is no “magic goggles” that will spring into play and block any unwanted laser dazzling.
I agree and I think it’s also rebellion against the Nanny State. You’ve got this little pen-sized light and you’re wondering if you could get a pilots attention or track a plane. Or it’s kind of a prank.
It wasn’t until the NYC cockpit video from a helicopter this week that I believed a pocket laser could really be a problem. Until you see the effect it’s one of those issues where you think authorities have found a new way to penalize funseekers.
BTW, the green laser shown in the NYC video is NOT the typical red presentation pointer. A green laser’s power may be high enough that it’s considered a vision hazard in any environment.
I know a guy who used to use a laser to paint spots on the side of the Goodyear Blimp. At least he knew enough not to point it at the gondola, only the lifting bag.
