I know they have apprehended and prosecuted a few people who have aimed lasers at aircraft. Do the pilots have the technology to pinpoint the beam and merge the data with their GPS to get an accurate location? Or have they just gotten lucky from guessing at the origin?
No such tech. Procedure upon seeing a beam sweeping your way or getting hit is to shout “laser”, duck down as best you can and close your eyes. A few seconds later cautiously open 1 eye. If it’s not still rattling around in the cockpit, go back to flying after assessing how many of our 4 eyes are still useable. Whatever you do, do NOT try to look outside to figure out where it’s coming from.
Even if nobody is permanently injured, you can still have badly impaired vision for a couple minutes. It’s the visual equivalent of ringing ears after a gunshot nearby. There have been some real close calls with nobody able to see well enough to fly that didn’t make the news because no passengers got hurt. Yet.
Then it’s a matter of calling ATC and saying “about 30 seconds ago we got lazed.” They look at the scope and guess where we were 30 seconds ago, put their mouse cursor there, and push a button to get the lat / long of that spot to 12 decimal places. Plus/minus the accuracy of our estimate of how long ago, their estimate of our position then, etc.
About a third of the time a pilot spots the beam slicing across the sky heading our way and can say “It came from about 2 'clock at 2 miles”. Most of the time the first thing you know is the whole cockpit is full of laser light rattling around between all the windows and instruments and your face. It’s like asking “which way did the water come from?” after falling in a swimming pool. The answer is “It came from everywhere all at once”.
So now the cops get called and are told there’s an idjit with a laser somewhere within a ~4 square mile area on the ground near [wherever]. I have no clue who or how a lat/long gets converted into a street address suitable for police search use.
Good luck with that search in any case. My own belief is the only people who are apprehended are the ones who keep shooting at subsequent airplanes so the cops drive around until get lucky and see a green beam heading skyward out of some backyard. Or they get ratted out by neighbors on the ground.
I personally never got lazed, but I know a dozen+ guys who have been. It’s just a matter of time before some moron “shoots” down an airliner with what they think is a toy. Or maybe it’ll be some malicious asshat who knows just what risks they’re creating.
Are these pen lasers like the kind we put on key-chains and use to make cats run around or something more powerful?
IANA expert. From what I’ve been told it’s the far more powerful lasers you can buy for a couple hundred online. Not the keychain toys.
See here for a freshly Googled example of the sorts of “grown up toys” folks can get with a couple clicks.
Despite the laser’s power, is it still not going to harm you unless the beam goes directly into your eye? Or is the mere reflection of the laser off of something (or the scattering of the beam by the windshield) still enough to cause injury?
In other words, even if the beam didn’t go directly into a pilot’s eyes, the reflection of many mini-beams from the laser would still blind him?
“The beam” of the laser is 20 or 40 feet in diameter at the distance of the airplane. It’s all going in the eyes. The question is entirely how many watts per unit time per unit area.
Lasers bounce of the interior surface of windows and such with essentially no attenuation. So whether the photons are rattling around in teh ckcpit a few times before they enter an eyeball or they get their directly does not really change how much energy is deposited.
And again there are two forms of injury.
So called “dazzle” is the inability to see for the next couple / few minutes, but with no lasting visual harm. That’s the common case. Of course if you lose control of the jet and crash during those couple of minutes your eyes then will quit working for good when they impact the Earth at 300+ mph amidst a hundred tons of aluminum, jet fuel, and other people’s eyeballs, assholes, and other assorted bits and parts.
Total blindness, or more commonly, just dead spots in your visual field where the retina got permanently cooked is a different hazard. One more likely to end a career than end a life.
Sometimes the idiot with the laser points it a helicopter, a police helicopter.
We used to get lasered fairly frequently on approach to Adelaide in the early hours of the morning. Some guys reckoned they could see it was coming from the Noarlunga shopping centre car park. I don’t know if he was ever apprehended.
Might have been this guy: https://youtu.be/fI-300ty84c?si=FANLQhHw5pVYmEaj
Is this something you’ve ever had to do? What does a laser coming your way look like from that altitude?
It mostly happens during takeoffs and landings.
As I said, I’ve never been lasered. If the air is less than transparent you can see the side of the beam as the idjit is waving it around in the sky trying to aim it at you.
So vaguely like the old-fashioned searchlights that were used for nitetime advertising back in the 1960s. A rod of light emanating from a spot on the ground and extending up into the sky above you.
As to @Darren_Garrison’s cite just above, note that the article uses the words “during takeoff and landing” when what they really mean is “during approach and departure.” IOW a time when the airplane is at 1,000 to 10,000 feet and within 2 to ~20 miles of the airport. Not so much while on or in immediate proximity to the runway.
And that’s the problem with apprehending these bozos. We’re zipping long over square mile of square mile of dense suburbia and suddenly get zapped. The area to be searched might be a circle 10 miles in diameter with a population of 150K people. Good bet the cops have other priorities.
Which, if I understand aviation correctly, is also when there’s the greatest risk from a momentary incapacitation of the pilot(s).
For sure. Screw-ups close to the ground are disproportionately dangerous. It’s often the case en route that the computers are flying, nothing is changing for minutes at a time and even if both pilots are temporarily incapacitated nothing happens. Witness the post upthread a bit about two pilots asleep in cruise for 28 minutes and nothing bad happened (except to their careers).
During the departure or arrival phase where we’re close enough to the ground that laser intensity is a real issue is also a time when we’re hand flying or directing the autopilot tactically, not strategically. Also a time with lots of other airplanes and a dynamic ATC environment where shit gets real real quickly when they ask us to do X and the answer is “we can’t” because we can’t see. Darn shame if we’ve been aimed towards a mountain or are manually descending and only manual interventions or ground impact will arrest the descent. With the ground just 2 minutes away.
Plus it’s got to be a lot easier to hit a plane with a handheld laser at 1000 feet than at 35000 feet.
… and then again, there was the case of Chile’s social unrest in oct 2019 and 100s of demonstrators blinding the police helicopters
I am not arguing that lasers are not a danger to pilots.
I am curious, though, how concerts seem to shine lasers all over the place with no worries about damaging the audience? One would think with 35,000 people packed in close the chances for a laser to shine right into an eye are pretty high.
Permanent blinding is a problem for anyone, but temporary blinding is a much bigger problem for a pilot in a critical phase of a flight than it is for a concertgoer.
Some non-expert thoughts on that. And yes, it’s a legit question I’ve wondered about too.
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The lasers at concerts tend to be aimed over the crowd’s head, not into the crowd.
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The lasers at concerts tend to be jumping all over the place at a furious pace, so the dwell time of any given laser pulse into any given eye is short. The guys shooting at airplanes are trying to dwell the laser on their target for multiple seconds. They may not succeed, but that’s their goal.
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In a dark place and within a couple hundred feet, say 5mw might be plenty bright to achieve the pretty lightshow. And be fully eye safe doing it. The lasers harming pilots at a mile or 3 can be 5000mw. Big difference in delivered energy.
I, unfortunately, happened to encounter somebody setting up a “DIY” laser light show, and it looked ludicrously dangerous. The laser itself was powerful enough to burninate skin, let alone your eyes (couldn’t tell you if there was a power control system because I did not want to get close), dodgy beam stop, etc.
A professional would, among other things, ensure no unsafe exposure by one or more of aiming the beams at controlled targets above the crowd’s heads, calibrating and limiting the output power, defocusing the beam and scanning it fast to limit the power density, things like that. It is possible that many laser shows are unsafe according to industry standards.
Someone recently posted a hoax about cutting down trees using a powerful laser.
ETA: this was on Reddit in r/FellingGoneWild, a fun subreddit.
Trees? I once asked about anti-aircraft lasers on this board, and the informed response seemed to be that this was not a (practical) thing, but I would not be surprised if there was some R&D, at least for missile defence and similar.
Anyway, you need the right tool for the right job. You cut down trees with a rotary cannon or mini-gun, not a laser.