I think I’m going to throw up now.
What a champ! He endangers hundreds of persons lives (possibly even someone you know), blames it on his daughter and gives the FBI a fucking glide-slope to his position.
The guy is a moron, no doubt, but spare me this blinding pilots with lasers bullshit fearmongering.
Right, right. I agree. It’s the newest, keenest terrorist trap designed to ground commercial aircraft prematurely. When laser-scare 2k5 first broke, I thought they meant that terrorists would use a laser for guided munitions. Turns out they are afraid of the same laser pointer my professors used in class. I hate to say this; but give the terrorists a bit more credit.
It turns out that they couldn’t even get lasers. They had to resort to ill-tempered, mutated sea bass.
Without the frikin’ laser beams attached to their heads? Who is going to be afraid of that?
Back to the OP though, blaiming your daughter has to go down in history as one of the punkest moves in history.
Watered down lasers distributing sea bass is no basis for a system of terrorism.
I think it’s Banach who’s enabling the fearmongers here. “See? Someone shined a laser into a cockpit and was prosecuted for it! That means it’s dangerous! And if it’s dangerous, the terrorists are going to do it and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”
Just a thought - maybe his daughter did do it, and he changed his story to protect her. The article says he took a lie detector test, but it doesn’t say he failed it.
Probably not, but it is possible.
Wow. That’s low.
It said in both articles that I read that the pilots were temporarily blinded by the flashes. Why are people calling this issue “bullshit fearmongering”? You don’t think blinding pilots in flight isn’t just the slightest bit of a bad idea?
Lasers are a known problem for pilots.
Russia undoubtedly has more advanced laser tech than most people, but due to the wavelength, your standard green laser pointer is a class IIIa laser, which according to this rating chart means it has the capability to damage your eye.
(Notwithstanding the fact that I doubt you could reliably do the most critical part of your job if I was flashing a laser at you). The man is indeed a dumbass.
Personally I don’t think it’s really possible. Even if it is, I think we have about 6,945,765 more realistic methods in which “terrorists” could cause mayhem.
A person has at most a 10 second window (from a mile or two away) to shine a pinpoint light at an object moving at least 150 mph, which is behind reflecting glass and is the size of dime?
(pupils are smaller then a dime, but you get the idea.)
It’s a one in a billion shot at best.
Americans watch too many Hollywood movies. Any attack from OBL and his ilk will be very low tech.
What I want to know is how does a laser beam, from the ground get into the pilots eyes? Here is a picture of a Boing 757. As you can see, the cockpit is above the nose of the airplane. A laser would have to be coming at the plane from a great distance away in order to even make it into the cockpit, and the odds of sustained contact with a pilots eyes seems pretty remote to me.
Except that the pilots DID say that they were temporarily blinded by the laser. Not permantly, which I’m guessing is what would be the billion in one pinpoint lineup of the laser to the pupil, but from this case alone, the danger is clearly NOT some figment of someone’s imagination.
I have a very difficult time believing that any danger existed. The probability of aiming a laser directly into someone’s eye from such a distance seems virtually zero. Another one of “those things we have to think of differently since 9/11*”
*9/11 is a registered trademark of George W. Bush
What you have to understand, Jadis, is that some minor functionary once stuck a review of this thing in a monthly bulletin about terrorism. That he or she said that there wasn’t any evidence that it was terrorists doing it is of course wholly irrelevant. What is relevant is that the functionary works for the FBI at a time when the government’s principal executive officer is OMGBUSHCOH4LLI8URT0n!!!11!!ELEVEN!!!, which renders any concerns about this phenomenon incorrect and of suspect movtives.
I have the same questions as adam yax? How on earth did this guy do it?
You mean a dimestore laser pointer can be seen from that far away? Or did the perp have something better?
I stand corrected, then. 
I, too, am having a lot of trouble getting my mind around a civilian with a laser pointer hitting a pilot in the eye from several thousand feet away. I’d like to see empirical proof that this is possible.