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Laser Injures Delta Pilot's Eye
stormfish writes "The Washington Times is reporting that laser light from an unknown source injured a pilot's eye as he was flying a Boeing 737 from Dallas to Salt Lake City. A 5 milliwatt laser pointer is strong enough to damage a person's eye, and stronger laser's are not that hard to come by. Unfortunately, having pilots wear colored laser safety glasses would be impractical as that would make it impossible to interpret the colored symbols on paper maps and cockpit displays."
Class IIIa (>5mW) 532nm green laser pointer (ThinkGeek)
Class IIIb (>15mW) 532nm green laser pointer (MegaLaser)
Class IIIb 200mW handheld green laser (Information Unlimited)
It's even possible to get small, portable Class IV (potential instant severe eye damage, even from diffuse or reflected beams; this is the class of laser which also includes burning and cutting beams) lasers:
Various Class IV portable lasers, including a small battery powered 2W diode laser (Information Unlimited)
The front windows of a commercial aircraft and objects in the cockpit could easily reflect and refract a beam from the ground in ways that would be at a minimum very distracting and unsafe, and potentially damaging to eyesight.
Information about laser classes.
... at least we know the laser wasn't fired by GI-JOE or COBRA.
My precious antique eye!
Did anyone think to check the frickin' sharks in the Great Salt Lake?
make them fly by voice recognition
Fly the friendly Ninnle!
"Lasers are easily obtainable and can be self-manufactured weapons in the terrorist arsenal, which essentially can effect a soft-kill solution and leave virtually no detectable evidence," he said.
I'm a private pilot, so I certainly won't make light of this problem. But please...is every new way to hurt somebody going to be another weapon in the terrorist arsenal? Are we going to assume that everytime something happens to someone, a terrorist is behind it? I for one am tired of our leaders trying to make us afraid.
And yeah, this is a rant. Mod me down if you will, before I strike again.
Can the cockpit windows have a safety coating applied instead of the pilot wearing glasses. Would tint the look of the world outside the plane, but wouldn't hinder looking at the interior all that much.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
God-damned terrorists!!
now we need to ban lasers! for the children!
The earth is 98% full, please delete anyone you can!
Not to be alarmist, but if they can't ge on the planes they could try to blind the crew.
I know the planes are fully (almost) automated. . . just thinking out loud.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Do not look at laser with remaining eye.
How many times do we need to tell people that
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Thinkgeek wanted for questioning.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I, for one, welcome our new flying shark overlords
*cringes in terror*
How can they be sure it's a laser? Can't directional intense light come from a number of places... like, for example, the sun? (Yeah yeah, the sun is anything but directional, but you get my point..)
Is there any way to make glass opaque to coherent light while still passing visible light? Or are pilots going to have to fly by instruments and video screens to protect themselves? (Can a readily available laser damage a CCD?)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Blue Oyster Cult must have been touring Salt Lake City and just started Godzilla as they were landing.
The goggles do nothing!
Having pilots wear coloured safety glasses wouldn't be impractical, it would be impossible; the only colour that would block all laser frequencies is black.
I bet it was those sharks with friggen laser beams. Either that or ill-tempered sea bass. Everyone deserve a warm meal!
Well, if the Washington Times says it, it must be true!
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Pilot don't use maps, they use charts.
Light?
Thank you folks, thank you very much.
Tip your waitresses.
Seriously, though, all this shows is that almost any object can be used in potentially dangerous ways. Could it be a "tool of terrorists"? Sure. So could almost anything.
I think Al Qaeda must read Tom Clancy novels. He crashed a plane into the senate building in Debt of Honour, and in the same book used bright lights to blinds pilots during landings.
:-)
We should arrest Tom forthwith! (if only for his terrible characters
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Other poster beat ya. :-)
Couldn't a laser from that high up only be directed from some place in front of the plane or above it (ie satellite)??
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
First off the laser needs to be of significant power to do that from a distance.
Secondly it needs to be mounted to a telescope for aiming.
The articel does not mention any laser facts but uses the word "laser" in an ominous way as to induce fear in the readers.
to cause that kind of damage to an eye, it either needs to be high enough power to cause damage and hit directly, if it's indirect, then it needs to be significantly higher power.
no your laser pointer will not blind a pilot from 5 miles away after it's power was reduced from the beam splitting effects of the windshield.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
With talk of Commercial Space Flight soon being a reality, I would think this issue will soon be solved.
Let's look to the US Space Program for an answer. Does NASA not solve the issue of intense light by tinting the glass in space vehicles?
Of course, there is the question of the source of the light, but that is for conspiracy theorists to imagine, er, solve.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
The boogeyman gonna getcha unless you re-elect Bush. If kerry is president, there gonna be all kinda terraists running round with lasers blinding people.
BOO!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Its owned by one Sun Myung Moon, who fancies himself the new messiah.
I suggest everyone read the wiki entry on The Washington Times
-----------------------
Sun Myung Moon (born January 6, 1920) is the founder of the Unification Church (established on May 1, 1954, in Seoul, South Korea). With his wife Hak Ja Han, he is co-leader of the Unification Movement.
Moon's followers see him as a new Messiah, the second coming of Christ, commissioned by Jesus Christ to complete the divine mission of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. In 2004, members of Congress crowned him the "King of Peace" in ceremonies on Capitol Hill. But when he first came to the United States, Rev. Moon met with enormous opposition, not the least from a Congressional probe accusing him of ties to the 1976 "Koreagate" influence-peddling scandal. Unable to convict him of political malfeasance, the probe landed him in court on charges of tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Moon's defenders describe the ensuing 18 months in federal prison as an act of bigotry.
Today Moon's Unification Church International controls industries all over the world, ranging from a third of the U.S. fishing industry to $300 million in cultural and political enterprises in the Washington, D.C. area alone, as the Washington Post has reported.
Unfortunately, having pilots wear colored laser safety glasses would be impractical as that would make it impossible to interpret the colored symbols on paper maps and cockpit displays.
Why not make the glass of the cockpit windows out of laser safety glass? Or, have a "laser safety shield" that rolls down in front of the glass for landings?
This isn't much of a security threat. Most commercial airliners are quite capable of landing themselves without pilot intervention. Pilots are handy to have around when things go wrong (ILS is deflected, some kind of serious software problem, etc...) but otherwise the plane can land itself safely, and autopilot is frequently used to land planes today.
Really, if someone is pointing lasers at planes as they land, they're just being a bit of a jerk.
I think it was "Debt of Honour" where CIA operatives near the airport use lasers to blind japanese (don't ask) AWACS pilots, making them crash their planes. Coincidentally, that book ends with a airliner being crashed into the White House. Soo, what does this mean? It's obvious - Tom Clancy is providing The Terrorists (tm) with ideas and needs to be put in jail ASAP!
It would not be impractical for the pilot to wear safty glasses during the takoff and landing phases of flight, and have the copilot dictate to the pilot important information and peform tasks (ie. airspeed, gear down, flaps out). This is how it is done to a certain extent already. And after takeoff, the pilot could remove his safty glasses. In fact, this is how the C-130 crews do it when landing in the arctic. The snow is so bright that the pilot must look outside the whole time while the copilot reads things off the instruments.
It's not obvious how to protect pilots directly from this, but it would seem to be fairly feasible to protect them indirectly by building a device that could track down the sources of the laser exposure.
It would be some kind of recording device to place in a plane that views the ground through a wide-angle lens and constantly records the view, together with GPS coordinates and altitude. Assuming that the laser is located on the ground, it would seem as if it would be fairly easy to detect laser exposures and determine the ground location of the laser.
A year to develop? $100,000 each to manufacture?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I must be missing something here. Is it really feasible to hit a pilot in the eye a few thousand feet in the air in a moving plane? Even if you could get a lock on the plane, the pilot could always move a few inches to avoid the beam? I'm very confused here.
"The plane's two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit, said officials familiar with government reports of the Sept. 22 incident."
Next thing you know, they're smearing vaporub on each other and are struggling to find words to describe how awesome their faces feel right now.
-Randy
Put a corner reflector mirror on the dash board, that will stop anyone trying to zap the cockpit :-)
The story said they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit. To do that from the ground would take some pretty quick targeting work.
Could a first class prankster have used a pointer through a small hole or something similar? Maybe the door was open?
Grasping at straws here.
They used bright spotlights during WWII to blind and confuse Nazi pilots. It worked, many of them crashed, and none knew where to drop their bombs.
They also "hid" entire squadrons using smoke and mirrors.
If I could remember the name of the magician and his special squad of effects dude, I'd google for some links. Cool stuff though. David Copperfield-style illusions to fool the Nazis into seeing forces where there were none, and seeing nothing where the forces are, mostly in the desert theatre.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Two questions: was the cockpit door open, and were there any unruly children or frat brats with laser pointers near the front of the plane?
seriously, why not make sunglasses with a non-linear coating which becomes opaque (like a fuse) when light intensity is too strong ? Fighter pilots have such visors on their helmets in case of a nuclear flash. Some of them are even reversible (back to transparent after a while).
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
A multi-watt laser with a decently large aperture and a TEM 00 spatial mode would be a different story.
On approach for landing in Seattle (I was just a passenger, not pilot) I was looking out the window into downtown Bellevue. From an area near the Bellevue main mall (hard to tell where exactly from 5000 feet, and 3 miles over) was some kind of laser light show, and the laser in describing its pattern for the show occasionally and momentarily came directly through the window, and directly in my eyes. Even this very brief exposure was painful, and my eyes had after-images for hours! The laser was green, so I assume an even higher energy than a red laser (don't know for sure).
Ever since that encounter I've always wondered if it was just an incredible fluke, or something that could happen easily again. Now I know.
Stronger laser's what?
I'm surprised to see this article here, the Washington Times is about as reputable as the National Enquirer. I have no idea if the story is true or not, but I'm to the point with the "Times" that I just dismiss anything that was written by it's reporters.
And let's not forget who the bizarre owner of this "news source" is, isn't he claiming to be God incarnate?
- sigs are for wimps.
We shall begin today by reviewing the correct use of the apostrophe, which is defined grammatically as ``the little thing that is hard to find when you put it inside quotation marks,'' as is shown in this example: ``'''.
Even top professional writers have trouble with apostrophes, as we see in this quotation from William Shakespeare:
``O Romeo, Romeo
``Your lookin' fine in them tight's.''
This is incorrect, of course: Shakespeare has used the word ``your'' as a participial infraction, which requires an apostrophe, as we see in this corrected version:
``O Romeo, Romeo
``You're buttock's are highly visible in them tight's.''
--Dave Barry
Did they use the finger quotes when they used the word laser?
Deserving got nothing to do with it.....shuffle
What about peril-sensitive glasses?
blah
I bet the navigator sitting behind the pilot is hiding his laser keychain about now.
oops.
I bought a green laser from thinkgeek (AWESOME TOY!), and when you use this thing at night (especially if you're far away from most city lights), it REALLY CAN point to the stars (ok ok I was really skeptical when I bought it). And I keep thinking, HOW IN THE HELL is this NOT effecting aircraft? Granted, shooting someone in the eye from the ground not easy by any means, but now given how easy it is to purchase these lasers, it really was a matter of time until some idiot screws it for all of us and causes problems with the airlines...... I just hope to god these don't get banned. They're TOO much fun.
"Lasers are easily obtainable and can be self-manufactured weapons in the terrorist arsenal, which essentially can effect a soft-kill solution and leave virtually no detectable evidence,"
This does not sound like the modus operandi of terrorists. Don't terrorists like to leave lots of evidence. They want people to know it was a terrorist attack.
... in several armoured vehicles that I have been in. There is a slight tint that reveals the laser protection coating over periscopes and aiming sights(no, this is not a secret) and has been in use for years.
Time for someone to reinvent the wheel?
It's not like this is the first time this has happened... http://www.insightmag.com/news/2001/05/21/Nation/R ussian.Laser.Attack.CoverUp.Deepens-210967.shtml/
But I guess as long as it'a another government that's screwing with you it's ok.
Last I heard both the US Navy Intel guy and the Canadian Pilot both still had vision problems.
There are only 10 types of users, those that understand binary and those who don't.
George Costanza laser pointer guy.
What a hack that guy was. He was just a prop comic!
No depth there, I tell ya.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Look at the location of the windows on a commercial jet... There is no way a laser from the ground could get in through the window, given the angles.
Also, considering the velocity, even if the angle problem could be solved, it would only glance the pilot's eye for a fraction of a second.
So how did this laser pointer sniper aim this thing anyway? Laser sights? But seriously, wouldn't he need some high powered optics to get this thing right in the pilot's eye? Where do they think this guy "fired" it from anyway?
His characters aren't as bad as the way they all think and speak American, regardless of their nationality and upbringing.
The US Department of Homeland Security, in accordance with our policy of protecting you from the likes of Senator Kennedy and Cat Stevens will now be working with Congress to outlaw the posession of all laser devices. Please stay tuned.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I remember reading something similar in a Reader's Digest a few years ago:
Apparently the US was tracking a Russian "Laundry Ship" north of Canada because they somehow found it suspicious. A while later, the helicopter pilot that had been filming the ship came to the doctor having vision problems. Upon close examination, there was a grid of little damaged, scar-tissue-surrounded holes in his retina. Upon examination of the video, they found a brief flash that when freeze-framed proved to be a grid of bright little laser points that had flashed at the helicopter from the boat! So it's nothing new to use lasers to destroy the vision of expensive-to-train pilots. The question is, was this stray laser light or something intentional as was the case with the "laundry ship"?
~Ben
Darn those Blue lasers and their pesky... ground-level camouflaged lasers?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Without a collimator, lasers diverge from their source, spreading into a larger dot at farther distances. So their energy is spread over a larger area, with proportionally less energy per unit area. The eye is a small area. And planes have windows only on their upper surfaces; the ground in "line of sight" is far from the cockpit, considering both altitude and angle, allowing spreading. Then there's the speed with which the plane is moving through space, allowing energy to accumulate on the pilot's eye for only a brief moment of intersection, especially if held in a wobbly human hand. It seems unlikely that a person with a handheld laser on the ground could have accidentally burned this pilot. What really happened?
--
make install -not war
Does this imply a rewrite of the Catch 22 in which soldiers are given an implicit option of damaging their eyes instead?
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
Don't astronomers use some fairly powerful sky-pointing lasers in connection with "adaptive optics" (which correct for the imperfections in the optical characteristics of the atmosphere?)
Of course they're supposed to clear their uses of these lasers with the FAA...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Don't fear the reaper...
This has been debated for a while, but recent studies have borne out the idea that class IIIa lasers, up to 5mW, don't cause permanent injury to the retina.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1111526 6
We need to add Laser Detection Systems to the planes, that will fire a laser back in the same direction as the incoming one, a little offset so as to hit the terrorist in the eye. An eye for an eye.
I remember hearing (even if it's only an urban legend, it's still a fun story) that Tom Clancy was contracted by the US Gov't for his ability to gather information about sensitive items from public sources.
I thought I had a reasonable grasp on basic physics, but obviously not. The plane's two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit
1. The pilots saw the beam? Was the cockpit full of smoke? Or did they see a red dot jumping around the cockpit?
2. Also, from what I know of airliners, the windows are more or less pointing forward as opposed to down - and I'm guessing at five miles out from the airport the plane was still high enough that no-one was going to be able to shine a laser in from a source at the same level as the place itself. So given the angles, the red dot must have been jumping around the ceiling of the cockpit, if anywhere at all. That's some shot.
3. It was an even better shot to hit the pilot in the eye with the thing. Presumably that's hitting a moving target the size of a dime from hundreds of yards.
4. And another thing, I always learned that lasers were beams of coherent light. Can a laser pass through regular glass and come out the other side still coherent enough to do damage? Especially that thick glass you get on airliners?
Somebody please explain. I'm confused.
A few years ago, you would always see people shining laser pointers at wrestlers any time you watched wrestling. A few years later, they stopped because they started to strictly ban them from shows.
To my knowledge, no wrestler had their eyes injured by these things, despite the fact that people would try to shine them at the wrestlers eyes. Chances are this thing was much stronger.
who are completely ignorant of lasers here is astounding.
Laser blocking windows, colored glasses! WTF.
Is every post a troll now?
Try learning about the topic in question rather than blindly throwing stupid ideas around.
But you could could make the cockpit window safe from laser light. Then there would be no need to worry about the pilots being able to read their instrumentation because of coloured glasses.
This isn't the first time there's been malicious use of lasers. I'm not reaching for the tinfoil hat, but I wouldn't rule it out completely.
Constitutionally Correct
Folks, if they saw a laser dot inside the cockpit, it means that the laser was somehow originating from nearby. Without a pretty sophisticated targeting mechanism and a really good laser, there's no way that anyone is going to track a target the size of the cockpit windows from thousands of feet away. There's another thing I find odd -- we have a reflex when a bright light suddenly shines in our eyes -- we move our heads, avert our eyes and squint. If the pilot's eye was damaged without this happening, it means that the laser was either a lot stronger than 5 milliwatt, or not in the visible spectrum (again how would targeting such a laser work?). Something seems weird about this whole story.
Picture the pilot wearing light filtering goggles, tin foil hat, anti meteorite system and trusty handgun strapped to hip.
Speaking as a private pilot, you are in far more danger from ducks, geese, sea gulls than any number of laser wielding boogey man terrorists.
From personal experience, a flock of 25 pound Canada geese passing around your Cessna 172 at a combined speed of 200 mph or so is pretty impressive.
I'd take my chances with a laser any day over that.
Laser pointers of any type have really shitty focus on them. By the time it goes 1000 feet, the beam has diverged to the point where it's not even a problem.
Point the sucker at a fence across a street, or over any distance where you can see the resulting spot. Notice how it's not exactly a pinpoint spot anymore? That's divergence of the beam. Now imagine how big that beam is over 6 miles (planes flying at around 30000 feet or so), and how little light from it is actually visible from that kind of distance.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
So you're saying the pilots have to "hold it" the entire flight?
The article lacks enough information... Often times direct exposure from handheld pointers has been cited and hyped as if it was a 40 watt 523nm YAG laser.
There are rules and restrictions for directing coherent laser light up into the sky at night. You generally file a report with the center for disease and radiological health.
In addition to all of this, even with a 5 watt argon, at a great distance the beam will fall out of coherency. There is a big difference between a beam that is tightly focused / coherent, and one where the output is spread on a 12" circle (temOO?).
Another big factor is if the laser is moving real fast, once again the light is spread out...
The US has pretty strict laws on this stuff, where as other countries do not. You will see pictures of crowd scanning from high powered lasers in other countries, but you won't generally find crowd scanning above 5mw here.
There is more information about lasers at the laser faq site (google for Sam's Laser Faq). Laser-FX International also has a bit of information about laser show setups. I have some pictures of my 150mw argon-ion and large frame argon that puts out somewhere between 2.5 and 5 watts of power at my homepage ( http://users.757.org/~ethan )... Lots of pictures.
Without colimating optics, the laser beam from the 150mw argon spreads to 6" or more across at a distance of 1000'.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
With those green lasers II from ThinkGeek for only 100 buckazoids, OSTG may soon be found on the list of terrorist organisations. Maybe USAF should bomb every disco in the world for prevention of such "attacks".
There you are, staring at me again.
So exactly why would closing of the outside world be such a bad idea?
Aircraft instruments ain't failsafe. There have been countless incidents where instruments have failed not totally, easily spotted, but slightly (a direction finder slightly off, an altitude meter reading to high) off. Sure aircraft have redundant instruments and pilots are supposed to check but they don't. Even the fact that a plane got two pilots each with their own instruments has not proven enough in the past to prevent a disaster when the captain decides to follow his instrument readout.
So what does this have to do with windows? Well a look at the outside will quickly tell you a lot that you would take several instruments. Altitude, attitude, weather, air traffic, ground traffic. All pretty damn important.
Worse while pilots are trained to fly without outside references it does have the danger of the pilot loosing orientation. Thinking that up is down and such. I remember at least one crash investigation where the pilot was following his instruments into trying to correct the aircraft while he was in fact flying it straight into the ground.
So the above post is not informative. It is totally mis-informed. Pilots need their windows.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Reading the article.. I think the reference to the fact that 5mW laser pointers can be dangerous is quite misleading.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such a laser was used in this case. (And it does seem rather unlikely)
The article mentions that there have been incidents in the past with aviation and laser shows. The wattage of those lasers is a completely different story.
So it's an old problem with a new post-9/11-paranoic "it could be a terrorist tool!" spin to it.
Any angle from the ground in order to hit the pilots eyes had to be shot from a LONG way away you would think. The closer the shooter was, the steeper the angle, making it near impossible to hit the windshield, let alone the pilots eyes. It certainly seems to make more sense that it came from another aircraft, and that in itself is rather alarming.
I am thinking of a few scenarios, all of them suck if that is the case.
1- really lame practical joke gone really bad from a random person in another plane.
2- delibarate terrorist attack by joe "real" terrorist, a proof of concept effort maybe
3-agent provocateur attack by shadow government/rogue faction to induce a reaction to put pressure on reducing lasers in civilian hands, because of their potential self defense against a junta potential perhaps, or for some other reason, such as borking surveillence cameras, or any number of reasons
Of course it still could have come from the ground, but it seems just like an amazingly lucky shot with a pretty powerful laser.(anyone knowledgeable want to comment on probable laser used and how to aim it accurately in this scenario?) Not only to hit, but to see where the hit is to correct the aim. Try it with a simple handheld rifle scope with integral laser(maybe that's what was used, but a model not available readily for civilians), and you can see the wiggle you get and how hard to see it at a relatively close couple hundred yards against a stationary target, against something moving really fast and pretty far away indicates a pretty sophisticated and powerful setup. The news articles (I have read several before slashdot got it) don't really have much in the way of details yet.
Ever heard the expression "There's no such thing as bad publicity"... :P
Can't say that Delta has been doing too hot lately in the market.
Yeah, mod me down for Troll, fine
*yawn*
LASER is an acronym. So LASER's is correct.
Then it would be valis....
I was on a Search and Rescue mission in CAP and we were targeted by a strong green laser. I was the mission observer and instructed the pilot to look away. Initially it passed by us fast but then it illuminated the cockpit. We got closer but it stopped.
If we had a better location on the source we would have been more active tracking it down. I would not want to be the person caught interfereing with an Air Force assigned SAR mission.
That's all it would take. Polarized sunglasses or a polarizing filter film on the windows.
It's LASERs. You don't need an apostrophe to make an acronym plural. CDs, not CD's.
Why are these people thinking about solutions to this "problem" when it has only happened to ONE pilot? Maybe it would be a good idea to wait until this happend to more than one pilot. I know it would be too much to ask for people choose a statistically significant threshold for legal or administrative action, but at least wait until it is not a freak occurrence.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I don't have a link for this but it was already published in the magazine Science et Vie that there is a technology that military pilots can wear to prevent a laser from reaching the their eyes.
This was created in response to the threat of lasers from enemy crafts that could disable the pilot.
If I recall correctly, it is some form of mesh of micro-flaps that are normally open so that the surface is see through. When a laser hits the surface, it creates some form of static which closes the flaps, preventing the laser from reaching the eye (at least for a time sufficient to damage the eye).
And let's not forget who the bizarre owner of this "news source" is, isn't he claiming to be God incarnate?
Indeed. And let's not forget Reverend Moon's coronation as the messiah in a Senate Office Building.
If the beam was visible, as the article claims it was, then that's a heck of a strong laser - especially if it had already travelled all the way up from the ground. Keeping beams collimated over long distances is hard, too; the average laser pointer won't do it. For that matter, if the beam was as thin as a laser pointer's, I don't think it could have come all the way up from the ground at all - diffraction creates a trade-off between beam size and distance it will stay collimated no matter how good your optics are, such that in order to keep from spreading out at a distance, the beam has to be pretty big to begin with. So I wonder if there's a possibility that the beam actually originated within the cockpit instead of on the ground. Then again, it sounds like the plane was flying pretty low at the time, so the beam may not actually have travelled all that far even if it did come from the ground.
Just the other day I was watching "Wimbledon" in a movie theatre, and I noticed a lazer beam pointing at the screen.
Obviously an evil terrorist was attempting to kill us all, so I quickly urinated on the movie screen to prevent the fire.
Oddly enough my heroic act wasn't accepted by the movie theatre staff. The decided to remove me from the premesis in shame.
Seems to me...
In line with the runway, on the far side from the plane.
From that angle, a landing plane is "stationary." In other words, making a straight-on approach, minimal side-to-side motion, slow drop.
Actually, probably the easiest way to hit a plane with a laser.
Fortunately, there's a restricted space where this approach will work, and that can be monitored and/or secured.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There is an item easily found in comercial airliners, that is often used in wars also known as "pillow wars" These dangerous items are part of the terrorists arsenals and can be easily home built!! beware!
Check out Website development, maintenance and accesibility cons
Immediate automatic launch of a Harm missle by an aircraft back at the laser source. There might be a few unpleasant incidents and bad publicity about colateral damage but the survivors will learn quickly not to do that.
The way I did this was to have the laser and binoculars on a board with a tripod mount. Its hard to get the laser to go into it at an exact angle, you will need to test it with an object in the distance. Now all you need to do it put the binocalars on a tripod and look into the unused side, wherever you look the laser will be. The binoculars will make the beam bigger but you can adjust them so that it won't spread out too much.
Don't screw with the the Mormons, I guess.
Company I used to work for used a high powered laser to determine cloud cover. Its possible the pilots got hit with it or one of the competing systems.
"He noted that incidents of lasers being directed at commercial airliners during takeoff and landings have raised fears that "this in fact may be a new form of terrorism. Lasers are easily obtainable and can be self-manufactured weapons in the terrorist arsenal, which essentially can effect a soft-kill solution and leave virtually no detectable evidence," he said."
Whoa there, Tex, slow down. Easy on the terrorist hot button. As good as the terrorist ploy is, blinding lasers don't exactly have the terror element a potential madman is looking for, nor do they have guaranteed catastrophic results. We're talking maybe blinding someone. That's assuming you have a powerful enough laser that won't diffuse over distance, considering you're a terrorist and don't want to be anywhere you can easily be blown to snot. It's also an easily countered threat. First hint you have being lased, don the goggles temporarily, pinpoint the moron's position and let the military take it from there.
Yeah, somebody has an overactive imagination on this call.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Did mini-me hump the laser and hit a button or something? Or maybe it was the shark...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
A 5mW laser does not seem to damage a person's eye even when they look directly into it for 15 minutes (see here for example).
From a distance of what must be miles away, aimed at a moving aircraft, you would need a laser that was orders of magnitude more powerful in order to damage someone's eye. Even with a powerful laser, you'd generally have to look directly into the optical axis to cause serious vision impairment. And while I haven't gotten injured by a laser, the few times I looked into one accidentally, there was little doubt about when it happened or where the light came from.
Even more implausible is the claim in the article that someone would "[continue] to suffer eye pain and deteriorating vision"; laser injuries to the eye do not cause continued deterioration and they do not cause chronic pain (here).
The whole thing strikes me as wildly implausible. As the article above shows, apparently erroneous claims of laser injuries are fairly frequent. A more likely explanation is that someone is lying, perhaps because he wants to retire early or did something else stupid and wants it covered.
If indeed this was a terrorist pointing the laser, would it not be far more leathal if the laser was being used, not to injure the eyesight of the pilot, but rather, to paint the airplane as a target for a Man Portable Air Defense System?
Early generations of MANPADS that rely on the heat signature of the aircraft's engines are now much more easily defeated by onboard decoy/chaff/flare systems. A laser guided missle may have much better success rates vs hardened targets (civillian/commercial aircraft probably don't have countermeasures, yet, so this may have been a test?)
That said, 5 miles out of SLC airport puts most planes on approach paths at or below surrounding peaks. One could drive a high-powered system in the bed of a pickup to the top of surrounding mtns and fire away from a realively higher vantage point than the plane.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Have curtains across the windows, like in the B-52's (to prevent blindness from the bomb going off...).
Have anyone looking out the front wear a patch on one eye at a time, so they dont loose both at once?
emt 377 emt 4
Does BOC still perform? I saw them back in the 70's while at Northern Illinois U.. Great concert.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This could work well for near-IR (and deep red) wavelengths. A coating that would block 780 nm and longer would prevent many high power diode lasers and Nd:YAG lasers from entering the cockpit while not interfering with normal color vision.
Now, please let me be the first pedant to point out that for them to have actually seen the beam inside the cockpit, then it must have been helluva dusty or smokey in there. Who were the pilots? Cheech and Chong?
Honestly, how difficult can it be to develop some new sort of glass, one which light cannot penetrate?
The Windshield is already temperate, bullet proof glass... why not add a laser saftey layer? The only colors the need to distinguish outside the plane are the color of ground lighting... taxiway, apron, hanger, runway lights, etc.
Just a though.
Any reason why an autodarkening lens, like used in welding, could not be used. It would not immediately stop the beam, but it could minimize damage.
And in any case, making a few airline pilots suffer from chronic eye problems that can't be proven to have resulted from the attack is hardly an effective terror weapon. Even if the worst case happens and they cause a crash, remember that terrorism is a form of advertising: if you can't tell it's not an accident (no detectable evidence, just a crash on take-off or landing) it's not going to terrorise anyone.
After a couple of hours on ebay, I was pretty shaken. Laser heads in the multi-hundred WATT (not MW) range are readily available to the public, no liscense no oversight. I asked a friend who does laser research about this, and he told me that while it was illegal to sell a high-powered laser to the public, the parts weren't restricted. So, a company can sell you a high power laser head, and next week the power supply, columnating lenses and whatever else you need, they just can't assemble it for you.
This is like saying that gun shops can sell all the parts for RPG's, but they can't actually load it for you!
Generally, I'm in favor of minimal govt. oversight, and I don't care for most gun-control laws etc. But NOBODY needs a 1500 watt UV laser for 'personal use' any more than I need tanks and howitzers for deer hunting! The add linked in previous responses showing a 200W laser-pointer shaped like a gun are just frightening. That's not a laser-pointer, it's a weapon, and I certainly don't want it pointed at me by some pimply-faced wanna-be geek trying to impress his friends!
I remember, but I can't find a link to the article. Some years, a helicopter was flying over an unauthorized army zone, over some US Navy boat. The pilot reported beeing blinded by a red light, because he survived to the crash. He lost part of his seight but was happy to be alive
"It starts with a slight fever and dryness of the throat. When the virus penetrates the red blood cells, the victim becomes dizzy, begins to experience an itchy rash, then the poison goes to work on the central nervous system, severe muscle spasms followed by the inevitable grueling. At this point, the entire digestive system collapses accompanied by uncontrollable flatulence... until finally, the poor bastard is reduced to a quivering wasted piece of jelly."
Attndnt : Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit
Striker : The cockpit
Attndnt : It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important now.
Hurry. Lets outlaw the lasers.
As implausible is it seems that a low-budget laser on the ground could have caused this incident, the only conclusion we can reach is that the Flight Control Computer onboard the aircraft became "self-aware" and took action it deemed necessary to protect its own self-determination. . .
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
From the article:
The plane's two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit
If I read this right it says there was a beam (a visible point of light) inside the cockpit. This may not be the case, but it is one possible interpretation.
If this is the case it's pretty serious. Think about it. What kind of tracking system is necessary to get a laser beam into a cockpit window of a flying plane from the ground and keep it there long enough to be seen by the pilots?
Burning Laser Ray Gun
DANGER Class IV Laser
Handheld Battery Powered Device Can Start Fires Over a Considerable Distance!!
Build a burning laser system using our sealed CO2 laser tube with special cooling. High efficiency current controlled power supply delivers over 100 watts of power to this directed energy beam device. Excellent demonstration of future weapons technology.
LABURN1 - Burning Laser Ray Gun Plans...$20.00
LABURN1K - Complete Kit and Plans...$1475.95
LABURN10 - Assembled...$1975.95
----
That's like advertising for an AK-47, "Can mow down hundreds of bastards that pissed you off over the years, all in the same fast-food restaurant, all within seconds!"
I served in an infantry battalion alongside two tank battalions in Germany in 1982, and shortly after I got there, some moron in one of the then-new M1 tanks decided to test the new-fangled laser rangefinders on an automobile speeding along a nearby country road. He succeeded in permanently blinding the driver, who suffered further devastating injuries in the subsequent crash. If I remember correctly, the tank gunner was convicted at his court-martial and got twenty years in Fort Leavenworth military penitentiary. The point is that the M1's laser rangefinder was orders of magnitude more powerful than any commercial laser pointer, the gunner was using a powerful magnifying optical instrument on a gyro-stabilized tank turret to track an object moving much slower than an aircraft in flight.
From my limited contact with the optics in an M1 (courtesy a tanker buddy), I appreciate the extreme difficulty of keeping cross-hairs on a fast-moving target, and I seriously doubt that anyone could have hit the windshield of an aircraft in flight with a handheld laser. They would have to have been using some sort of stabilized mount and telescopic rig. Were there any military units on exercises in the area? Bored soldiers will do the stupidest shit. Trust me; I know from personal experience.
https://store.blublocker.com/catalog/bestsellers/a viator.html
"Unfortunately, having pilots wear colored laser safety glasses would be impractical as that would make it impossible to interpret the colored symbols on paper maps and cockpit displays."
Furthermoor, wearing colored laser-safety glasses would make the pilots look ridiculous.
Where's your sense of fashion?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The pilot is going to lose his medical and never fly again.
My guess is that they were screwing around with a laser pointer in the cockpit and the pilot got his eyeball fried.
Make the claim that you saw it come in while you were landing, and you've got a lifetime of disability payments.
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
He wrote about crashing a plane into Congress, and he wrote about crashing a plane by blinding the pilots.
Send him to Gitmo for educating the terrorists!
There are articles online concerning outdoor laser safety that are at least 6 years old...
/ am04-9.htm
This problem is very likely not related to
terrorism.... The FAA has conducted at
least one study on the subject:
http://www.cami.jccbi.gov/aam-400A/abstracts/2004
because they told him when they took him up in their ship, at least thats what he says
There's a link-collection about anti-personell lasers (including blinding ones) with similar stories. Seems old, but relevant.
Sig. under reconstruction.
I'm a regular visitor to Ibiza (it's an island near spain famed for it's nightlife) and a few years ago it was quite common for the nightclubs with laser shows to "point out" aircraft on approach (as they carried the next batch of party people). From the ground it just looks like you're shining the laser at the plane, but from inside it's crazy as the beam shines through the windows and lights up the cabin (which has it's lights off for nightime landing). Was quite fun at the time but looking back I can see the potential danger.
This was a few years ago, I believe the airlines complained and the clubs were banned from doing it any more.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Tom Clancy wrote a book that use this same tactic. I forget which one, I think _Debt of Honor_ but Im not sure. Anyway, 2 agents Chavez and Smith were masquerading a photo-journalists and they smuggled this laser equipment disguised as cameras. They brought 2-3 planes down by frying the pilots. The air traffic controllers had no idea what had happened.
THis kind of thing was a problem for the US during the first Gulf War. Basically, a laser would be pread with a (parabolic?) mirror, an F117 would fly into the beam, the night-vision camera hooked into the pilot's helmet would be overloaded, and the pilot would be blinded for a second or two, enough to lose control and crash.
One countermeasure that was later looked into was to use a lens coating with a non-linear response - it remained clear for most light intensities, but went opaque almost instantaneously (in milliseconds) when the intensity went over a certain threshold.
The reason I know about this was that my nonlinear optics professor had an amusing story about being invited to give a lecture on his research in the US, only to find when he arrived that it was to a military lab with several times more people working on the field than the amount doing the same research, but publically.
No doubt some bright spark is thinking of trying to sell the same tech to commercial jet makers now, especially since the new invadee paradigm is to just let the Americans in, wait till they relax, then commence the guerilla warfare.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Laser pointers are class 3A (1 to 5 mW) and are required to carry a warning cautioning users to avoid shining a laser pointer beam into anyone's eye. But class 3A lasers are less dangerous than most people think. The most well-supported risk estimate suggests that the retina can theoretically be damaged if someone were to stare into the beam for 10 seconds (Ophthalmology 1997; 104:1213).
-- "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke" - Opus
On the Island of Mallorca in the mediterrenean there was (is?) a nightclub called Tito's which had a fantastic roof mounted laser whose purpose was in effect a visible-for-miles sign.
After many complaints from the pilots using the airport which was 7 miles away, because it was somehow interfering with their visibility during landing and takeoff, the laser show was permanently shut down.
The point was this was a big and very powerful installation, where the beams were swept across the sky very rapidly in effect creating curtains of light which I can easily picture a plane flying through, however a SINGLE beam is a different proposition, especially given the high sill height of cockpit windows (higher than a car windscreen) and the nose up attitude of a plane on landing approach or takeoff, even assuming you could deliberately aim that well, you would need to be at least the same height as the cockpit.
So unless the plane was on final approach somewhere like hong kong where a laser targeter could conceivably be atop a tower block or mountain, you're looking at the only possible EXTERNAL platform being another plane, and someone with an INCREDIBLY steady aim, or military type laser aiming capabilities.
cheers
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Moonie paper from the wannabe Messiah publisher, right?
That article is yet more fearprop or perhaps the first physical evidence of Moonie divine light.
This sounds like a magic laser beam - ironically, my eyes are too dry to bother reading the story, but it seems to me it'd be hard to aim a laser from the ground in a way that would hit a pilot's eyes in the cockpit if the plane is even 100ft AGL, much less around FL300.
Its *on* the *wing* I tell *you*!
*With* a *freaking* *laser* beam on it's head!
I've always wondered if it was just an incredible fluke, or something that could happen easily again. Now I know
you can get a welding helmet that autodarkens when you arc. they are about $50 and change fast enough for you to not go blind, and run off a 9volt battery.
if you know nothing about welding, that is one issue when you are learning. knowing where the electrode is in relation to the work and getting it close enough to arc, but not to stick. normally you kinda peek then drop your helmet and go for it. the autoshade helmets let you see what you are about to weld and when it gets bright they tint fast enough to protect you..... the tinting is extreme, but under the plasma light youu can see your work.
it's possibly something like that can be used for lasers as well as any other type of super bright blinding light. maybe the lasers are too tricky to trip the sensors, but if they can make the helmets that cheap, and there is a market for it in planes... i bet someone can figure it out. it might help fighter/bomber pilots too. it has to throw their vision to see things explode in front of them... maybe?
Please. They're about as reliable and objective as Faux Nudes.
While I personally don't believe that lasers shined at commercial airplanes are a real threat, after reading some of the comments I have to ask:
Just checking ... I know it's "cool" to be all snarky about terrorism, but it's getting a bit old and tired.
Windows are for passengers, just paint them over and use video to see outside instead. They are already rated at flying IFR anyway. Make the cockpit just like the simulators they fly for all their training.
All planes have powerful (but dispursive) lasers on them now to jam laser guided surface to air missiles. The pilot's eye may have been hit by another plane's laser. If you don't believe me, buy a laser enabled radar detector and point it at a low-flying plane...
Why can't they tint the glass in a similar way to the mentioned glasses?
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Replace all color-coded thingamajiggies in the cockpit with braille then the airlines and FAA can change the rules and be ADA compliant by hiring blind pilots.
w00t!
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
That's the funniest shit I've read here all hour.
The thought occurs that it could have been a guidance beam for a beam riding anti-Aircraft missile like one of these: http://www.army-technology.com/projects/rbs70/
You seem to be mistaken in one thing though. You assume that the goal is to actually take down an aircraft.
Terrorism is not necessarily synonymous with mass murder-- i.e. either one can exist without the other. It is entirely possible that terrorists could be trying to make people *think* that they are vulnerable in the sky, thus spreading terror and poisoning the economic climate for the airlines.
Hell, terrorism could include anything from leaving empty packages market "bomb" in airport restrooms and sending letters to various random people containing cornstarch and a note with the word "antrax" on it to incidents like September 11th where nearly 3000 people were killed. The important component is not murder, but terror, hence the word.
There are vast numbers of potential items, such as the corn starch and cardboard boxes mentioned above, which could be used as improvised terrorist weapons most of which have indispensible legitimate uses as well. Indeed no level of regulation can keep an imaginative indivitual from being able to concoct a scheme which will play on our fears and make the public or the government conclude that a threat to public safety or health or an attack against the people or government is either imminant or underway.
Back to the question of lasers. Schematics for building lasers are available with a minimum of research. Sufficiently powerful lasers may also be able to injure pilots even without directly hitting the eye (i.e. the scattering of the beam via imperfections in the window or reflections off other surfaces inside the cockpit).
Finally if pilots *think* they are at risk of permanent injury, it may also poison the economy for the airlines. This is another way in which we could be vulnerable as a country to this sort of attack.
The real issue is that if we live in a society where cornstarch can be used as a weapon of mass terror then we have to re-evaluate our very notion of the role of government in protecting us from the terrorists. Indeed perhaps we need a greater public discussion about all issues involving homeland security and face these as a people rather than delegating this responsibility to the Federal government. Perhaps issues such as airline security, airport security, etc. are best handled by public discourse rather than secret regulation. The public is best equipped to handle the threat of terrorism when they know what the risks are and are able to freely debate and discuss what to do about it.
Such an approach has been generally successful in the realm of computer security, in the sense that zero-day exploits are not nearly as common as they might be otherwise. An approach of full disclosure of security measures and problems would help us combat the issues much more effectively. The attacks on September 11th certainly seem to indicate that Al Qaeda has performed extensive recon of our airport security measures, so the argument that such disclosure would undermine security holds very little weight for me. Indeed such disclosure may allow us to close the holes before they are exploited (unlike computer software security attacks, successful large-scale terrorist attacks seem to take many months or even possibly several years to plan and execute).
I am posting anonymously out of fear that such a post could place me on a no-fly list.
I concur with the side to side, head on does seem reasonable as a stabler shot, just still thinking about the up and down angle. Aren't planes coming in nose-up? Seems like it's only the last few seconds they drop flat enough to get a shot off for someone on the ground, but for real I could be wrong on that, been a decade now since I last flew and memory is hazy. And he got hit at five miles from the airport, so he was still at some reasonable small thousands of feet altitude you would think. Of course five miles from the airport doesn't mean five miles from the shooter, and they didn't specify the angle the pilots saw the laser beam at when they noticed it flitting around the cockpit cabin. Just that one pilots recollection would indicate a ground shot or an air to air shot from another plane, or even wilder as has been suggested,and overhead shot from some satellite. I dismiss none of those possibilities yet, except accidental.
This thing stinks. I may not be a cop but I think like a cop all the time, with the twist of not trusting what's been going down with this regime, or the previous few for that matter. Been too many coincidences and odd occurrences to suit me. Anthrax attack using US army anthrax when homeland security bill (or patriot act, one or the other I forget now) up for a vote, excuse me, too cute. And we are getting closer and closer to the "elections" as well, just about everyone been predicting more real or ersatz "terror" incidents. I think we can probably rule out "accidental" at this time,just the odds are fantastical against it, but any other theory is still open.
I don't know if anyone remembers, but back during the klinton regime, just about every time some weird gun bill was coming up for a vote we had "kids n gunz" incidents hit the news. Even columbine had an angle like that to it, what's the odds of an NRA national convention, a law on concealed carry being debated at the state level there, and the "kids n gunz, eek, assault weapon gunz!" shooting incident all occurring at the same time and about the same place? And the waco assault, coincidently when congressional hearings on the BATF and some abuses and their funding where about to start. Plenty of examples of coincidences. the current regime claiming they had no idea that hijackers would take planes and smash them into buildings, yet they were running an exercise that day, playing make believe planes were hijacked and smashed into buildings. uh huh, someone sure lying about that one.
The whole thing stinks, this whole "war on terror" stinks, it's way more reichstagg fire scam than anything else, but now it's all messed up with real terrorists as well. Whattafreekinmess.
I just don't trust or believe in coincidences too much. And this laser deal is another one. I've been seriously wondering when they were going to restrict lasers from civilians, as they are potentially very useful as defensive arms against grossly superior weaponry that only the state possesses. I'll be following it for updates, see if they realease some more details. I guarantee any place that rents heavy duty lasers are getting visits from the feds about now, but I don't know how much good that will do..
I have no idea how successful it would be, but wouldn't simple mirror shades (all the rage in the 80's) or mirrored windshields offer fairly good protection against visible wavelengths of laser light?
/submits patent for tin foil eyeglasses
"Me claiming Satan exist is just as valid as you claiming an atom exists" - 1inChrist
Better yet would be to fly by camera. I know they are currently working on something like this. But I was under the impression that the ultimate dream was to make the floors out of TV screens, and to project what's underneath the plane on the floor. So while landing you could see the run way. They could do the same thing with the window. So if they get a laser, the worst that can happen is that you might damage a camera. In that case, you fly by wire, and open the shutters on the window when you pass the laser. -Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Why is it that "stronger laser's are not that hard to come by" (emphasis added) but "having pilots wear . . . " (emphasis added).
How hard is it to realize when you are using the possessive and when you are simply trying to make a plural?
-Grammar Police
"He noted that incidents of lasers being directed at commercial airliners during takeoff and landings have raised fears that "this in fact may be a new form of terrorism.
Lasers are easily obtainable and can be self-manufactured weapons in the terrorist arsenal, which essentially can effect a soft-kill solution and leave virtually no detectable evidence."
(Sounds a lot like file-trading.)
No problem.
Just pass another law.
The Washington Times is owned and operated by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who says the paper "will be the instrument through which America will know God." It's not the best source of news.
This paper likes to print rumor and urban legend as fact. Take what you read there with a grain of salt.
I think in the Tom Clancy book "Debt of Honour", CIA agents use a laser to blind the pilots landings a AWACS-type craft.
If its good enough for the CIA, its good enough for Al-Quaeda
The aim of terrorism is to damage our economy and our nation by spreading fear and uncertainty to the citizens and residents of our great nation and to those who would conduct lawful business with us.
It seems to me that those who profit from selling fear are a form of terrorist. Of course our first ammendment Free Press clause protects their activities because the framers were afraid that the abridgement of the system under which a free press can operate would be a meachanism used to secure the powers necessary for tyrrany, which by definition relies on requiring that the public fear the executive. It is therefore one of our great defences against an even greater form of terrorism than Al Qaeda-- a despotic out of control executive.
It is now impossible to fly safely.
Terrorists can easily crash airliners if they so desire. Everyone should stop flying.
The terrorists have won.
It wasn't me. I swear. Really.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Thousands of feet up? Not damaging the retna? Hard to target all 4 eyes? I don't think the danger lies in the physical damage a laser could do at range. All an attack needs to do is create a brief distraction at a critical moment. If someone wanted to attack an aircraft (for terrorism purposes) they would want to do it at take-off or landing. So we're only talking about maybe a hundred feet or so. (But say the attackers are a mile from the airport so maybe ranges will from 5-10 thousand feet) I'm not saying a 5mW laser would necessairly be effective for this kind of attack but a distraction from maybe a dozen attackers all at once right before the wheels contact the tarmack? That could be fatal indeed. Considering the relative ease of aquiring laser sources, why point 1 at a plance when you can point 10 or 20 just as easy? Imagine that the pilot has had a long flight and is dealing with a strong crosswind on landing, and suddenly at the critical moment there are flashes in his vision from multiple angles and he flinches or has to shut his eyes. Ok, so maybe the laser might not damage his eyes, but might not the flaming wreakage of the crashed plane be harmful enough?
But I play one on Slashdot...
100%
aren't airplanes basically automated? pilot drives on the tarmac, lines everything up and hits a few buttons, presto! landing is similar. if the blinding is intentional, many more things than lasers could be used.
always mosh clockwise
This story appeared on Slashdot a while back. It mentions the use of near-infra red light to actually stimulate the healing of retinal cells. NASA has more information about it on their website as well. Here is a quote from the New Scientist article mentioned in the Slashdot story...
It seems to be very pertinent to the situations of the Delta pilot and Canadian Navy helicopter pilot in the current story. Some companies make devices using this technology for medical purposes.
About 8 years ago I was working on a broadcast transmitter that was in a room on the roof of a apartment tower near Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi. It was shortly after dark when I emerged from the transmitter shack and I stopped to notice a C-130 on final approach to Keesler. A laser that was part of a display at one of the Casinos painted the bottom of the plane from the nose to tail. The plane wobbled as the pilot was temporarily blinded by the beam. Reading in the newspaper the next day confirmed that the pilot had been temporarily blinded by the laser and the co-pilot had finished the approach and landing.
At the time laser light shows were the rage at the newly built casinos. Several had them, and all used green lasers whose beams were panned around the sky by motorized mirrors. As these casinos were built surrounding an AirForce base, they were supposed to have safety shutoffs that, during operations, would disable the lasers upon request by the base. An investigation found that these safety devices had been bypassed by maintenance personnel, including a laser whose safety shutter had been defeated by wrapping wire around it.
Needless to say, the laser light shows were dismantled quickly and were never brought back.
Fortunately, in this case, the optics spread the beam out with distance, instead of keeping tight collumination, so the pilot did not suffer long term damage.
These lasers were in the range of 50W, not some little 5mW laser pointer. Their beams could be seen for miles orthogonally and would paint patterns on the underside of clouds over two miles up. Your 5mW laser does not have the collimation, nor the power after atmospheric absorbtion to do much after around 100 ft.
However, I must admit, lasers in the 50W range are available, would do grevious eye damage at distance, and could be used to down an airplane by blinding the pilots.
This is all very dramatic.
I'm color blind (at least, it says so on my medical certificate) and I fly about 200 hours/year commuting to work. In the winter it gets dark early and I fly at night. No problem for me.
What you left out of your life and death dramatic "are you man enough?" no power after dark scenario is pilot controlled lighting. Yup. If there isn't a tower, or the tower people have quit for the day, they turn the lights off. But you knew that, right?
All those fancy color coded lights will be dark.
In my case, I keep a battery powered radio in my bag right next to the flashlight. I'll still be able to turn on the lights and complete my flight, color blind or not.
How about you?
Of course if it's in the Washington Times, you can bet it was democrat who's to blame.
Hope it wasn't one of these...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Flight charts produced by the US government are designed to be fully readable even in red light. Most pilot flashlights are dual-mode; they can shine in either white or red. Red light is less destructive to night vision. Of course, making pilots wear red glasses might not be a great option - seems like you could just tint the cockpit windows with something that diffuses or reflects coherent light.
No he didn't - lookit the time - he just posted in to another thread :-)
Kinda hard when they're at the bottom of the dead sea.
And mind you, its just proof when God says "Regime Change" he can actually pull it off...overnight. That there would be enough to make me believe, then again I already do but not because of some threat, but because of faith.
You know the same kind of faith that some have that a dirty chemical soup covered the earth and then lightning hit it, causing thousands of distict amino acids to for--with twists backwards of how they form in all cases except inside living cells--and for those amino acids to form into protiens, which formed into functioning cells with DNA. You know, the kind of faith an evolutionist much have in impossible odds that life could form in a chemical soup that happened to have exactly what was needed in exactly the right amounts for life to form--and literally billions of complex molecules to form into a living organism. And for that organism to form in an enviroment surrounded by a chemical cocktail that would most likely be very very unpleasant to be around.
So yeah, some scientist somewhere made the conditions necessary to get amino acids to form. Too bad of course they all formed backwards of the ones produced by living creatures. Put these together into a protein, get a backwards protein, make it the right protein backwards and put it in a cows brain and give it mad cow disease.
Lets put it this way, every theory regarding the origins of life is based entirely on faith. We weren't there, so its by faith in the scientists claims and their skill. Even the science can support the idea of special creation, if you choose to view it in that perspective, just the same as it can show random chance originated evolution if thats the viewpoint you want to have.
Geologically, the evidence for noah's flood is actually almost overwhelming. The story exists in the history of hundreds of cultures, the names are different sometimes but often very similar-- such as Noe instead of Noah. But the essence of the story is the same, as well as the relative timeframe of the story. So there are two possible explanations for this, either A) the story is true and all peoples decended from Noah's family or B) the human race was a monoculture in the past 5,000 years. (Which of course in and of itself is part of A) And that is why all have the story in common.
I love how we test volcanic rocks, for thier content of certain isotopes, and then say the volcano these rocks came from erupted 300 million years ago. Then at the same time we test rocks coming from active volcanoes, and samples taken from the same lava flows which cooled within hours of each other can test out to be tens of millions of years old to start with, but also 10 of millions of years different in age from each other. Remember these are rocks we observed to form at nearly the same time.
We date rocks based on the level of an isotope remaining. We base this date on the assumption that the rate of decay is constant. Which unfortunately is not, and we know it. Its related directly to the presence of other elements as well as temperature. Additionally, we must assume there is always the same amount of that isotope in every rock to start with, because duh nobody was there to find out how much to start with. We base that on modern day observations, which unfortunately can vary but a large number of millions of years worth of the isotope being measured.
So we'll just assume of course then that we really can't count on these numbers. So then how do these scientists figure out how old rocks are? FROM FOSSILS, which of course...they figure out how old those are from THE ROCKS THEY ARE FOUND IN.
Say somebody finds a new fossil of a "human ancestor" they want to figure out how old it is. They do radio carbon dating on it, and come back with a number of 2 million years. Unfortunately this doesn't work because radiocarbon dating is accepted to be only accurate to about 10,000 years. See C-14 decays so fast, that after about 10,000 years there is so litt
It would not be hard to give them laser-safe glasses. The military always uses maps with no red on them. How hard would it be to pick a color that no warning light in cockpit uses and swap it out on maps?
Seems the simplest method would be to mount a couple video cameras on the plane and feed them to giant displays in the cockpit. You could even have a field of vision that would be impossible with windows (imagine a camera pointed backwards). Lasers would then be useless.
Only problem would be electric failure -- if your power died or something you would be flying blind, so it might be a good idea to keep a window in the cockpit, just covered with a shade or something.
The threshold for damage to the eye from visible-wavelength laser exposure with a 0.1 second duration (about the time it takes you to blink) is a fluence of about 0.3 mJ/cm^2 (see D. Sliney and M. Wolbarsht, Safety with Lasers and Other Optical Sources, (Plenum, 1982), Fig. 8-2), which corresponds to an intensity of 3 mW/cm^2.
If you multiply 3 mW/cm^2 by 20 square feet you get about 90 watts. Not exactly a hand-held device!
You can easyly shoot to the criminal 100% KO with this self-defense weapon, BUY IT!!!
I call bullshit. If the frequency is doubled, the wavelength is halved, and ~400 nm is around the boundary between violet and UV, not green.
First of all, I have seen several posters here to /. that frankly don't know jack. I am serious here.
Now to explain why this laser was so powerful that it could be seen from the air at 40,000 feet or more, this is an incredibly powerful laser that is used by the Utah State University Department of Physics to study the upper atmosphere air temperature. BTW, that laser beam is a beautiful sight, and watching it go straight up to the zenith (apparently... just a few arc seconds of zenith if you are standing near the building) makes your mind follow the light and wander up to infinity (or at least 100 km up into the atmosphere).
My (almost... just two doors down the block from me) next door neighbor is one of the research scientist involved in the project. This is an ongoing project that has been running off and on for almost eleven years. If this were something brand new I might see the pilot having a right to complain, but this is something that is very old (well, comparatively old... it was approved under the Bush I administration for funding).
Frankly I don't know why the pilot didn't read his stinking charts. What were they, over 12 years old? If that were true the pilot should have his pilots license suspended anyway for that very reason alone. For those not in the know, just don't fly an airplane over Utah State University if you don't want to get blinded by the light.
The physics of this are also pretty cool. There are two parts, the laser that shoots out, and a light reciever that measures the intensity of the light coming back, and the timing of that light. From this information the temperature of the upper atmosphere can be obtained +/- about 1 degree C for the whole range of altitudes, and they don't even have to send up a sounding rocket to get the data.
yeah, we need to see the approach details - it could have easily been atypical flight path - i've been on some once-arounds on comm air that made me think twice about going greyhound... and a great bank on a 747 where we swore we were looking straight up (and the other side of the plane straight down i suppose)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The US Military has (had for years now) glass which detects laser light (by its coherence) and instantly goes opaque.
My theory is that the pilot was really bored, and started playing with his laser pointer pen. His co-pilot and him made a bet about laser-pen tolerance, and he lost. Now he has to find a convenient excuse or risk losing his license.
Table-ized A.I.
This is usually not done because
1) Locking the brakes in any aircraft causes the tires to develop a nice igloo shape, as the friction melts the bottom of the tire.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
It's even possible to create a laser that can do eye damage (or even damage to the plane) that wouldn't even be in the visible spectrum. For example, a CO2 laser.
Dye lasers are also tunable to just about any wavelength you could want.
Yeah -- but there's a flaw in your logic.
Lasers come in two types: continuous-wave (CW) and pulsed. CW can be used constantly, while pulsed cannot.
Most of the high-powered CW lasers are not 100% duty cycle. They are designed to operate continuously, but only for a certain amount of time. Beyond that, they have to be shut down and cooled. You could probably get around it, but that lowers the chance you can pack all the aiming hardware (optical or radar), laser, and cooling gear into the back of a camper-shell covered pickup.
When I fly now, yes I do have a hand-held radio. Didn't that night though -- and it was real -- and yes, I was man enough, thank you :-)
It was at a controlled field with the lights on. (At this field when the tower closes, the FSS takes over -- they're manned 24/7 -- and the lights stay on.) Failure happened just after I was cleared to join the downwind.
BTW I'm in Canada. The rules are slightly different here...
In Canada, Night is a seperate rating for your licence.
The requirements are;
Private Pilot licence
Class 1 or 3 medical certificate
20 hours, which includes:
- 10 hour dual instrument
- 5 hours dual night (2 hours of cross-country)
- 5 hours solo night (10 take offs and landings)
And in Canada, you can't get an unrestricted medical certificate if you're color blind and can't demonstrate that you can discern the light signals. The wording on the restriction printed on your medical will be "restricted day flying only, requiring a two-way radio to fly in and out of controlled airports". And you will therefore not be allowed to hold a night rating.
Final authority on this here is the Canadian Air Regulations; 421.42, 401.42 and 401.43.
I stand by my statment -- flying color blind at night is asking for trouble.
Let me be direct -- You, sir, are *not* a safe pilot if you are flying at night colorblind. I hope that when (not if) this catches up with you that you are not carrying passengers.
Ian Ameline
I don't have time to read all the comments here to see if anyone already pointed this out, but... This was part of a Clancy book. I forget which one, though.
This is the second time bad things were forecast by Clancy... I remember on 9/11 I was like "oh shit, terrorists read Clancy too!"
A passenger jet in route between Texas and Utah should be about 30,000 feet in altiude. Even if you were to knock off a mile of altidue to estimate height over ground, the beam would have had to travel minimally nearly five miles (directly over head). To actually enter the cockpit window would require an oblique shot and to actually reach the pilot, it would have to be even more oblique. The most likely culprit was really the co-pilot playing silly ass with his keyring pointer. Terrorists, bah!
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Its a sad story, but a pilot who now works as a programmer at DCIEM (Defence R&D Canada) was a pilot during the cold war. He flew too close to a russian ship and was hit with some sort of laser. His eyes never recovered. A brilliant non-war technique to cause damage without any evidence. I know this coz my roommate worked at dciem.
"What a facile argument. "
Remember folks. Freedom means you can do whatever you want(1).
(1) Yeah, yeah. I know, but around here that seems to be the pervailing attitude. Freedom without bad consequences. Now wouldn't that be a utopia? Now who wants to help me develop a new form of life were we'll learn so much? The only downside is that it's lethal to all other life on the planet.
I'm color blind and you apparently are not. Who has firsthand knowledge of the situation?
If I felt threatened I wouldn't have bought two airplanes and finished my IFR. I wouldn't continue to pour USD 130 down my tanks every week.
So let me be direct: your no judge of my capabilities and I'm pretty sure your not even a very experienced pilot.
But please DO feel free to rant on about the perils of flight. That is exactly what the community needs is more "there I was" FUD.
Realisticly, though, I agree with you. Color-blindness is a hinderance but probably not a severe handicap. It's handy for me to be able to quickly locate things by color- but if I knew that it wasn't an option for me to do so I imagine that I could fairly easily do it by context instead.
That's the nice thing about having a century of procedures, technology, and experience behind us- most of the serious kinks have been ironed out of the system and there are several ways to accomplish nearly anything you may need to do in a cockpit. (Save for flying the plane itself, but that's the easy part isn't it.)
I'd be a bit more apt to insure that my handhelt tranceiver's batteries were charged before each flight if I knew that a light-gun was not an option for me, but aside from that I can't think of any major differences.
Having worked with Class IIIb Lasers for 25+ years I can attest to the fact that it is nearly impossible to incur eye damage from 5-15 mW. You reflexively look away and blink. In order to incur damage from such a laser it would require:
1.Anesthetizing your eyelid muscles
2.Anesthetizing your eye muscles
3.Mounting your head in a clamp
4.Firing the laser point blank into your eye for 10 min.
This would cause temporary damage.
In addition, while the laser beam is nominally collimated over distances of tens of meters the beam spreads, reducing the energy entering the eye by an inverse square relation.
This is not to say that lasers are not hazardous, something in the 1 Watt range can be seriously dangerous to your retina. But the inverse square law still applies over long distances. Pointing and tracking with an accuracy of 1cm over several kilometers is spectacularly difficult as well.
Eye-popper lasers have been evaluated by both the US and the Russians but they have had little effectiveness. They have been banned from the military as inhumane. Usually banned weapons tend to be both inhumane and ineffective.
With a big enough laser (>>10W)you could injure a pilot, in the same fashion you can bring down a plane with a sniper rifle, it's possible, but highly unlikely, and not a particularly good terrorist tactic.
A kamikaze falcon or the sudden release of a crate full of pigeons would be more effective by orders of magnitude.
o.k. so one of you science peeps, tell us what would have been used that would have resulted in a green laser light? Surely something more than a green LED, and a battery.
CNN reported that a chainsaw was used in an attack in California today. Something like an ex-husband going after the ex-wife and her boyfriend.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
One of AC Clarke's short stories was about a despotic but superstitious african dictator. A scientist knows that the dictator would be at a particular place to view the countryside and his subjects from a high lookout. Scientist, in his lab miles away, sets up a laser aimed at that point, and a telescope. Ruler attends ceremony, scientist watches and waits until the dictator looks toward crowd, then fires pulse, binding him. He then clears up all of the equipment. Ruler's henchmen attribute it to the wrath of the gods, and the dictator is deposed.
Written in the 1960's, I think. Perhaps even 1950's.
You have the right to remain silent.
42,000 people die in car crashes every year. 0 people die in laser induced headaches.
Lasers represent a threat matrix position of 0.00000% relative to the highest threat.
In fact by all accounts Lasers are less deadly than peanut butter.
AIK
I just think of a funny story when I was in an international robotics conference a couple of years ago... The organiser gave all of us a 10mW (yes, 10mW rather the legal limit of 5mW) red laser pointer as a sourvneir... A oldish professor started using it in the first workshop right after he had got that.... The big problem was he fired the laser on the highly glossy white board surface almost continously. In the next fifteen minutes, I found the majority of the participants were staring down the floor. Every one was sick of that....
The windscreen does not need to be there. And at altitude the only laser I can think of which would be there and be high enough power is a military targeting laser.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can you at least give the name, rank, and serial number of the perpetrator who got twenty years at Leavenworth? No, I don't think so.
There's no such thing as a "ray" over long distances. At a distance of a mile or so, it would take a laser originating from an emitter several feet in diameter to put a concentrated "beam" into an aircraft cabin. It's a simple matter of light being a wave, it suffers from diffraction effects, so, no matter how perfect the optics are, the beam will spread out after a while. A laser pointer will put a small spot on a whiteboard across a room, but not across a football field. The equipment needed to focus a laser on a pilot's eye across a distance of several miles is more like "ship-sized" than "truck-sized"
I'm a grad student in utah working on a large lidar system used to make measurements in the middle atmosphere. We use a q-switched nd:yag laser that generates about 18 watts of green light in a 7ns pulse at 30 hz. So there are high powered lasers pointed into the night sky.
PS2's duh...
Wait a second, you corrected the poster about a book that you hadn't even read?. WTF? Then you make more errors in your reply to the person who corrected you! OK, it was Debt of Honor, and the bright light (Clancy doesn't say it was a laser, more like an overbright spotlight) brings down a Japanese AWACS plane. The 747 at the end that crashes into the Capitol was deliberately flown into it in a kamikaze / Al Qaeda-style attack (the book came out several years before 9-11). And the 747 crashed at the end of Debt of Honor, not the beginning of Executive Orders. Executive Orders began with the aftermath of the crash. So no, there was no "both right" about it, you were flat wrong.
Leave the Tom Clancy to the pros. And yes, I should get a life.
The Pink Floyd 'Divison Bell' tour 10 years ago had a pair of 50W (yes 50 watts) copper-vapor lasers. Although they get run through an array of beam splitters, that's still some eye-cooking power, and is taken very seriously in the industry. The effects are programmed so that beams only head skyward and never hit the auduience, and there are a series of fail-safes in place. I remember reading in a trade magazine that they had to get FAA Clearance for every outdoor performance. A truley amazing show, a testement to the art stoners can create with an ass-load of high tech gear.
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
or add a plastic reflective layer to the inside of the windows... I don't think that adding that to a cockpit would be cost prohibitive or a difficult fix. Tho I suppose if it affects visibility it might be an issue.... but a pilot that has a bit of trouble seeing through a window is much better than a pilot rolling on the cockpit floor screaming "MY EYES, MY EYES"
Bill Gertz is the man. He does stories, and the Pentagon scratches its collective heads trying to figure out where he gets his secret info from.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
very very insightful!
Me, The Mayo Clinic, and The Archives of Ophthalmology say that Laser Pointers are _absolutely_completely_safe to stare at for several minutes. Trust them!
See: "Laser Pointers and the Human Eye: A Clinicopathologic Study"
Abstact: "Continuous exposure was directed to the fovea for 1 minute, to the retina 5 below fixation for 5 minutes, and to the retina 5 above fixation for 15 minutes."
Research conclusion: "The risk to the human eye from transient exposure to light from commercially available class 3A laser pointers having powers of 1, 2, and 5 mW seems negligible. "
http://archopht.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstra
My guess is either the pilot is a psycho-somatic sissy, or it was a multiple WATT Laser (that somehow got aimed well enough) that they saw: I.e. not an e-z to aim "pointer".
Read MY fine article then consider those two probabilities...
Funny they wont mention what freaking color it was...heh...
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Thank heaven, I'm not the only person who saw that movie, after all!
I live just North of Salt Lake City, and since this terrorist act threatens me imminently, I did a bit of research. My conclusion is that someone forgot to tell the pilot that the new mouse he was using was dangerous, he was goofing off, it flipped upside down and burned his retina. Case solved.
Some assclown was waving one around and giggling like an idiot during "Lord of the Rings."
I say it's dangerous because I think he almost choked after I stuffed the laser pointer down his goddamn throat.
Laser pointers are bad for you, mmmkay?
... is Windows. They should apply SP2 (black paint) immediately.
In Soviet Amerika the ballot boxes YOU!
First of all, planes won't be falling out of the sky just because the pilot gets blinded... They are on autopilot most of the time, and only during landing would the pilots really be vulnerable. In that case, security patrols around the airports, possibly rather high solid walls, and things of that nature could take most of the threat away.
Now, as for permanently blinding pilots, the planes could always be landed by a passenger, or by remote-control (in some cases).
If this does become a real problem, the answer is video cameras, of course. They could have a black screen covering the actual cockpit windsheild, and fly by looking at several TV monitors. In the event that the monitors/cameras failed, they could remove the black screen and see through the windsheild.
However, I don't consider this too much of a problem. It would probably be easier to aquire a missle launcher than to aquire/build a great targeting system, and rather powerful lasers.
In fact, if they can blind pilots, they could work around any solution you can think-of, by uping the power, and just burning a hole through the skin and fuel tank!
This makes just another very minor item in the list of why I no longer fly. Major security hassle, just so you can pay through the teeth for a cramped seat, terrible service, and all the other crap.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Maybe the Sun itself is a Terrorist Plot to cause Pilots to crash due to Eye Exposure... maybe!
What wavelength are things like remote controls and /dev/ircomm0?
Windows keeps you from crashing?
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
When I vistsed Paris several years ago, you could basically by a laser pointer from anywhere - I must have seen dozens of street vendors selling them (mainly to school children to, you guessed it, shine in other people's eyes...)
one day while i was driving out of town one of my friends had a small red class IIIa laser pointer and he pointed it at a car about ten car-lengths ahead of us. The driver of the other car slammed on their brakes and pulled off the road so i could pass them. this was a pretty powerful demonstration in my opinion of what even a crappy little laser can do.
I'm colour-blind. Not massively so, just the most common red-green deficiency (deuteranopia, I think?) that affects around 5 in 100 males, maybe more (http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2.html)
;) But you're going to have trouble with vessel identification from their lighting (is that a ship or a rig?), and you're going to have some trouble coming into ports; not something I'd want to have to deal with single-handed.
I'm not a pilot, but I've done a fair bit of sailing; my last trip was a ~1500 nautical mile blue-water passage from the Azores back home to the Isle of Man. That's 12 days at sea, and even with four crew you spend a couple of hours on nightwatch per day. You're bound to encounter various situations where coloured light recognition is *very* useful, nearing on essential. For instance: you see a very large tanker directly ahead; the very fact that she's already over the horizon means that she's going to have a hard time stopping within those 5km, and probably hasn't seen you. You may need to get out of her way, and fast. While you can try hailing someone on the VHF or SSB, even with DSC some ships don't pay attention, and a surprisingly large amount of don't have their radar on all the time (due to the limited life magnetrons, I guess?). So, can you tell if he's actually coming towards you, or going away? Can you tell the configuration of the lights? Is that red or green on their port side? (Yes, you should be able to see their white aft light, but bulbs die.)
Personally, I wouldn't be 100% sure. My general daytime vision is pretty good, and I can usually tell what colour an object is, but low-intensity lights at night? Not with confidence. (Even with bino's.) On a ship it's not too bad: you have time to play with, so you can take a bearing, wait a minute and take another one, then calculate if she's on a collision; you can check the radar if you have it (we do); or you can piss off one of your crewmates by waking them up
Personally, I wouldn't be confident enough to pilot a plane at night. I'd imagine that things happen much faster compared to sailing (we travel an average of 6 knots an hour, and most motor vessels do 30kts tops) and that extra dimension of movement must make a lot of difference! Sailing's got plenty of procedures, knowledge requirements & useful instrumentation; I'd imagine that piloting has many more, so I guess what I'm interested in is whether you feel these would cover absolutely any situation that happened? I know that if it came down to it, if I was stuck on a boat by myself I'd be able to manage in spite of being colour-blind; can you say the same of yourself as a pilot?
(This isn't meant in a confrontational manner, I'm genuinely interested.)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iraq/laser .htm
This isn't a new issue, although this is the first time I've heard of a civilian being injured in this manner. This has been reported as a problem in a few military encounters, enemy pilots using high-powered laser pointers to blind other pilots. A fellow at the University of Dayton created a deisgn for the cockpits which essentially scatters such incoming light, preventing it from being unifed enough to damage an eye. Unfortunately, I lack cites, as my information comes from reading a magazine clipping posted on my professor's door almost 4 years ago...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.