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."

Comments

Re:Easy to get these lasers...

[mirko]

All of these handhelds laser have had their public sales suspended in France where there had been to many complaints from both victims and their optometrists.
It's still possible to buy some but in a very restricted context.

Re:coat cockpit windows instead

[dnaboy]

Main problem is there are lasers across the visual spectrum. As you start layering filters to cover the major chemical laser wavelengths, then start looking at commercially available solid state lasers and even tunable lasers, and all of the sudden you're looking at a situation where no light is getting in to the cockpit anyway.

I would propose that actually physically seeing out of the window is less and less neccessary. At the same time oLED and plasma displays keep getting better. Why not recreate environment using cameras and flat displays? Sure it wouldn't look normal at first, but keep in mind, pilots all get certified on simulators.

Plus, it opens the door to all sorts of useful heads up display possibilities (porn).

Laser pointers not a risk to aircraft

[Phronesis]

Laser pointers would be almost impossible to use against aircraft because the beam diverges so quickly. At 10 feet you might damage someone's retina, but at 1000 feet, the beam will have spread significantly: typical laser pointers have beam divergences of several milliradians, so at 1000 feet the beam will be several feet in diameter and the intensity will be insufficient to damage someone's eye.

A multi-watt laser with a decently large aperture and a TEM 00 spatial mode would be a different story.

Re:Sigh...another reference to terrorism

[ameline]

If there's a radio failure, the control tower uses light signals -- under ordinary circumstances, you need to remember that airport lights (runway, taxiway, etc) are color coded. As a pilot, you *must* be able to tell the difference between red, green, yellow, blue and white lights.

(Yes, I am a pilot)

Class IIIa lasers don't cause permanent injury

[Felgerkarb]

**LEGAL DISCLAIMNER** IN NO WAY AM I ADVOCATING THAT ONE SHOULD POINT A LASER POINTER INTO ONE'S OWN OR ANOTHERS EYE

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

Re:Easy to get these lasers...

[deglr6328]

CO2 emits @ ~ 10 microns wavelength. So far as I know (large) airplaine windows are made from polycarbonate or at least have a polycarbonate layer in them. That is going to mean almost 100% absorption and therefore 0% transmission. A CO2 laser presents a much greater danger from skin burns and the like than from eye damage. The eye's aqueous humor and lenses are also opaque to 10um light and you would therefore experience heating of the epithelium over the cornea and not damage to the retina; which I while suspect would be very painful you'd probably have enough time to shut your eyelid and prevent further damage.

Also I'd like to say that the story poster's alarmist warnings of 5mW lasers is completely unfounded. The extremely high (relatively, anyway) divergence experienced by almost all cheapo, poorly colimated 5mW laser pointers means the beam will be at least inches wide if shone on something as far away as an airplaine at thousands of feet up. The amount of light that can enter the pupil from a "legal" 5mW laser pointer at such a large beamwidth is distracting but totally harmless.

Re:Easy to get these lasers...

[alanh]

Although it looked really bright, he was able to look directly into the beam without pain.

DANGEROUS ADVICE!

The presence of pain isn't a useful check. Eyes don't have pain receptors in the retna. Damage could have occured. This is one of the reasons you're told to never look at a non-total solar eclipse: the sliver of sunlight isn't bright enough to trigger your "look away" instinct and your pupil opens some, but the light is intense enough to burn slivers of your retna away....