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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."
"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
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.
Uhh ohh, I'm replying to myself again...
Okay, I read the article. It may well have been a laser? Intentional... I doubt it. Have you ever tried pointing a laser at a specific letter on a whiteboard? Try hitting somebody's eye through the window of a jet that's up in the sky, and furthermore moving, presumably right in your general direction. Takes a skill. These evil terrorists are so skilled these days!
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?)
Unfortunately, anything you do to affect visibility of coherent light is going to affect the visibility of diffuse light. But you can do smart things with polarization and embedded diffraction filters; you'll get some amount of distortion, but you can probably tune the distortion only to the frequencies that matter to you (off the top of my head, 532, 635, 650... maybe a few of the argon lines)
Even a 5mw red pointer can damage a CCD; it's focused by the lens to a spot small enough to cause intense heating.
And there are handheld laser diodes and DPSS lasers that are far more powerful than that.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Yeah, and what is your tracking, targeting, and atmospheric compensation hardware?
I do security
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.
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 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.
How does someone fire a bullet in a gang shootout and hit a little girl on a porch 3 blocks away?
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.
Someone mod the parent up, please. There have been a lot of hand-wringing alarmists making claims about how damaging these things are, and I've often suspected the issue had little scientific merit behind it. I had one person complain that since LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emissions of Radiation, that the light itself was radioactive and therefore could cause cancer!
Or maybe it's because at least some americans realize that tools don't hurt people, people hurt people.
For the hobbiest that wants to get higher power lasers, and the business that needs them, you are just creating unnecessary headaches due to the irresponsible actions of a very few people.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
Agreed. For a terrorist, they'd be shooting several miles at a target the size of... your eye. There are 4 targets that need to be hit to completely blind the pilot and copilot. Doesn't sound like an easy task to me.
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 I would argue that while true in the manufactered form, a 5mW laser might be distracting, consider what might happen if several were aimed through a easily obtained 6 inch telescope to properly colimate the beam, which was then aimed at an airport runway catching an airliner just as it was flairing on final approach.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Or...after a story like this gets out, just a probing laser ANYWHERE in the cockpit could make the two of them nervous enough to make a dangerous mistake or overlook something important. You don't have to actually do any damage to cause problems. Just a threat can be effective enough.
Sure, just paint them black.
You can't filter out every possible laser without blocking the whole spectrum. You could, however, block some of the more commonly available laser lines selectively. A good start would be to block out all infrared.
There are special coatings and materials that can block intense light while passing regular light unattenuated. I'm not sure if these are ready for commercial deployment though.
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.
Careless use of tools most certainly hurts people, which is why there are safety restrictions on what kind of tools are allowed to be sold, and most tools come with common-sense instructions attached to them.
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
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