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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."
Did anyone think to check the frickin' sharks in the Great Salt Lake?
"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.
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.
I, for one, welcome our new flying shark overlords
*cringes in terror*
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.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Though not easily portable I have a 15W CO2 laser, which could be rigged up in a pickup bed quite simply. Put a camper shell over it and it'd be quite hard to figure out where the beam came from. Setup time would be roughly 1/2 hour from when the vehicle quits moving. There is no teardown time so you could shoot and run. I was able to pick up nearly everything for under $200 surplus. I've got to figure even larger rigs are easily acquired.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I hearby declare the parent post to be a threat to National Security! You can't just go around posting links to dangerous things on the web! Think of the chaos! Think of the humanity! What about the CHILDREN!
Never confuse volume with power.
Hell, we could invade all the countries who might be trying to obtain them. But let's start with the ones that have oil.
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).
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.
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!
How about some sort of fast-acting photochromic coating instead? So that it's transparent most of the time, but darkens when hit by laser (or any very bright) light.
Simple. Equip every pilot with a pair of Joo-Janta 2000 Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses, that turn totally black at the first indication of danger! Joo-Janta 2000 Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses: Another fine product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation!
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.
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
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
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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Better start with the ones that have oil that we sold lasers to.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
-- There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo... LASER!
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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.
Maybe you can't find the article because it was a RUSSIAN ship that the pilot was observing when he got hit.
Here's a quote from recent article that mentions the incident:
"In one case, Naval Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly and Canadian helicopter pilot Capt. Pat Barnes suffered eye injuries hours after an aerial surveillance mission to photograph a Russian merchant ship that had been shadowing the ballistic-missile submarine USS Ohio in Washington state's Strait of Juan de Fuca."
You don't have any anti-American bias do you?
Insert witty sig here.
I shone my cheapo LASER pointer at my buddies house one night (Trying to find line of site for future WLAN developments). His house is about 300M away, but in amongst other houses, so this was a great way to identify his roof peak and bedroom window. He said that the beam was bigger then his head (although his head is not abnormally large, it isn't exactly small) and looked like someone had a huge spotlight in our kitchen window. Although it looked really bright, he was able to look directly into the beam without pain. Granted there was enough humidity in the air for us to see the beam.
Potential future Darwin Award nominee. Investigating the effects of lasers by looking directly into the beam.
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.
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....
- AlanH
It's not just the laser pointers. All pointers can be harmful to the eye.