Slashdot Mirror
Laser Incidents With Aircraft On the Rise
EqualSlash writes "High-power laser pointers available for cheap are increasingly finding abuse as the ultimate long-distance weapons of pranksters and vandals. The Federal Aviation Administration says laser events aimed on planes have nearly doubled in the last year, leaping from 1,527 in 2009 to 2,836 in 2010. The highest number of incidents was reported at Los Angeles International Airport, which recorded 102 in 2010. Lasers pointed at cockpits can temporarily blind pilots, forcing them to give up control of an aircraft to their co-pilot or abort a take-off/landing. In March of 2008, unidentified individuals wielding four green laser pointers launched a coordinated attack on six incoming planes at Sydney Airport, which resulted in a ban on all laser pointers in the state of New South Wales."
How do you manage getting a beam of light inside a cockpit that opens facing upward? Aside from banking sharply it doesn't make any sense.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
They'll probably green lasers in the US before they'll ban semi-automatic handguns.
and just beat the shit out of them for being well on their way towards having those fun laser pointers banned completely?
Green lasers are often used for stargazing, since you can use the visible beam to point out specific stars. I wonder how many of these incidents are accidental hits either by idiots^W people who don't know the difference between a plane and a shooting star or who are honestly pointing out constellations while a plane just happens to fly through? Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity and all that.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Lasers pointed at cockpits can temporarily blind pilots
Please cite examples of pilots who have temporarily been "blinded" by a laser.
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
But America has given up on things like trigonometry, math and science, in favor of bullshit like this. The current situation is 1) Pilot and copilot see red dot jump momentarily around the cockpit and decide to report the incident, 2) Pilot and copilot agree to overstate the harm done to them in an effort to persuade authorities that this is a "serious problem" 3) The media gets hold of the story and distorts it further, screaming for the death penalty for anyone who owns a laser pointer and lives within 10 miles of an airport. But no one is willing to do the math.
Yeah it's irresponsible to point lasers at airplanes. Call me if ever there's a serious incident that puts an aircraft in danger.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You must be new here. You can cuss as much as you want here:
"I've had it... with these fucking lasers on this fucking plane!"
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
This is an example of the "fallacy of the transposed conditional" and how people use it to justify legislation that does nothing to address the problem.
See if you can assign a likelihood (high or low) to the following:
Probability that someone has a laser, given that they shined one at an airplane,
Probability that someone shines one at an airplane, given that they have a laser.
The likelihood that anyone having a laser will use it against an airplane is so astronomically small that legislation will have no appreciable effect, but will inconvenience many people.
The logic is precisely backwards, but it sounds like a justification.
Someone should introduce the legislators down under to Bayes Theorem.
IAAP and we've had the cockpit lasered before. While it's certainly unlikely that the laser beam will hit your pupils directly, the pressing issue is, you can very quickly lose your night vision when the beam is refracted/scattered by the windshield. On short final (when these idiots are lasering the cockpits) a loss of night vision (likely) or partial blindness (less likely) will jeopardize the safety of everyone aboard during the approach.
No, they don't.
There has not been a single case of a pilot blinded by lasers, nor is it likely there ever will be.
Not only do pilots look at the (rather tall) instrument board most at the time, and don't stare at scenery, but it's also impossible to keep the laser pointer pointed at a moving target at any distance. If anyone were able to do so, don't fine them -- hire them as gunners for the military, because that kind of precision is supernatural.
And at the distance a plane is away, combined with the rather thick windows of a plane, even if a superhuman was able to hit the eye of a pilot for a fraction of a second, it would have far less of an impact than a quick glance at the sun, something people frequently do.
Plain and simple, this is FUD, and another attempt at at the same time scaring people and showing that the powers do something about it.
... however considering that these beams are usually powered by 5/1000ths of a watt or so, it's not a lot of energy to start with (the sun puts out around 24 times much energy per square centimeter). It's far less than 5 mW if you're not getting the whole "beam".
Your argument is like saying that a 600,000 volt stun gun is only powered by one 9 volt battery.
It's true, but irrelevant when you're lying on the ground twitching.
I suspect that the impact on night vision is not much greater than looking at the instruments (which also emit light in a dark cockpit, and have to be checked quite often as you know).
And now you're just making stuff up, but if you're confident in your assesment,
I'd encourage you to test the effects of a green laser to the eyes from 3 miles away.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sorry, but I've already had to fend off one attempted home invasion (in Phoenix) with my shotgun, so unless you have first-hand experience with violent criminals, I think your opinion is worthless.
I didn't create a violent, dangerous society. That would be the criminal class who did, plus stupid laws and courts who let violent criminals out early, while keeping non-violent drug offenders in. Don't look at me, I didn't vote for the people who did that; if I had my way, drugs would all be decriminalized.
The "rest of you" don't have the same situation we do. If you're in Europe, you live in small, homogeneous countries, so you don't have all the race and poverty problems we do. It's a lot easier to get along when you don't have giant groups of people mired in poverty for whatever reason.
Finally, even here, criminals don't always have guns, because they're not THAT easy to get (thanks to background check laws). So to commit a "gun crime", a criminal has to steal a gun first, and then commit a crime with it. But most criminals don't need guns for their crimes; they use other weapons: bats, knives, or good old-fashioned fists. They spend lots of time in prison pumping iron, so they're ready to use their physical size when they get out.
How exactly do you propose a 90-pound woman to defend herself against a 250 pound man? That's what guns are for, to level the field for physically disadvantaged people.