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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."
No joke, once they green the lasers it's all over.
This is why we can't have nice things. Someone always has to be irresponsible.
The pilots must be able to see the ground for landing and must be able to look down for traffic avoidance--if they can see the ground, someone on the ground can blast them in the eye with a laser. You are right though--someone directly below would have a hard time shining the laser into most cockpits and must be some horizontal distance away.
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.
I doubt the problem is really pranksters.
There has been a campaign for decades to close or at least move Sydney airport. It sits in an inner-city suburb that predates the airport.
Every election sees both federal and state governments promising to do something about it.
Spend some time in a suburb like Rockdale and you'll have to get used to large aircraft passing at chimney height all day and most of the night. At other airports with similar problems aircraft have been found with bullet holes in them. So I think the laser crew are being most restrained.
I can only speak to the approach into LAX, because that is the only major international airport that I have seen on a regular basis (unless you count PDX, but that is more regional). There are plenty of 4-5 story parking garages along the 405 as the planes are nearly down on final approach. A person could probably get another 5 feet of elevation for standing on top of a vehicle, maybe 6-7 feet if you find a big lifted monster truck or cargo van. All in total that is about 55 feet of elevation.
The flight paths on those planes is completely predictable. It would be fairly easy to get into the cockpit of some of those planes. A person would probably need a aim a few miles out. Once they were near the garage, the angle would be too extreme given the height of the cockpit.
How much energy would be needed to create a distracting level of laser light into the cockpit of a jumbo jet that is 5-10 miles away?
Actually the penalty for that is less than a beating.
It is charged as interfering with a flight crew and does not carry much of a penalty.
Catching the culprits is difficult, unless someone happens to see who did it, its just not likely to happen. By the time you mobilize resources they just put it in their pocket and walk away.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
...by a laser while piloting a helicopter and it's scary as hell. I don't have a solution but I sure wish I did. There are some sick puppies out there that this continues to go on. These people should be arrested and prosecuted but I recognize that it's difficult to impossible to catch these idiots.
You don't go near airports to watch the stars.
Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that.
Near my international airport (KSEA for those interested) is a public park on the north end of the airport, from there it is a ridiculously easy shoot into the cockpit with a laser at around 3 miles when aircraft are landing to the north (runways 34). At that range most green lasers beams are actually fairly wide, but still plenty bright, especially to eyes that have spent the last 6 hours acclimated to almost total darkness (pilots routinely turn the lights down at night) Since you bring up geometry, I submit to you that the angle from ground to cockpit at that distance is probably in the 10 degree range. And consider that these aircraft are landing from the south, facing north. The pilot is required to maintain contact with the runway lighting system at all times, including the lights leading up to the runway. If they can see lights 1/2 mile ahead of them, I think they can see the lights 3 miles ahead of them. If you'd like i'll get out my FAR/AIM (FAA rule bible) and quote you the regs.
Now, lets talk the pussies argument. Would you want YOUR pilot to be even 1/4 blinded when operating at 175mph and 300 feet off the ground? Safety says you go around and let your eyes reacclimate. It's not that they could NEVER land the plane, but that given the other stressors already in place, why would you risk it? Remember we are in the plane with you, and we have just as much interest in going home to our families as you do.
My credentials: Commerial rated, Multi-engine and Single-engine, with an unrestricted IFR rating.
Posting AC due to lack of account, long time reader.
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.
I believe that should be "I've had it... with these motherfucking lasers on this motherfucking plane!"
Depends on the optics and the weather, I would suspect.
On a clear day, with excellent optics, probably surprisingly little(In Lunar laser rangefinding experiments, the laser spreads from being a near-point-source to a mere 4 mile diameter spot across ~240,000 miles). Your not-at-all-pricey 250-500mW DPSS greens would probably do just fine, if you could keep them stable and on target.
If your optics are shit, or there is fog/dust/substantial thermal shimmer, requirements would go up markedly...
A properly unloaded firearm in a locked case is permitted in an airport. The baggage is checked separately and tagged so that TSA knows it is there. Yes, this includes a handgun. It may seem counter-intuitive to those have never been in uninhabited areas, but a large caliber handgun is useful in case you are caught by surprise by wolves, boar, or bear. My cousin used to go on Salmon fishing trips in Alaska, and he always carried a .44 with him just in case he had to take down a bear. As far as I know, he never had to use it outside of the gun range, but better safe than sorry.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
In Australia we ban just about anything at the drop of the hat. As such, their first reaction was to ban all laser pointers which could be used for this. It's now illegal to have them, similarly illegal as firearms, mase, battons, knives, etc.
So that was their first line of dealing with it. Make it illegal to have them, then you just need to find it in their house/car/clothes, and you can arrest them for possession.
This is just explaining how they make it easy to catch and prosecute these people. I don't agree with this, as this logic gets extrapolated quite easily. Eg, Want to get rid of bikies? Just ban motorcycle enthusiast groups. Want to stop people reading some book, playing some game, or watching some movie? Just make ratings required, and refuse to classify anything you don't like.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I own a 100mw green laser pointer -- the rare times I end up showing it to people, all of them aim it out into the distance to hit some target -- usually a tree or phone pole. I quickly noticed about 1/4th of them would aim it at a helicopter or airplane. It's not malice -- it's stupidity. Now after telling people the dangers of pointing it at living things or reflective objects, I have to tell them not to point it at flying shit too.
The chances of someone having a steady enough hand to hit a plane are slim. Being able to keep it on the plane for any significant amount of time to blind someone is even slimmer. The beam is around 4-8mm wide at 3 miles distance on an expensive laser pointer. I don't know if it would have enough power at that distance to blind or even annoy. But hey -- there is plenty of shit on the ground to point at, so I don't really care to test it.
No it is really pretty easy. Just tape the laser pointer to a pair of binoculars. With a little bit of playing around with the aiming, you will be able to look into the binoculars and see the laser hitting objects way far away very easily. Holding the binoculars while placing your arms on a table will give you very good stability. Works really great!
Banning things has never worked and never will.
Not true. It depends on what you're trying to ban: how common is it, how easy is it to get a hold of, how easy is it to make your own, how easy is it to detect, etc.?
For instance, banning marijuana has never been very successful, because 1) it's super easy to make your own, you just need seeds (it is, after all, a weed: weeds by definition grow easily), and 2) it's easy for other people to set up large-scale operations to make it and smuggle it.
Guns are in the middle: on this continent (Americas), guns are everywhere, so banning them in certain places doesn't work because people just get them in another place and take them where they're not supposed to. It probably works a lot better in the UK because they're an island, so once they've gotten the handguns away from the citizens, it's not that hard to control the import and export of them. Plus, they don't seem to have any domestic manufacturers of handguns, unlike both the USA and also many European countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic). Also, because so many guns are in the hands of civilians here, banning them wouldn't work because they're already out there (people aren't going to just turn them in when asked). Finally, guns are fundamentally rather simple mechanical devices; it's not that hard for someone with a machine shop to make their own.
Now for an example of something where a ban works, look at nuclear weapons. By their very nature, these things are really hard to make, and require huge amounts of money, plus access to uranium, and advanced technology to refine it into weapons-grade material. Look how much trouble the governments of Iran and North Korea are having in making their own nuclear bombs.
Of course, that's a little extreme, but how about other bombs? Those are illegal for citizens in most countries, but there's not a lot of trouble enforcing that ban, because again the materials are hard to find, or it's not that easy to make them, plus ready-made bombs aren't floating around in large quantities and easily smuggled (unlike recreational drugs for instance). Sure, you could make one with commonly-available household chemicals (bleach, etc.), but in my reading on that stuff, those kinds of bombs are very unstable, and most likely to injure or kill the bombmaker. They aren't stable explosives you can carry around and plant on a target and reliably detonate. There is one stable explosive you can buy legally in most states, called "tannerite", but the only way to ignite this stuff is to shoot it with a supersonic bullet (usually meaning a rifle), so that's not exactly practical if you're trying to set a bomb somewhere to do some mayhem. The materials for making stable, reliable, high explosives just aren't easy to get or make, so that's why we don't have people running around with grenades and rockets and such.
Now, when stuff is all around you, it's really impossible to enforce a ban. For instance, some people are banned from driving a car, because they've had their license suspended or revoked. How does that work out? Not well: they just hop in the car and drive anyway (since the state usually doesn't confiscate their car; even if they do, they take their family member's car).
With handheld lasers, enforcing a ban wouldn't be that hard, though it certainly wouldn't be 100%. First, they have to decide if they're banning only the super-powerful ones, or any laser pointer at all (including the small ones integrated with presentation remotes, or used as cat toys, etc.). Banning the latter would be pretty much impossible, because small low-power lasers are everywhere these days, and lots of people have small laser pointers. But the powerful ones aren't so common, nor so inexpensive. You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode. So if they banned the importation of the pointers, and also of the components needed to make them, that would make it pretty hard to get them in, dependi
You happen to live in Sydney?
--- Illogical Spock
Indeed not. There has to be some visibility of the runway: for Cat IIIB, they have to be able to see the runway 150 feet away and 50 feet above. See here for more details.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Father had a .44 for bear - didn't work out that well. Very difficult to aim when standing alongside brush and other obstacles. Turns out that a standard 12 guage is far more effective. They are more difficult to carry then a handgun but easier to use and still much lighter then a rifle. There are pros and cons like with any other decision. Anyone wanting protection from bear/wolf/boar should at least consider the shotgun. They are easier to use which makes them better suited to those not familiar with guns.
On a side note - wolves really do not threaten humans. There are very few cases of wolf attacks - but it does happen (unlike what some others like to claim.) They pose a much bigger threat to animals/livestock that you might have with you when in the back country. They routinely follow dog sleds hoping that a dog will stray back from the sled - which they would instantly kill. Happens all the time to my father + his sledding buddies - but they don't bother carrying guns for wolf protection. If a wolf is going to get your dog then you can bet that they will do it without giving you the opportunity to shoot. You generally do not even see them (unless on a lake) - you just hear them howling all around you. The bigger danger is from moose - I know several people who have lost multiple dogs to moose attack. And I know one guy who killed a moose who got into his dogs with a snow hook (used to "hook" the sled to the snow - basically a ~3lb piece of metal.) Because the dogs are all tethered together, they don't stand a chance against a moose.
You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode.
If you just want a laser to cause mayhem with then afaict the ones out of DVD burners are far nastier than even the powerfull end of laser pointers.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You want to just drive yourself over or do we have to come pick you up?
-FBI
You don't go near airports to watch the stars.
Yes you do:
http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/arts/photos/2009/08/17/beatles-cp-250-7152353.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Airline rules vary, but typically the gun has to be in a case 'designed for holding firearms' and it must be locked.
Get that? It must be locked. NORMAL checked luggage not only doesn't have to be locked, it's not allowed to be locked (so TSA can rifle through it as they please and steal your shit).
So if you want to be able to lock your checked baggage, just fly with a gun. Not only will you be able to lock your gun case, you will be REQUIRED to do so, and anything else you can fit in that gun case can be locked too. I used to know a guy who claimed to always fly with a starter pistol (legal in many jurisdictions) just so he could check a lockable case.
IANAL YMMV
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 don't buy that one experience, if true, gives you superior qualifications or knowledge. I've spent much of my life in downtowns of major cities with much higher crime rates than Phoenix, but that doesn't make me an expert. I do know that criminals almost always want easy money, not conflict -- they want your money, not you. Pointing a gun at a criminal greatly increases your chance of getting shot; the mentally unstable (either natural or drug-assisted) may freak out and shoot. A tip for the inexperienced: If they want your money, give it to them; it's just money, it's not worth your life or health.
Your experience coincidentally fits the same old rhetoric from right wing fringe:
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.
These assertions are bizarre. Europe is small, homogenous countries? With no poverty problems? Really? In fact, their race problems are worse than the U.S. right now and have the same cause, lots of bigots who react like animals to anything different than them and inflict suffering on innocent people. It's not race that causes conflict, it's the racists. Aren't centuries of slavery; another of segregation, oppression, and lynchings; and continuing discrimination enough to demonstrate that? And that's just the blacks; don't forget the Catholics (yes, there used to be riots against Catholics!), Native Americans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and currently Latinos, gays, and Muslims, etc etc. The bigots simply hate everyone not like them -- and then blame the victims for the problems!
Finally, even here, criminals don't always have guns, because they're not THAT easy to get (thanks to background check laws).
Maybe in Phoenix, though that's not what I understand. Elsewhere, many studies report that it's very easy for anyone to obtain a gun in major cities. Many city governments periodically have gun buy-back programs, where the government buys guns, no questions asked, just to get a few off the streets. Many reports attribute the large numbers of homicides in cities to the easy availability of guns; dumb disputes end in death rather than a black eye because a gun is at hand. Gun rights advocates fight any hint of an attempt to regulate guns, obsessing over one legalistic issue, the Second Amendment of the Constitution (which is vague about personal ownership of firearms), at the expense of many others, including the lives of people dying each year from gun violence. The U.S. has one of the highest murder rates among rich countries, and most of it is poor people killing other poor people of the same race (they live in the same neighborhood).
Both the racist and some (not all) of the gun rights arguments are rationalizations for people to follow their most base instincts, hatred and violence, without responsibility toward the people and society around them. They aren't serious ideas but more a demonstration of political aggression, to threaten anyone how disagrees. And they have a history of backing up those threats with violence.
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.
Strawman argument. The issue is not permanent blindness, but disorientation, temporary blindness, or injury. There are multiple reports of pilots being injured by lasers:
Burned retina: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/sep/28/20040928-111356-3924r/
Ruptured blood vessels: http://www.marconews.com/news/2011/jan/03/collier-sheriff-helicopter-pilots-injured-laser/?partner=yahoo_feeds
Unspecified possible injury: http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/11/25/319357/pilot-injured-in-american-md-82-laser-incident.html
You might not be impressed because there's no blood, but an eye injury can be a career-ender for a pilot. Disorientation is the most common result of lasing incidents, with some cases of temporary blindness. Reduced vision, even temporarily, is a Big Deal when flying.