FAA Goes To the Web To Fight Laser-Pointing

coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to go online to help it battle the growing safety problem of people pointing lasers at flying aircraft. The FAA today said it created a new website to make it easier for pilots and the public to report laser incidents and obtain information on the problem which continues to grow by leaps and bounds. This year, pilots reported 2,795 laser events through Oct. 20. Pilots have reported the most laser events in 2011 in Phoenix (96), Philadelphia (95) and Chicago (83). Since it began tracking laser events in 2005 reports rose from nearly 300 to 2,836 in 2010, the FAA said."

Comments

I'm surprised it's such a problem

[msobkow]

I'd think it'd be pretty hard to accurately aim a laser pointer at a moving aircraft. I'm surprised it's such an issue.

Re:I'm surprised it's such a problem

[bmo]

Those are reports of people /successfully/ getting the aim right.

The number of morons waving their lasers indiscriminately at planes is much higher.

I had one idiot shine his fucking keychain laser at my face at a fucking bar. The "average person" with a laser pointer is a fucking menace.

While I disagree with Australia's ban on "high power lasers" (i.e., lasers strong enough to be seen at distance), I do see their point.

--
BMO

Re:I'm surprised it's such a problem

[Mitchell314]

While I disagree with Australia's ban on "high power lasers" (i.e., lasers strong enough to be seen at distance), I do see their point.

-- BMO

Not for much longer if you keep looking at it. :P

Re:I'm surprised it's such a problem

[DNS-and-BIND]

See youtube for what it's like to be lased from the ground by someone with a powerful laser pointer. You can shaky-hands it all you want, all you need to to is hit the aircraft once or twice and the pilots are blinded.

Re:I'm surprised it's such a problem

[thegarbz]

This is something I would never do because, well, it's dumb and there are better things to do.

There are definitely people in the world who can't find better things to do. Pointing lasers at planes is right up there with a long list of stupidity such as throwing bricks at cars from a highway overpass.

But I wonder how much of this is "there is a serious risk we could crash" and how much is "damn kids, we are pilots, FAA we are quite put out, use your quick-and-dirty-no-legislation-needed administrative law powers".

It would depend on the airport, the type of approach, how much human intervention is required in flying the plane, and the conditions. When a laser hits an aircraft it lights up the entire plane due to imperfections in laser design creating a diverging beam. The issue isn't the possibility to blind the pilot (which is next to none), it's that the cockpit would light up like a set of highbeams pointed at you on the highway making it hard if not impossible to see anything outside the window.

Re:I'm surprised it's such a problem

[J'raxis]

But why should someone be responsible for their own safety when they can just demand the government ban things? It's so much easier!

Re:What kind of problems does it create for pilots

[bmo]

A windshield is not a perfect surface. It's got all sorts of scratches and dirt and whatnot.

The laser hits the windshield and makes every single one of these imperfections light up from scattering. It can make things difficult to see.

--
BMO

Re:First Post

[houstonbofh]

First OWWWW MY EYES!

Clicked on a goatse link, did ya?

This will just make it worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser pointers are tiny handheld devices that can be concealed or brought anywhere, so you'll never be able to track anyone down and stop them. If you're the type to actually get off on shining lasers at airplanes, then it's just going to make your day to see your latest venture reported on the website. I mean, when I see one of those radar equipped speed limit signs that tells you how fast you're going, I always end up seeing how fast I can get before I pass it. This is going to have the same effect on these people.

Re:What kind of problems does it create for pilots

[AlienIntelligence]

I don't doubt that this is a problem, but I'd like to know what the pilots experience is when this happens. Does the laser light cause the entire cockpit to light up? What kind of disturbance does it cause?

Depends on the particular laser, quality, build, color, power, etc.

Also depends on how clean the cockpit glass is at that spot it is hitting.

Laser quality affects the collimation at a great distance, where a
cheaply built Chinese green targeting laser has a pretty appreciable
spread at landing altitude. At a half mile, my green dot is a good
inch or so, diameter.

That coupled with a bug splattered cockpit glass, would produce some
pretty overwhelming speculars in the cockpit, also potentially striking
off of other reflective objects.

Potentially worse would be a very finely collimated laser making its
way into the cockpit and having a specular reflection directly in the
pilot's eyes. A suitable powered green laser would cause at best,
temporary blindness. Total blindness while not common isn't ruled out.
And that laser could get the co-pilot as well, easily. Just leaving the
flight tech to land.

And this is on approach, 5 minutes or so to get squared or splatted.

I live in Phoenix, where the article mentions some of the highest
incidences. And I can believe it. When I first got back into Real Estate
here, I attempted to draw a map of all the "noise zones" associated
with aircraft here. I gave up as soon as I realized there was ZERO
land mass in the Phoenix valley that does not have SOME air traffic
at least hourly during flight traffic hours for the commuter airfields.
7pm at night, I've counted 20+ planes aloft. Gets crowded up there
when we have UFO's too. =) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights

What's worse, west phoenix has all those hot shots in their F-18s,
flying their practice sorties 4 at a time coming out of Luke AFB.
Right... over... head. Sigh. Can't wait to hear the LOUDER F-35,
since we won the bid. Hope they are deployed after I move.

-AI

Sounds like you need a tech solution

[physicsphairy]

When your potential culprit is a six year old child, your weapon of concern is bought for a few bucks at Wal*Mart, and you're dealing with thousands of incidents, I think it's pretty clear that you need a technological solution for filtering laser light, not a massive network of informants.

Re:Sounds like you need a tech solution

[subreality]

The trouble with attenuating lasers is that you still need to see. Green is where we have our best vision by far. Red is fair, and our vision in blue is terrible. That's why the green lasers are always the biggest problem.

Thing is, green is right in the middle of the spectrum. Most filters are high-pass or low-pass. It's quite hard to make a very narrow notch filter that won't take out a huge swath of your most important vision information. That's why there are different laser safety goggles for different wavelengths - if you're using a red laser, you break out the blue goggles.

Pilots can't afford to lose that much vision on final approach.

I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken. I'd add a telephoto camera to the front of the plane that can zoom in and take a few shots whenever the plane gets hit with a laser. Even if you can't make out their faces, you might get some license plates, or see whose back yard it's coming from.

I think there are also nontechnological things they should be doing. First up would be to take some cockpit videos using a camera with a nice wide aperture - real sensitive, like your eyes are in the dark. Show the runway getting closer, closer, then FLASH you're completely overwhelmed by green for a couple seconds, stop the camera down a few to simulate your now-desensitized eyes, and then go back to trying to land the plane, now much closer to the runway and somewhat disoriented. Then publicize the hell out of the videos and some people will get the message.

For the rest, well, that's what the telephoto pictures are for.

Re:Sounds like you need a tech solution

[rmstar]

I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken.

Legal countermeasures are likely to be more effective. The government should regulate the ownership of lasers above a very low energy output. This is the way this works in Europe. In the US, you can freely buy lasers with a full watt of output, which is just ridiculously dangerous for everyone, including whoever owns them.

Given how bad something obvious as firearm regulation works in the US, i don't expect this to happen, though.

Re:Landing

[T-Bucket]

It's not too big a deal for commercial aircraft since computers do the majority of the flying, but it can be dangerous for manually flown small aircraft.

This is complete BS. The only time a computer is flying a commercial aircraft during the landing phase is when the weather is so bad that you wouldn't be able to find the airplane with a laser.

The public has this myth that all planes are controlled by computers. I fly commercial jets for a living. The autopilot rarely goes on below 10,000 feet. The only time it's used during approach/landing is if the weather is bad. (This frees up the pilots for more important things like finding the runway).

I have personally been hit by green lasers three times on approach to major airports. Let me tell you, it's not fun. Fortunately, if you look away rather quickly you can move past the laser before you're in too much danger. (The average jet is doing ~150mph on short final).

Still, it's a legit problem, and anything they can do to put the fucktards who are doing this away is a good thing.

Re:Landing

[FlyingGuy]

Before I go any further, I am a pilot.

I don't care if you are flying a piper cub or a 787 Dreamliner. Final approach and landing is the single most dangerous operation performed by pilots.

You are low and slow and the engines are spooled way down because you are using minimum power, just enough to keep the damn thing flying, but slow enough so that when the wheels hit the pavement you don't blow all the tires and shear off the gear and kill all the people on board. Unless you are shooting a landing into damn near zero / zero conditions ( and only a very few airports are equipped to do that ( no GPS does not do that ) the plane is most assuredly NOT on auto pilot there are people flying those planes. At night it is dark in the cockpit and has been for hours. The pilots pupils are basically wide open, so just imagine how your eyes are going to react when a laser hits that acrylic windshield and every little minor scratch starts sending light in every fucking direction. even if you don;t take a shot into the eyes the windshield becomes damn near opaque and the pour underpaid overworked tired bastard is now a couple of hundred feet from the ground and suddenly can see a god damn thing except for his glowing windshield. Nice scenario eh? I am making 150kts and sinking at 500 feet per minute, or 8 feet per second so at 200 feet i got less then 30 seconds to get everything right or your relatives coming to visit are going to be showing up at your house in a barbeque bag.

Please don't try an minimize this at all. Your post shows you at least have some sense of the problem.

Exposure?

[KingSkippus]

Okay, I followed your link (which wasn't really a link, by the way...), and this confused me:

A typical flash from a hand-held laser at 1000 feet lasts about 1/50 of a second. In the FAA simulator studies, the flash used was one second long. The animation above "splits the difference" by using 1/2 second flashes. We feel this is a realistic portrayal of how long a typical exposure might last.

There is a MASSIVE difference between 1/50 of a second and 1 second! And they're going to "split the difference"!!?

It seems to me like saying, "We're going to simulate eating rice to determine if it could be dangerous. An average serving is around 200 grains, so our simulator uses 3000 grains. Let's split the difference and test 1600 grains. Yup, looks like rice is pretty dangerous!" Well, YEAH, if you're eating eight servings in each sitting!

Not that I'm saying lasers don't pose some danger, mind you. Maybe they do, but this just doesn't seem like a very good-faith demonstration of that. I don't understand why they don't just record some of these actual flashes and show them to the public so that we'll actually see what the problem is. The fact that they don't kind of leads me to think that under just the right, extremely rare and fluky, circumstances it could cause an issue; but really, the danger is probably exaggerated to scare people into not doing it. Such is the problem with these warnings, it's hard to tell where it is in the spectrum (no pun intended) of warnings against stuff like texting and driving (very real and very dangerous) and stuff like using cell phones at gas stations (totally bogus).

Re:Exposure?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because when you get flashed, it takes time for your night vision to recover. The flash might be 1/50th of a second, but the AFTERIMAGE lasts much longer.
Cameras do not have afterimage, so it is necessary to simulate it.

Re:Exposure?

[arth1]

Undoubtably from time to time pilots see people flashing laser pointers at them. They probably find it annoying. But it's not going to blind a pilot and make the plane fall out of the sky.

Agreed. The figures speak for themselves. If it was so dangerous you'd think that at least one of those 2700 incidents would have led to an accident. That you can have that many incidents and no accidents just illustrates how little of a problem it is for safety.

What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.

Re:Exposure?

[unrtst]

Good example and bad interpretation.

1/50 of a second is the length of a single half field in PAL TV. I doubt very highly that you'd notice it though. I have a 3d projector which uses DLP-Link glasses to keep the sync. DLP-Link shows one flash of white to the screen every... I'm not sure exactly how often :-)

Point is though, that flash doesn't register to my eyes.

Using half a second (25 times as long) to demonstrate it, makes it look like they are afraid that if people saw the real 1/50 of a second, they would realize that it's not a big deal.

As another poster mentioned below, this is probably more to do with representing the afterimage that would come from a laser flash. Though, I believe this has less to do with cameras not registering an afterimage, and far more to do with displays not being capable of rendering a realistic spectrum of light... Have you ever looked at the sun? It's often blindingly bright. Far far far more bright than any monitor or projector output on full white output. It's the severe difference in brightness levels that cause the afterimage, and you simply can't reproduce that in a video unless you exaggerate the duration of the flash.

A better demo would be to trigger a camera flash right at your face while watching TV. I still think the claims of risk are exaggerated, but using a longer duration flash in videos makes sense to me.

Re:Exposure?

[AJWM]

Have you ever looked at the sun? It's often blindingly bright.

Indeed it is, although you have to stare at it for a bit to cause permanent damage.

However, if you do the math, you'll find that even a low-powered red laser pointer projects a beam that is as bright as the sun if you look directly at it. Higher-powered lasers, or even same-powered green lasers (the eye being more sensitive to green light than to red) are worse, often much worse.

Even if a laser flash on a pilot doesn't cause eye damage (which it could), it can kill his night vision.

(And, camera flash is a good example -- that lasts milliseconds, but is certainly visible.)

Re:Exposure?

[AJWM]

What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.

Let me guess, you have zero cockpit hours, right? I'm a pilot. If you can't see the ground, your seat isn't adjusted right, or you're in a steep climb (assuming no clouds). Sure, you can't see straight down (well, unless you're flying one of the Aeroflot planes that actually has windows down at foot level), but you can see the ground a couple of miles away (depending on your altitude and attitude), less if you're on descent for landing.

And do you really think the problem should be ignored until it does cause a crash? How about if somebody stands on an overpass and shines a laser at you while you're driving?

Re:Just out of curiosity.

[nhtshot]

Here's a better idea:

I'll promise that the airport was there BEFORE some developer bought the farmland and built your subdivision full of McMansions on it. He got a spanking deal on the land because it's near an airport and you didn't do your homework.

How about, instead of chastising the airport and pilots for your mistakes, DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.

To answer your direct question, yes, there is a rule. However, it does not apply during approach and landing, which is what you are talking about.

I apologize in advance for the tone of this message, but I used to fly out of an airport in exactly this situation. There were hundreds of home owners constantly complaining/picketing/etc. I have 0 sympathy for them. They knew the airport was there when they bought the house. You are in the same boat.

This is stupid.

[Tanuki64]

Website? Laws? Punishments? Forget it. There can only be a technical solution. Find some way to make planes impervious to this kind of attack.

I personally would not have a problem with it, that when someone is pointing a laser pointer at a plane and is caught, she is skinned alive. But since 'idiot' and 'asshole' is among the most common human traits, this would hardly cause a ripple in the gene pool and would do nothing to improve the safety of planes.

Another possible solution would be to forbid laser pointers. Good luck with that.

Re:Landing

[michelcolman]

Don't pretend to know anything about airline flying, because you obviously don't. It's quite the opposite, actually: we (yes, I'm an airline pilot) only use autoland in very bad visibility conditions, or when required to keep our currency. You actually need to make a few autolands per year to stay current, but these can normally be performed in the simulator nowadays so it's not an issue anymore.

Almost all landings are manual. The last autoland I did (apart from the simulator) must have been about a year ago. Most of the time, we do use the ILS (which is just a guidance towards the runway, it's what people call "the instruments") but we do it manually while looking out the window as well. And we quite often make completely visual approaches too, although that's being allowed less and less due to noise abatement regulations (they prefer all planes to fly the same, well defined trajectory and only annoy the same people all the time).

Some companies ban visual approaches completely (except under special circumstances), but I don't know of any companies that use autoland all the time. It would be a bad idea anyway: in very windy conditions, the autoland cannot cope and its use is prohibited. Or sometimes there's a technical malfunction. In those cases, the plane can only be landed by a pilot. Would you then prefer a pilot who lands the aircraft every day, or one that only lands the plane a few times a year to keep his currency?

There's also this widespread misunderstanding that autoland makes things easier for the pilots. Believe me, it's actually more work than a normal landing with all the checklists and verifications we have to do, and the constant monitoring of a system that lacks common sense and might suddenly do weird things due to some system bug. Yes, that does happen occasionally.

Re:Just out of curiosity.

[digitig]

Aagh -- replied to wrong post. Next time I'll get somebody who has a clue to do my posting.

Re:Landing

[michelcolman]

Don't be ridiculous. Systems often break down (lots of different equipment failures can disable autoland), and you can't even use it in very windy conditions. In those cases, would you prefer to have a pilot who lands the plane every day, or one that almost never does? And even with autoland, we're always relieved to actually be able to see the runway. It's the single most important backup to a system that just relies on some electrical signals from the ground.