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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."
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
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
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
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
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.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
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.
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.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
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).
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.