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$10k Reward For Info On Anyone Who Points a Laser At Planes Goes Nationwide
coondoggie writes: "The FBI today said it was making national a pilot program it tried out in 12 locations earlier this year that offers up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft. According to the FBI, the pilot locations have seen a 19% decrease in the number of reported laser-to-aircraft incidents. Those locations included: Albuquerque, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia."
1) Aim laser pointer at my own plane, parked in a hangar. 2) Turn myself in for "intentionally aiming a laser at an aircraft" 3) Profit!
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
I see Michael Cooney at Network World (coondoggie) is submitting his own blog posts again.
Planes get lost, re-routed etc ALL the time. Think a nightclub with laser advertising, plane flies overhead, or helicopter. Can they be punished?
"The FBI today said it was making national a pilot program it tried out in 12 locations earlier this year that offers up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft.
One Hundred BILLION dollars!
John
You'd think they'd have just put polarized glass in the cockpit by now if it were that big of a deal. Oh wait... that's right, it's not that big of a deal.
Why do we continue to allow things like this to get blown so far out of proportion that we end up sending 16yr olds to prison for something that never really had a chance to do harm to anyone in the first place? A landing aircraft is moving faster than freeway traffic at it's slowest. Without computer control and actuators there is no way a person could, by hand, hold a laser on a cockpit window for more than a tenth of a second. If a pilot is unable to land a plane after a flash of light that brief, we'd better start making lightening illegal because it's a hell of a lot brighter, and more common than a laser strike.
2) Offer to pay him $8K for pointing a laser pointer at a plane and going to jail.
3) Profit!
You could probably find a more erratic person willing to take less than $8K of the 10K, but I would imagine you'd want to deal with a fairly rational person who doesn't feel resentment towards you (i.e. for getting ripped off). The goal of this plan is to rip off the government and the tax payer, not the fall guy.
What the government should do, is offer $20K for turning in the orchestrator of a laser pointer arrest reward scheme.
I can't imagine it would have any real affect or we'd read about planes falling out of the sky left and right all over the world.
right? Right?
US army got plenty of those.
I used to believe in police rewards...until I tried to claim one.
Pigs lie.
its not just about fixed wing aircraft. this is a huge deal for helicopters.. including the ones used by the police force. It doesnt cause them to fall out of the sky but it can ruin a pilots career.
2 years without Chrisq's racist rants, sounds like heaven.
Why do the decision makers in this country have an insatiable urge to ruin everything for everyone by making needles, useless, delusion, meaningless legislation that makes our culture, our lives, our freedoms the governments issue, make normal every day illegal? It is so ludicrous, like one person stated, why do we have such a strange system in which 16 year olds, young, respectable people with futures going to jail for YEARS for stupid frivolous crap, this overly litigated country we live in now is becoming a nightmare, I read recently over FORTY-THOUSAND laws were passed last year alone, do you know what any of them are? I don't.
What the world is coming to now a days, lasers and aircraft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I live in the Chicago area and have never heard about this pilot program for rewards. How could an un-announced program have any effect at all?
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
2 years without Chrisq's racist rants, sounds like heaven.
Its lucky that you weren't around during WWII. You would have been insisting that complaining about Hitler and the Nazis was racist and "anti German"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Any "amateur astronomer" who tries to do their laser-assisted star tour somewhere as light-polluted as the surroundings of a typical airport needs clue.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I was developing Ronja OSHW FSO and contemplating using a laser pointer.
I called an authority asking if hitting a pilot's eye would be a problem.
They said absolutely no problem. The pointer has a small aperture causing divergence by diffraction. So after a few kms, the light spot would be diluted.
They said the biggest reason is the pilots have to be used to random intense lights on the horizon. City's windows cause pretty intense sunlight reflections.
Of course different thing is if you use high powered laser pointers as some sold on the internet or other kind of laser with precision optic of large apeture.
Other factors (they didn't mention): atmospheric jitter, speed of airplane. Pilots eye at 200 km/h spends 1.8 msec in a 10 cm beam.
I think this is scare mongering unless they go after higer powered lasers which I think should be illegal in public for eye safety reason anyway.
My latest OSHW project
Yep. Precisely how many planes has any laser brought down so far? Have lasers become a standard military weapon yet? If so I'd expect to see Al Caida and the Taliban routinely using laser pointers to crash US aircraft. But oddly enough, we don't...
Let's get real. Is a laser pointer a mile away going to disable both of a pilots eyes? AND both of a copilot's eyes? And how long were you blinded when a supermarket checkout scanner laser last caught your eye? Did you crash your shopping cart? Did you call in the FBI?
This mountain is such a molehill. It makes me wonder why the FBI is overselling this schtick so hard. It's easier than working for a living, I guess.
I'm an airline pilot who has been lased three times, and I'm probably one of the only pilots in the country to have also earned a degree as a laser technician. With these credentials I was chosen to represent my airline at the ALPA Laser Illumination Conference in 2011. http://laserconference.alpa.or... The threat is real. It's easy to dismiss it as a "what are the odds" type of event, but the truth is that it happens far too frequently. People can buy these 1+ watt diode lasers very easily online and do with them what they will, and they frequently choose to point them at airplanes. What does it look like in the cockpit? Pretty much like an intense green strobe effect. And the worst thing is that once the light is seen the first time it's human instinct to look out the window to try and find the cause of the flash. Then the second blast hits as the pilot is looking directly at it. Depending on altitude and beam divergence, there's a real possibility of permanent eye damage. The lower to the ground, the more likely the damage. At night a pilot's vision is kept adapted to the ambient light in the cockpit, so their pupils are dilated to allow more light in. This also increases likelihood of damage. Flash blindness can last for many minutes, and it's a very bad thing to have your pilots flash blinded. It is a real issue, and having personally experienced it, I can say it's a problem.
You didn't hear it ,therefore it didn't happen?
I guess no trees make noise when you aren't around.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
NT
Damn, everyone and his brother should accuse their worse enemy. $10,000 is $10,000. Oh wait, no one is actually going to prosecuted and this is all just a mind fuck? Say it isn't so.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
"One Hundred BILLION dollars!"
It just occurred to me that when the movie came out a hundred billion was a lot of dollars.
How quaint.
Yep, and lasers shoot themselves at airplanes.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Just remove the windows from all planes, and install body scanners everywhere within a hundred miles of any route.
Get a family dollar pointer, point a plane, toss pointer by enemy neighbor porch/car door.
Call report strange laser
Profit...
Government is going after "snitches" Supreme Court just stood behind forcing Time's reporter to turn over his anonymous source over a CIA operation he wrote about. They want to arrest Assange/Snowden, they got Manning, making government employees scared to snitch on illegal government activity. Yet the government wants citizens to snitch on each other!?
Fuck off, I ain't reporting shit, you can't have different rules, you want people to leak on neighbors then stop killing/attacking/threatening government whistleblowers.
Driving uses about the same amount of fuel, creates about the same amount of pollution, and is far more dangerous than flying.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One can report someone for shining a laser pointer, they are arrested but not convicted -as they didn't shine it at a plane, in fact at the time no planes were in the air.
Profit (just a bit of your time)
Otherwise, it's the chair.
My airspace, MINE!
I read a book of that nature. I can't remember it's name, but the jets were flying over his house due to a new airport, so he floated Barrage balloon above his place.
It was a fairly decent book but he'd most likely be shoot in this age. - They downed the balloon with the after burners of a jet.
-A barrage balloon, sometimes called a "blimp," is a large balloon tethered with metal cables, used to defend against aircraft attack by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables, or at least making the attacker's approach more difficult.
My airspace, MINE!
-A barrage balloon, sometimes called a "blimp," is a large balloon tethered with metal cables, used to defend against aircraft attack by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables, or at least making the attacker's approach more difficult.
Found this gem reading further: " They proved to be mildly effective against the V-1 flying bomb, which usually flew at 2,000 feet (600 m) or lower but had wire-cutters on its wings to counter balloons. 231 V-1s are officially claimed to have been destroyed by balloons." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Something I didn't realize is how many freaking V-1's were set off.
It's just a source of structural weakness in the airframe anyway. Just get rid of the windows and replace with cameras.
then they're fucked.
seriously, what a terrible idea.
Al cicada?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada
Arresting the nitwits who shine lasers in people's faces is a mitigation measure.
The shark fires back.
Have gnu, will travel.
Planes don't fall out of the sky when hit by lasers any more than cards spontaneously burst into flakes when a driver looks at their phone. The question is of risk. Do you want a pilot to be unable to see a runway during the most critical maneuver of the entire flight? It's not at all dissimilar to not wanting some idiot behind me on the road to be smsing his bro while I'm performing an emergency break in front of him. It's a risk to other's life. Don't do it. Note I say others, not your life. Your life is yours to end whenever you want.
Absolutely they can and it's not unusual. I'd you operate a laser more powerful than a handheld pointer, you ccarb easily get busted for pointing skyward whether aircraft fly by or not. Any decent DJ or light jockey knows not to point lighting upward outdoors.
You may have noticed in the last few years club lasers have almost universally switched to scatter effects, where there are two hundred weak beams rather than one strong beam. That's largely because a strong beam can get you in trouble in several ways. Heck, just having an overpower laser at a show without a permit is a big fine - even if it is pointed at the ceiling.
Ps - the local FAA field office can approve unterminated (or terminated) laser effects outdoors, so it IS possible to do it safely and legally. The FAA might just tell the operator to point the laser this direction, not that direction (such as not toward the approach corridor for a local airport).
Lol. Try filtering red, blue, and green while making a post. You'll notice that you can't, because you couldn't see anythind. Red is at one end of the spectrum, so you can filter it and everything just looks a little blue, because you've filtered out the low end of the spectrum. You can filter out blue by filtering the high end of the spectrum. You can filter green by filtering the middle of the spectrum.
If you block the low end (red), the middle (green) and the high end (blue), you've just blocked ALL light.
(1) Establish how many personalities can be distinguished within the defendant's mind.
(2) Try to identify the personality who was in charge at the time, and do him/her for pointing the laser.
(3) Prosecute all the other personalities for being accessory and/or accomplice to the act of pointing the laser.
(4) Depending on how tightly the personalities are linked, you may optionally prosecute each of them for conspiracy to commit a crime, or even taking part in a criminal organisation.
(5) Add all sentences together. This is how long the body pointing the laser should go behind bars.
I suspect that the defense of "multiple personalities" will lose its popularity very quickly.
Thank you! I didn't know this. :-) Much appreciated.
Give the pilots an Oculus Rift headset with images fed from cameras mounted on the headset. Make sure you don't get a high-end headset "now capable of accurate reproduction of laser beams". While you can still blind the cameras with a laser you cannot burn out the pilot's retinas.
(I do hate myself a little for plugging a Facebook product.)
sigs are hazardous to your health
No, it is actually a few more.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe because people already understand the danger of kids playing with guns?
Phone fail. "cars spontaneously burst into flames"