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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"
One Hundred BILLION dollars!
John
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.
[...]offers up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft.
Fear mongering does not need to be rational, this is citizen training so that they hear and see how rewarding it can be to turn in people for cash.
Polarized glass will do nothing. The issue with the laser is that, by time it reaches the plane, it's spread a fair amount. When it hits the glass of the cockpit, which has various minuscule scratches and dirt and whatnot, it gets lit up like a Christmas tree. Polarized glass will suffer the same fate. It's the dirt and imperfections that blind the pilot.
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.
If it were as simple as polarized glass they might actually go that route. Unfortunately for everyone, it is much more complicated than that. You need specific lenses to protect from specific wavelengths (of which there are many).
[...] 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 [...]
With high powered lasers (that are surprisingly easy to come by) a fraction of a second is all it takes to cause serious and often permanent eye injury.
QFT, last year I sat in the cockpit during an evening landing in Egypt (Sharm-el-sheik) and where I had previously dismissed the whole pointing lasers thing, that landing quickly brought me around. Granted, pilots generally land on the instruments anyway, but looking out the windows was certainly not an option anymore because of the effect the laser pointers had on the canopy.
One of the things I had always wondered (and asked the pilots) was 'Who would do such a thing? What do they gain from it?' until we were walking around in the (touristic) city centre at night. Tons of shops that sold massively overpowered laser pointers and more importantly: lots of small kids waving those things around.
Planes get lost, re-routed etc ALL the time.
Think a nightclub with laser advertising, plane flies overhead, or helicopter.
Can they be punished?
Major astronomical telescopes often use lasers for their adaptive optics systems. They coordinate with relevant authorities to insure they don't zap sensitive optics on satellites and post "plane spotters" outside so they can shut down the laser if a plane comes too close to the beam.
Of course, those lasers tend to be considerably more powerful (>5W) than handheld laser pointers (~5mW), so it might not be directly comparable, but I'd hope that any organization that is shooting lasers into the sky would have someone keeping an eye out for aircraft.
Because in Egypt the military was using aircraft and snipers to shoot protesters. So it's common there now to "lase" aircraft to point them out to other people so they know to take cover.
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeat...
http://static2.businessinsider...
http://s3files.core77.com/blog...
http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/...
Notice there are hundreds of lasers on these things... yet there's a a surprising lack of blind pilots or aircraft crashing into crowds.
Yes, it's technically possible this could hard the pilot. But practically? Not very likely. These pilots circled the crowds for hours every night for months with hundreds of lasers trained on them the entire time without incident.
Its a knee jerk overreaction to people being so freagin retarded in this country. If you don't have laws, enforced laws, with teeth, people do whatever to the full extent of what is allowed, with no common sense whatsoever.
Now, everywhere in the world has that issue, but just not to the full extent the US has it (as far as the "first world" goes). I've lived in multiple countries for a number of years, and now I'm in the US, and its just shocking. People smoking while leaning on a no-smoking sign. People screaming on top of their lungs in the street at 3 in the morning. People letting their dog bark for hours while cheering it on. Lines while waiting at a busy bus stop? Hell no! If there's no risk of jail time, not only someone will do it, but a LOT of people will do it.
And people pointing laser pointers at anything and everything.
Its such a ridiculous society that doesn't give a flying duck about their neighbor. EVER. So you end up in a world where everything has to be fucking spelled out with someone in uniform wacking them behind the head all the time like little babies, or they won't apply the slightest bit of common sense.
Ok, wheres your studies to prove this?
You need a study to know that laser pointers are non-polarized and that shining a bright, non-polarized light through a polarizing filter doesn't stop the light from passing through? And even if the filter is 100% efficient, which none of them are, you only cut 1/2 the light that passes, and none of the light that lights up the crazing or other imperfections in the windows.
Remember, we're talking about sending stupid per-pubesent teenagers to prison.
No, we're talking about a $10,000 reward for information about people committing a crime.
I'm not saying they shouldn't get in trouble. I'm saying $10,000 rewards are insanely excessive.
Do you not know the difference between a fine, which is punishment for the criminal, and a reward, which isn't?
Trying to pass laws that make being young and stupid illegal haven't worked very well in the past.
Too late. It is already against the law to point a laser pointer at an aircraft. The law says nothing about "young and stupid people who point laser pointers", it covers old and smart people too. And if you think that pointing a laser pointer at an airplane will make it "fall out of the sky", you're wrong.
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.
ok, and how many people do you know that have been permanently blinded by a laser? Any?
Yes. And your implication that it is ok to temporarily blind someone who relies on "see and avoid" to keep from running into other traffic is just pathetic.
How about this? It took all of five seconds to find using Google.
I can't even find anything on a lab experiment gone wrong or military laser accident. Nothing.
Why yes, of course, every lab accident makes the 11 o'clock news so you can find out about it.
The only thing I can find are articles from pilots complaining, and they have an understandable axe to grind.
Yeah, I supposed it's a surprise that people who are the targets of attempts to blind them, even temporarily, might have "an axe to grind" with those people.
But what's the practical chance of that happening?
It's documented fact. The chance of a documented fact happening is not "damn near 0".
You're worried about people going to prison for trying to blind a pilot of an aircraft carrying upwards of 200 passengers? Here's the simple way to avoid it: DON'T SHINE A LASER POINTER AT AN AIRPLANE. Problem solved.
OT: what the hell is wrong with /. today? It keeps telling me I'm not logged in and it ignores the "ads disabled" flag completely? Five different views of the same discussion in five tries at reading it.
http://www.usnews.com/news/art...
14yrs in prison. Most people in prison for HOMICIDE serve half that.
This is the definition of unfair sentencing .