Laser Strikes On Aircraft Increasing In Frequency (usatoday.com)

puddingebola writes: The FAA is reporting a record number of laser strikes on aircraft for 2015. From the article: "The Federal Aviation Administration recorded 5,352 laser strikes through Oct. 16, up from 2,837 for all of 2010. ... Some airports have reported more than 100 laser strikes this year: Los Angeles had 197; Phoenix had 183; Houston had 151; Las Vegas had 132, and Dallas-Fort Worth had 115. On July 15, during a 90-minute period, 11 airliners and one military aircraft reported laser strikes near New York City-area airports. Those incidents remain under investigation by the FAA, FBI and New Jersey state police."

Comments

Hyperbolic Stories About Laser Illumination Increa

[Anonymous Coward]

Last night NBC nightly news was calling them "laser attacks on aircraft".

The entire thing is overblown hyperbole. It's a bright light. Deal with it.

All the stories of be blinded by laser shine, yet not one single person or pilot blinded by it.

Unless they are closer than 500 feet from the laser (a powerful 50-100mW), serious risk is non-existent.
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=jate

http://www.slms.org/blind.pdf

Re:"Laser Strikes" define?

[joe_frisch]

I've been lasered when flying my plane. The beam is big at these long distances, so ti isn't a tiny beam going into your eye, it lights up the cockpit and looks like a very bright point of light. Since your eye focuses the light to a point, lasers can be dangerous at fairly low power levels.

In a plane even if the beam is not damaging it is very distracting, and distraction is a major cause of aircraft accidents. in my case they kept the beam on the plane for many seconds so it was clearly intentional.

Its pretty common - several pilots I've spoken to have been lasered. This is the second time its happened to me.

Always had a problem with laser pointers

[tie_guy_matt]

Most laser pointers are class IIIb laser devices. The class III means not at all eye safe (though it isn't a burn hazard and you don't have to worry about specular reflection from a target other than a mirror.) The b part means that the manufacturers spread some money around to come up with a class of lasers called, "sure it isn't eye safe but really no one is going to shine it directly in their eyes, will they?" But now they are so cheap that people can buy them as if they were toys. What do you think the chances are that some parent will buy a laser pointer for a child (or maybe someone will just carelessly leave it out) -- then the child (thinking it is a toy anyway) will shine it in his eyes just to see what happens. Heck I would be really surprised if this hasn't happened already.

On a side note I would imagine that if the plane were at a very high altitude then it would not be as easy as you may think to shine a laser pointer on any part of the plane (let alone into the cockpit window.) Then again if the plane is at a high altitude then a beam from a common laser pointer will likely expand enough to no longer be that dangerous. I guess this is only a when the plane is very close to the ground almost immediately after a take-off or right before a landing.

If this really continues to be a problem then maybe the government should step in and only allow laser pointers to operate at certain wavelengths. Then Boeing and Airbus can put coatings on their windows to block those wavelengths (turn the cockpit window into a giant set of laser goggles.) Or maybe people can just stop shining laser points at airplanes. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean it is just a toy.

Re:Always had a problem with laser pointers

[mpoulton]

Most laser pointers are class IIIb laser devices.

IIIa, not IIIb. The CDRH requires that handheld pointing lasers meet the IIIa classification, which means less than 5mW output power among other things. Red laser pointers virtually all comply with this. Green pointers are hit-or-miss, since the cheap DPSS laser inside has highly variable power output depending on unpredictable factors. In my experience measuring the power output of green pointers (and I've measured a lot of 'em), they are generally 3-5mW but sometimes you get a hot one that pushes 5-10mW. They can all be cranked up with tinkering though, sometimes to 100mW or more! It's the tweaked green pointers and black-market IIIb and IV devices that cause some concern. 5mW in the eyeball is extremely unpleasant, but does not cause retinal damage - especially with the poor beam quality (and thus large focal spot size) of handheld lasers. A tweaked-out DPSS pointer running tens of milliwatts can definitely cause instant permanent damage at short range though, and the 500mW to 1.5W blue diodes are quite dangerous (but totally awesome).

Here's the thing, though: None of these lasers are really dangerous at long range. The beam quality is universally terrible, which results in high divergence and therefore large beam diameter at long range. The total amount of light produced by even the most powerful handheld lasers is not very much, and quickly loses its brilliance when spread over a circle a few meters in diameter. At one mile, a 2mrad beam will be approximately 10 feet in diameter. A 1W laser would then have an intensity of 0.138W/m^2, or 0.0138mW/cm^2. That's nothing. The sun is over 100 times brighter than that.

Re:Ground to plane windshield geometry

[Solandri]

I'm curious how someone on the ground is able to aim at the windshield of the cockpit from the ground. It seems like geometry of shining a laser at a plane would be such that if you were reasonably close to a plane, the windshield wouldn't be line of sight to an observer on the ground.

Simple geometry says if the pilot can see the ground, a laser on the ground can reach his eyes. Anyhow, a disturbing fraction of laser strikes are happening as planes are on final approach for landing. Their proximity, slower speed, and predicable path makes them more tempting targets at that stage of the flight. And it's precisely that stage where there's the slimmest margin for recovery should an incident occur.

I doubt a laser alone will bring down an airliner (there are two pilots specifically so one can take over if the other is disabled). But if the pilots are busy dealing with another problem, a laser strike may be the critical factor which pushes the situation over the threshold from a safe emergency landing to a crashed airplane. If you've read any airliner accident reports, it's almost always a combination of multiple factors which cause the plane to crash. if any one of those factors hadn't happened, the plane wouldn't have crashed.