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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."
I mean, if they keep increasing in frequency, eventually someone'll just fire a UV laser and nobody'll be able to see it. The next guy brings an X-Ray laser and it's a self-limiting problem, at least for everyone within a few thousand feet of ground zero.
>> are people doing this out of a really bad intention or are just not intelligent enough to understand the risks and the sentences they are facing
Both. These are the same people who like tossing bricks onto cars from the overpass.
At first I think it was just general stupidity and playing around.
Watching a Laser is interesting, because it isn't something we naturally see, so there is almost a magical quality to it. So shining it at an airplane just to see if it would light up or scatter hitting a propeller seems interesting to try.
However now... I expect it is because it makes the news, so they get a odd sense of satisfaction that news happen because of their action.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I live about 5 miles from a commercial airport and planes fly over all the time.
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.
Maybe if you were fairly close, at a higher elevation and the plane was taking off pretty much in your direction.
I can see how helicopters or other aircraft with more of a completely transparent nose would be vulnerable to ground observers shining lasers, but jetliners look to me like they have the cockpit windshield on the top half of the nose hemisphere.
What am I missing here?
Maybe this video will help you, some schmuck lighting up a news chopper, caught on film. It doesn't take much, particularly at night. In the video, when the laser hits just right, the entire canopy lights up green. Even through the video camera, the light shows as very, very bright, bright enough to burn the eyelid and cornea leading to blindness (which is not cool when you need to be piloting an aircraft).
It should be common knowledge by now that this is stupid stupid shit. It's only sheer luck that this idiocy hasn't incapacitated a pilot to the point that the aircraft went down.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Anything that distracts the pilots during landing is a problem, it doesn't matter if it's resulted in any crashes yet or not.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I've got a green laser. It's cool to shine it outside at night, because it creates a very visible beam.
It's also very tempting to shine it at things, to see how far away I can see a reflection. Aircraft a certainly a tempting target, being both moving and fairly far away.
I haven't and won't, because I understand the potential risk, but I do understand the temptation. And there are a lot of stupid people out there.
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.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
One thing I never see published is the details about the flights. Certainly if the pilot is near an airport, especially during landing and takeoff, then obviously the perps are engaging in malicious behavior.
However, my math says that the major airports reported in the article received 778 of the 5,352 reported incidents in 2015. I live in a residential area that is quite some distance from any airport. A substantial number of aircraft violate the 1000 foot above ground level FAA minimum for residential neighborhoods. I have tried, many times, to call someone, somewhere, who might give a shit about this very annoying violation and there isn't anyone who will do anything (including just returning a phone call), short of my hiring a PI and a lawyer.
Most disturbing is the helicopters flying what I estimate to be within 200 feet of my house. Although it is a very sturdily built house, the whole thing shakes when the helicopters pass by. Also incredibly annoying is the dip-shit in his WWII fighter plane practicing his tricks, and sometimes just diving and climbing endlessly.
If I were a lesser person, since I cannot appeal to any authority that will take any action, whatsoever, I might choose to take a more violent approach than just thinking of them as total assholes.
Only slightly less assholes are the clueless journos who report the stories. Usually it comes from the establishment wannabes at Ars Technica, where critical thinking flies out the window, though this time it's USA Today, and the story is always the same: Report the huge number of incidents, then mention the slim minority that occur right next to an airport. It sure would be nice to see someone actually analyze this data to give people a better understanding of what might be driving this behavior, as I wouldn't be surprised if just asking pilots to follow the law might result in some unsubstantial quantity of these incidents going away. Of course the real problem with this is that it reveal that pilots are also aggressors, so it isn't in that industry's interests to pursue such ends.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.