Americans Can’t Seem To Stop Pointing Lasers At Planes

Megalith

Megalith

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If you want to drive your cat nuts, that's fine. But pointing a laser at an aircraft is a horrible idea.

"When aimed at an aircraft from the ground, the powerful beam of light from a handheld laser can travel more than a mile and illuminate a cockpit, disorienting and temporarily blinding pilots," the Transportation Security Administration's Web site says.
 
I actually blame the cat people for making cheap lasers that anyone can pick up and annoy virtually everyone around them.
 
This graph perfectly demonstrates the upward trend of americans stupidity.

FAAlasers.jpg
 
With great power comes great responsibility - unfortunately Americans can't even be trusted with a cat toy.

I'm curious how many of these fools are kids versus adults. Kids are going to do stupid things, even after their parents tell them not to. The adults really have no excuse (other than excessive alcohol consumption I suppose).
 
Really?

Is the beam becoming incredibly unfocused and more powerful the further away it shines that it illuminates the whole cabin similar to a camera flash? Sounds sketchy to me.

I don't doubt its dangerous, but I doubt the accuracy needed for it to be dangerous as low as they imply.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Really?

Is the beam becoming incredibly unfocused and more powerful the further away it shines that it illuminates the whole cabin similar to a camera flash? Sounds sketchy to me.

I don't doubt its dangerous, but I doubt the accuracy needed for it to be dangerous as low as they imply.
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Fun trick to do I did when I was younger, lived near a motel, at night I would shine a laser into a room (hopefully it was empty) as it went through the glass I'm guessing the refraction spread it out and the entire room glowed red. So yeah, it's possible.
 
Kids being silly with red lasers, not really a problem. Young adults playing with green lasers is idiotic. First time I even heard of such a thing was in Iraq when they were used to stop vehicles at night or as a non-lethal method for crowd control.

It really does daze and blind you and it carries the unfortunate consequence of EXPANDING with distance which makes it very fun to play with. I can see why people would point those at the sky because it never ceased to impress me at the time, but come on people.
 
Unfortunately, there are many stupid people on this little world. We just can't seem to stop that from happening.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Fun trick to do I did when I was younger, lived near a motel, at night I would shine a laser into a room (hopefully it was empty) as it went through the glass I'm guessing the refraction spread it out and the entire room glowed red. So yeah, it's possible.
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Well good to know then.
 
Its not so much that it only happens in America, as that when it happens in another country like say Russia, you dont hear about it because the kid is found face down in a gully with the laser pointer parked in his ass.
 
Don't they already regulate lasers beyond a certain power? I don't think a cat toy is an issue.
 
Ramses said:
Don't they already regulate lasers beyond a certain power? I don't think a cat toy is an issue.
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Many mid/high-power laser e-tailers will ship overseas from China, and the customs import form into the USA will say "pencil".

I've seen it first hand.
 
Ramses said:
Don't they already regulate lasers beyond a certain power? I don't think a cat toy is an issue.
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Sure they're regulated but the high power one's that anyone can order over Amazon are still plenty powerful enough.
 
Ummm... Don't planes nowadays fly themselves basically? How is a laser going to effect the pilot when the plane is on auto?
 
hdgamer said:
Ummm... Don't planes nowadays fly themselves basically? How is a laser going to effect the pilot when the plane is on auto?
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It would be most dangerous when a plane is landing or taking off, which is not done with auto pilot. But even with air traffic control pilots have to keep looking to make sure they aren't about to have a mid-air collision. Or what if they've just been told to change altitude or heading to avoid some danger the pilot does that not the computer.
 
Sounds like pilots are the weak link here, just let the planes fly themselves with redundant sensors and fire all the pilots.
 
I remember this story from years ago during the Cold War era.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/ar...4525-8c24-1818201b2058/?resType=accessibility

RUSSIAN SHIP SUSPECTED IN LASER BEAM INCIDENT







By Dana Priest May 15, 1997

A Russian fishing vessel off the northwest coast of Washington state may have fired a laser beam suspected of injuring a Navy lieutenant and Canadian military pilot flying above the ship trying to determine if it was spying, U.S. officials said.

The April 4 incident in the Strait of Juan De Fuca prompted an inconclusive Coast Guard search of the Russian trawler and a protest to Moscow by State Department officials who acknowledged yesterday they still do not know exactly what happened that day.

"We protested this incident forcefully to the Russian government," said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. "I think it's highly unusual. There's no question about it."

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told reporters the episode remains under investigation, adding there is "still some conflicting evidence."

He said he had not raised the matter in meetings Tuesday with Russia's defense minister, Igor Rodionov.

On April 4, the USS Ohio, a nuclear missile submarine based in Bremerton, Wash., was passing through the strait en route to a 70-day patrol at sea. Nearby was the Kapitan Man, a Russian fishing boat whose unusual number of radar antennas caught the attention of the joint U.S.-Canadian military team that keeps watch over the region.

A Canadian CH-124 helicopter, with two Canadians and U.S. Navy Lt. Jack Daley on board, was dispatched to photograph the trawler to determine if the ship was what they suspected: a spy ship trying to capture an audio identification characteristic of the nuclear submarine that would make it possible for the Russians to identify the submarine in the future.

As the helicopter was overhead, Daley and the Canadian pilot suddenly developed problems that later were diagnosed by medical experts to be "consistent with eye problems" associated with laser burns, according to a Pentagon source.

They had cuts to the retina, swelling around the eyes, headaches and foggy vision for several days.

One of the helicopter passengers photographed the event. According to the Pentagon source, the photographs show a "red dot on a smoke-glass window." According to the Washington Times, which first reported the incident yesterday, 30 photo frames were taken. "Frame No. 16 {showed} definitive evidence of an emanation coming from the bridge area of the merchant vessel," according to a top-secret Pentagon report cited by the Times.

The Coast Guard conducted a routine safety inspection of the vessel at 8 p.m. the same day. U.S. officials were allowed to search the public areas but not "private quarters" of the Russian ship, according to several sources.

Despite being barred from some parts of the ship, "they felt things were not being hidden from them," a White House official said of the Coast Guard search party. The searchers were allowed to photograph the ship's logs, for instance.

The search turned up nothing. Military officials assume the laser was a range-finder, not a weapon, used to gauge the distance of a target.

The case remains open and is a mystery because no source of the eye burns has been found, White House officials said. Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
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hdgamer said:
Ummm... Don't planes nowadays fly themselves basically? How is a laser going to effect the pilot when the plane is on auto?
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Doubtful someone with a laser is firing them at a cockpit window when they're flying by themselves, which is at cruising altitude 25,000-35,000 feet. Hitting a 2 foot wide window at 30k feet away needs you to have an accuracy of about 13 arcseconds, which is absolutely tiny, not to mention that's if you were shooting straight up from under it, in which case you wouldn't be able to hit the window, I'm not sure you could actually hit a cockpit window from the ground at that altitude.

The issue is when planes are taking off and landing, where they're not flying themselves, and are significantly closer to the ground, where they're not automated. The cockpit is typically a darkened area, so pilots will have night vision issues if all of a sudden the cockpit was lit up and now they can't see the instruments as well.
 
Oh for a laser guided rail gun on a few planes. A few 'counter artillery' type incidents would make kids less inclined to try it I guess
 
jpm100 said:
Cold War was over well before 1997.
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Hard to consider it "well over" when it wasn't declared "over" until 1989, but USSR didn't dissolve until 1991. Still, as this article points out, even though USSR has dissolved and the two superpowers were no longer in direct conflict the cold war persisted behind the scenes because the Russian military complex (although supposedly significantly defunded) persisted (as did ours).

It's difficult to square a cold war era being over with a subsequent article about five years later about nuclear subs, spying trawlers, and counter-intel ops by US helicopters. A reasonable person would conclude that a cold war was still in effect even though it wasn't being talked about by Reagan anymore.
 
So put a green blocking filter on the cockpit window? Or couldnt a polarization filter aid in this? I mean shit I cant get a laser focused on a stopsign without it looking like a light show, how are these kids pointing them at planes?
 
Nolan7689 said:
Really?

Is the beam becoming incredibly unfocused and more powerful the further away it shines that it illuminates the whole cabin similar to a camera flash? Sounds sketchy to me.

I don't doubt its dangerous, but I doubt the accuracy needed for it to be dangerous as low as they imply.
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I guess you never noticed that the dot gets larger the further away the object it shines on is.
 
Darunion said:
So put a green blocking filter on the cockpit window? Or couldnt a polarization filter aid in this? I mean shit I cant get a laser focused on a stopsign without it looking like a light show, how are these kids pointing them at planes?
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I guess the beam gets huge and is still bright enough to be a problem.
 
What's the legitimate usage for super powerful handheld lasers? I want to light my bbq from a mile away?

Ban the shit.
 
Burticus said:
What's the legitimate usage for super powerful handheld lasers? I want to light my bbq from a mile away?

Ban the shit.
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Optical disc burners are where a lot of the high power/low cost (blue) lasers come from, well burners and laser display projectors (multiple colors available). If lasers didn't have a legitimate mass-market use they would not be available so cheaply for niche uses, like absurdly powerful handheld laser pointers. The handheld laser market isn't large enough to justify the R&D investment or generate the economies of scale necessary for every Larry Curly or Moe to pick up a 1W laser on pay day. Blu-ray players though? Yeah, that'll do it.
 
Kueller said:
Sounds like pilots are the weak link here, just let the planes fly themselves with redundant sensors and fire all the pilots.
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This sounds like what the dude said in the movie War Games right before they setup all the nukes to be on auto instead of having people to do the job.
 
Geef said:
This sounds like what the dude said in the movie War Games right before they setup all the nukes to be on auto instead of having people to do the job.
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Little OT but isn't it odd we are apparently pushing for autonomous cars, but after all these years of various types of aircraft auto-pilot, there isn't any talk of getting rid of human pilots? Russia sent a spacecraft, the shuttle copy, into orbit and back remotely/autonomously decades ago. It's pretty mature tech. Surely software can keep track of air traffic and location better than a human pilot? Wonder why that is? Is it harder to drive a car?
The ?'s are a little bit rhetorical, but not completely.
 
hdgamer said:
Ummm... Don't planes nowadays fly themselves basically? How is a laser going to effect the pilot when the plane is on auto?
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There was a recent news story here in Canada of this very thing happening at our airports. A number of times the planes weren't being hit in mid flight, they were being hit on landing. In some cases, the pilots had to abort the landing and make another pass.
 
I'm curious if any of these could be false reports given by pilots to cover up mishaps. As air traffic controllers buy the excuse, pilots see it as an easy way of getting out of being marked for infractions.
 
techrat said:
I guess you never noticed that the dot gets larger the further away the object it shines on is.
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Yeah, but the point is still not going to cause eye damage unless they were looking straight into the path of the beam for a amount of time virtually impossible to manage by pointing from the ground. This is just BS.

That being said a green laser is especially dangerous and should be handled by a responsible person.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Doubtful someone with a laser is firing them at a cockpit window when they're flying by themselves, which is at cruising altitude 25,000-35,000 feet. Hitting a 2 foot wide window at 30k feet away needs you to have an accuracy of about 13 arcseconds, which is absolutely tiny, not to mention that's if you were shooting straight up from under it, in which case you wouldn't be able to hit the window, I'm not sure you could actually hit a cockpit window from the ground at that altitude.

The issue is when planes are taking off and landing, where they're not flying themselves, and are significantly closer to the ground, where they're not automated. The cockpit is typically a darkened area, so pilots will have night vision issues if all of a sudden the cockpit was lit up and now they can't see the instruments as well.
Click to expand...

The beam could be close to 17ft wide at that distance.

And to all those saying the lasers aren't dangerous, you're simply wrong. If you don't believe me, have your friend point a 500 mW green laser at your face from across a football field while your eyes are open and see how you react.

Lasers above 10mW or so are dangerous and the fact that you can legally buy 1W lasers is insane.
 
Powerage said:
The beam could be close to 17ft wide at that distance.

And to all those saying the lasers aren't dangerous, you're simply wrong. If you don't believe me, have your friend point a 500 mW green laser at your face from across a football field while your eyes are open and see how you react.

Lasers above 10mW or so are dangerous and the fact that you can legally buy 1W lasers is insane.
Click to expand...

I can't edit my above comment, but don't actually do that football field thing.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Doubtful someone with a laser is firing them at a cockpit window when they're flying by themselves, which is at cruising altitude 25,000-35,000 feet. Hitting a 2 foot wide window at 30k feet away needs you to have an accuracy of about 13 arcseconds, which is absolutely tiny, not to mention that's if you were shooting straight up from under it, in which case you wouldn't be able to hit the window, I'm not sure you could actually hit a cockpit window from the ground at that altitude.

The issue is when planes are taking off and landing, where they're not flying themselves, and are significantly closer to the ground, where they're not automated. The cockpit is typically a darkened area, so pilots will have night vision issues if all of a sudden the cockpit was lit up and now they can't see the instruments as well.
Click to expand...

The beam's diameter does increase with distance due to beam divergence. It would be pretty hard to hit a cockpit window when the plane is at cruising altitude though.
 
TheCommander said:
The beam's diameter does increase with distance due to beam divergence. It would be pretty hard to hit a cockpit window when the plane is at cruising altitude though.
Click to expand...

The higher end handheld pointers often have adjustable focus...
 
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