Pilot's eye damaged by 'military' laser shone into cockpit at Heathrow

theguardian.com

3 points·jahnu··3 comments

I'm not sure the people doing that do it 'for fun' -- I think might be a bit of a reaction to what the aviation lobby does around Heathrow: the planes are being kept a low altitude for dozens of miles while making their turns.

I live between Slough and Maidenhead, WAY off heathrow, and you have most planes flying at very low altitude over, especially after take off, because they (presumably) try to save fuel during the takeoff phase and turn for their primary heading.

Problem is, they piss off millions of people over massively populated area by doing that, and are inherently also kept within range of these laser pointers for a lot longer, so they increase the probability of someone stupid wanting to 'do something about it'...

I don't have a solution mind you, apart perhaps installing some filtering for most common laser light on cockpit windows (if it's even possible to stack filters while still seeing thru)?

Can anyone here make a rough estimate of how powerful a laser would be required to do that?

I don't know, but that certainly requires quite a beam to still be dangerous over a few hundred meters, especially with the pollution around to scatter the light... I'd wouldn't think it would be the handheld kind, but I don't know..

What I know is that the military don't have exclusivity on big lazors -- my hackspace has a couple sourced from the medical industry that are scary. They are also the size of a washing machine, so not the 'pointy' kind.

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