FAA Releases Data Showing Trends in Dangerous Laser Strikes
faa.gov
faa.gov
Assuming a ~$200 fan-cooled 5w engraving laser with an excellent collimating lens focused at infinity, 1mrad divergence, the irradiance would fall off within 500m to a level below any permanent harm (let alone permanent damage in less than a second). This is by the FAA's very conservative standard of 2.5mW/cm^2, which is about 1/50th of the irradiance of direct sunlight. Within 500m, you'd need to be able to aim the beam very precisely to maintain the narrow cone of light to within 1mrad of the victim's pupil. Your hands are too shaky, you'd need something like a motorized telescope mount with active tracking.
The risks pilots bear when assholes shine bright lights at their windshield are distraction, glare and temporary 'flashblindness', where your rods and cones lose their low-light adaptation as they adjust to the briefly intense brightness level, and gradually recover over 10s of seconds. These are real risks, but it's not 30km lightsaber beams frying pilots' retinas for $3.99.
This is great when you are using a laser yourself as you can just get glasses that block the wavelength of your laser. It's better than nothing for pilots, since you can block against 1 or 2 of the most common wavelengths.
However if a particular wavelength were standard for protective eyewear, then an attacker would just get a different wavelength.
Could have multiple cams, some of which might have shielding in different directions, with the screens showing a composite-image from the cams that seem to be working well.
Even a poorly-designed system that accidentally shows a laser should at least not hurt the pilots, as the screens wouldn't be able to show anything brighter than white-pixels. Sorta like how someone flashing a laser-pointer in your eyes over a video-call can't actually hurt your eyes.
Though a well-designed system ought to be able to maintain a pretty reliable view outside, allowing the pilots to still see outside even while they're actively being hit.
Or, maybe allow the pilots to rotate the screens away to reveal windows in the event of an electrical/computer problem. But primarily as a backup -- presumably an augmented-reality display that's protected from issues like laser-attacks would be the preference when everything's working right.
Or.. I guess pilots could get augmented-reality glasses/helmets with their own cameras to do the same in modern aircraft, if it's a major problem in the short-term. Perhaps not as robust in the absence of externally-mounted cameras on the plane itself, and perhaps not quite as comfortable if the glasses/helmet are bulky.
An additional solution implementing electronics could be equipping all windows and possibly other areas on the craft with sensors which sound an alarm the instant any laser light is detected so that the pilots become aware of the problem before it takes its effect. Having two pilots and an autopilot also helps with this but this does nothing for most single pilot aircraft.
I really don't want a regulatory eye turned towards lasers, at least during a media cycle. Determined assholes will just take apart their BDR players. It'll stop most kids I guess, but I think more media coverage could lead to more behaviour like this.
I dont particularly think we need new laws though, intentionally hurting someone is already illegal. The mechanism shouldn't matter.
I wonder how they can locate the persons doing this? Good thing they are able to at least fine some of them.
Pretty good accuracy.
Source: am pilot, have done this, talked to police for follow-up
The lasers are super visible from the ground at night so a call to ATC would get the police on the case quickly and they’ll track it down.
Patrol cars can also spot those lasers without a reported strike and they’ll investigate.
What surprises me is that the penalty is so low considering the potential impact of a laser strike, one would think the fine would be 10 times as much and the offense would include prison time.
The neat part about using a phase conjugate mirror for this is that the return strike is essentially an amplified time-reversed version of the incoming beam. Any atmospheric distortion of the original beam that leads to it spreading out on the way to your plane operates in reverse on the return beam, so it gets concentrated on the return path. (This wouldn't work if you were trying to zap someone who was shooting Earth based lasers at your Moon base, say, because the round trip time would be long enough for atmospheric optical conditions to change, but some bozo shooting their laser at planes would be close enough that atmospheric change over the round trip time would be negligible).
I know that at one point the military was looking into phase conjugate mirror laser weapons to shoot down planes. The way those would work is that you'd have the big ass laser on the ground, with a human-aimed small laser beside it. The human hits the plane with the small laser, and some of the reflected light from that comes back to the big laser, which does its amplification and phase conjugation thing, and zaps the plane.
That was quite a while ago and I don't recall reading anything about them being deployed, so I assume they either run into some technical issue with the idea or found something better.
https://youtu.be/zAfagq8PjpM https://youtu.be/Wrn6Ym9BG8s https://youtu.be/KU56w8MX5Rk https://youtu.be/NIOh9-RoAaE
(And just to be clear, I'm not asking for instructions on this)
By the time you aim at something a thousand or two feet in the air, it's pretty close to filling the cockpit window. Plus it goes through helicopter door or front window plexi, which has a diffraction effect and will scatter the beam even more within the cockpit.
You absolutely can see where it hits, there's enough particulates in the air to show the beam itself.
I’m sure that “hit” was readily visible to the laser operator.
> People who shine lasers at aircraft face FAA fines of up to $11,000 per violation and up to $30,800 for multiple laser incidents.
> The FAA has issued $600,000 in fines since 2016, which includes $120,000 in 2021.
If everyone got a fine, and at 10% of the maximum first time offense fine ($1100), that’s only 100 people caught every year from pilots’ reports of nearly 7000 (a portion of which might be repeat violators).
Hard to catch people shining lasers?
Unless they repeatedly do it from the same location.
I was in Italy last week and a street vendor was selling decorative lasers and shinning it into the crowds. These "toys" were clearly strong enough to cause permanent eye damage. They should not be legal in this form factor.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aoc.web.management/vi...
What's with this pattern of incidents around the end of the year?
Green is the biggest, most visible offender. Add a 532 nm filter.
I did the inverse of this to make a laser pointer-driven drawing application on sky scrapers. No video of this sadly, but here's me playing asteroids on campus buildings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans
We ground planes due to poor weather and specifically poor visibility all the time, planes are rerouted due to fog constantly sure they’ll land if it’s their only option but it’s not a decision made lightly.
Navigating in spotty cumulus clouds or cumulonimbus (thunderstorm clouds) for ride and avoiding severe icing. Avoiding other airborne traffic (specifically required by federal law when in visual conditions) are other reasons to look out the window.
Hopefully they'll be ready with a big campaign when the first major crash is caused by one of these idiots.
Should aiming a laser at an aircraft he illegal? Yes. Do people deserve to be sentenced to over four years in prison for it like Justin Shorey? Hell no.
The rhetoric around COVID also trends this way, as some think it's no big deal because some of them are statistically unlikely to die from it. But there are bad things other than death that can stem from it, and it's still a dice roll when it comes to fatality.
> The injury to the pilot’s eyes caused by the defendant’s actions resulted in the pilot being unable to fly for a week.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtx/pr/schertz-man-sentenced-f...
Get it?
But I rather suspect campaigning to reduce the penalties for lasering aircraft is a doomed effort.
A slap on the wrist for him, because shit happens? I don't think so.
I mean this scenario has not happened yet, as far as I know, but eventually it will, if idiots keep doing it.
It is an assault, that can lead to injury or death. It is not a prank. It is a crime and deserves to be treated as one.
If the penalty for doing this was a modest slap on the wrist, that would be a completely ineffective deterrent for an activity that is very easy to get away with and hard to prosecute in the first place.
It seems the only options to prevent misuse here are to restrict the sale of laser pointers, or make the penalty for improper use so well-known and draconian that no one would want to take the chance of being caught.
How could someone possibly not be aware that trying to blind a pilot would be illegal?
I mean, trying to blind anyone is illegal. But a pilot that's actively flying a plane?
I still agree with you about the prison time.
Is it an obnoxious thing to do? Certainly, but claims that it's dangerous don't have any legitimacy if there's no evidence to back it up.
So sad to hear. No one shines a laser on an aircraft accidentally, and it is not like the police are using lasers as an excuse to systematically punish a minority. We don't need to wait for a tragedy to happen here.