French Navy ATL2 MPA: Someone Just Lasered The Wrong Aircraft
navalnews.com
navalnews.com
There are cases where military aircraft pointed their lasers (likely invisible IR lasers) at photographers. It's unclear if this was intentional and what kind of laser (e.g. rangefinder or designator) it was, but the laser likely wasn't meant as a weapons system but still fried the camera, with visible scorch marks.
I can't imagine eyes faring much better than the sensor if hit.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2021/08/02/sony-officially-warns-that-...
The lasers used in light shows are only allowed because they're moving; if you looked directly down the beam while it held still your blink reflex would not save your vision. Fortunately, you've got natural liquid cooling: your cornea is bathed in tears and your retina is surrounded by fluid-filled tissues, so there's a safety window of a few milliseconds while the laser pans across your eyeball too fast to cause dangerous temperature rise. If the laser beam slows down - if the encoders/resolvers on the galvanometers register insufficient change in the mirror angles - the controller will shut off the laser.
I don't have sufficient trust in my own professional, methodical, high-quality work using top dollar equipment to open up a machine without safety eyewear and lock out/tag out procedures; I have even less trust in products for the lower-margin, faster-paced entertainment industry. On top of that, it would not surprise me if a camera sensor has slightly less heatsinking compared to human eyeballs...but the fact that the safety margin is so thin that cameras can be damaged makes me not want to go to a light show!
Seconded.
Telecoms laser engineer here, and amateur musician. I'm astounded how casually class 3B and class 4 lasers are treated in the entertainment industry, or that using them in free space with poor travel limit stops / beam containment is even legal..... Often it appears little-to-no consideration is given as to what happens if a beam becomes misaligned or reflected into the audience.
You only have one set of eyes.
My roommate in college was a stagehand, we talked a bit about the safety and it appears the consideration is more on the scale of "We try not to shine the lasers in people's eyes" and less like "We have redundant, proven processes that ensure people cannot be harmed."
It feels like they've missed an important distinction between what's acceptable for your own purposes and what's acceptable risk to impose on someone else. Safety when messing about in your own backyard would often not pass OSHA requirements, that makes sense because it's your own risk and your own reward, this is ethically different an industrial scenario where you're forcing someone who's just trying to feed their family to endanger their eyes for someone else's profitability, similarly, concertgoers should and do assume that entertainment light shows are safe, while [some in] the entertainment industry take it much more casually.
See the comment below regarding concerns of misalignment, limit stops & containment for beams with the power to cause permanent blindness. I'm sure some venues handle this safely [1], but powerful lasers are being treated far to casually for my liking.
[1] Though I wonder what would happen if you asked for a copy of their risk assessment?
Modern show lasers are more likely to be around 1W for smaller events, around 20W for stadiums and up to 100W for the biggest outdoor events. Getting the beam from any of those in your eye will blind you almost instantly.
So audience scanning is carefully calibrated. The lasers are set up either to scan balconies and ceilings, to move at a certain velocity to minimise dwell time, to lose most of their brightness below a certain height - or all of the above.
Professional shows require a "variance" - basically regulation and associated paperwork - to make sure no one is hurt.
Of course any idiot can buy a 1W show laser for less than $1k now, but the US has quite strict legal requirements for public use, and anyone who causes serious eye damage is potentially on the hook for a law suit and bankruptcy.
"they make sure there are none"
A reflective surface may appear anywhere at any time.
A concert-goer may release a balloon, or have a phone on a selfie stick, or the machine may be bumped.
The reality is that your average police helicopter is probably better equipped to do this: It has high-zoom visible light/thermal sensors, with georeferencing to get exact lat/lon. Additionally, it probably has something along the lines of the Churchill/Shotover ARS system[1][2] that gives operators an overlay with street names, addresses, etc. Even news helicopters in the U.S. are equipped with those.
How pilots help police track down laser-strike suspects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1xdgE4xz-o
This is a good demonstration of a police helicopter with high-res thermal imagery tracking down someone with a laser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaOhD2r-Y8c
[1] https://shotover.com/products/ars [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rumcjbVzzLE
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Mark_I_Eyeball
For some reason this feels like distinctively American humor. Non?
Now 'Military Intelligence' is another thing entirely ... ;)
"MK-1" is a common military joke/term meaning the human eye, as opposed to other electrical-optical sensors that might be fitted to an upgraded aircraft.
I guess it is the kind of thing that is worldwide or (re-) discovered independently everywhere.
> the “sky sailors” (as naval aircrews are called in the French Navy)
What was the best outcome the person expected? To crash an airplane full of people?
A bit too dramatic, no? If you could actually crash a plane with a laser there would 1000s of such attempts. In reality they just had to turn around and maybe let autopilot land it.
Same with drones - there hasn’t been a single accident yet people so overreact.
The distance to target can give a false sense of safety to the perp. so interesting to see this article. I can't imagine the look on that person's face when the police knocked at the door!
For what it's worth, this is a good application of military technology with no loss of life. Firing lasers at aeroplanes is a Bad Thing™.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
https://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-4-blinding-las...
> The Chinese military […]
They would, ostensibly, fall under the header of 'rouge state', but usually people just say 'red'.
Maybe regular posters to /r/unexpectedgwennhadu/?
On a more serious note, the Bretagne independence movement used to be quite strong (relatively speaking) until the mid- to late-1990s, I can see some people still not being happy with the Paris administration sending airplanes upon their lands.
I admit doing it once when I was a kid, but for like 10 seconds, but you never really know if you are pointing exactly at the aircraft, since it's very far away. I learned years ago that I did something illegal...
Of course, people who got caught are pointing those lasers long enough for those camera to spot them.
I guess that a loooot of people try this, but don't do it long enough, so they never get caught, and also since most aircrafts have no way to find who did it.
The ray is not "straight", it has a slight angle, meaning the dot is larger and larger when distance increases, so it's less luminous (but still very luminous, enough to blind you temporarily). It's also the reason why it has way more probability to "hit" somebody's eye.
You can spot an airplane, but you can't really see secondary light source on it, it's just too far away. Even if a laser is a lot of light, the dot is not emitting enough for the naked eye to see any difference.
The light from a laser is directed, meaning all its photons goes in one direction, hence why it will blind an eye. But when it hits a surface, the photons bounce in all directions, and thus those secondary photons land in your eye in lower quantity because they're spread.
For nuisance behavior like this a bunch of community service would teaches the lesson just as well and not waste as many tax dollars.
Edit: FFS people, seriously? It's the aerial equivalent of some hooligan doing donuts in the middle of an intersection.
Yes, you can always come up with some appeal to emotion crap but the fact of the matter is that while the behavior was reckless and negligent nobody was harmed and there was no victim, the only transgression was a temporary risk of harm.
There's a very big difference between being a reckless nuisance and actually harming anyone or actually causing harm. Results matter. This is enshrined in statute all over the world (and in case law for common law jurisdictions). I hope all you people are smart enough to get out of jury duty.
This doesn't qualify as nuisance behavior. The risks are very real, particularly with civilian/LEO aircraft which don't have the training (and possible countermeasures) that a military pilot would.
I infer that you mean it's better that 1-3 years or something worse.
In this case (the article didn't mention the individual's circumstances) six months will most likely have severe consequences to things like employment/education/child-care. These will have negative effects on the rest of the community in all likelyhood.
As it sounds like no-one was harmed, would a fine, probation, and/or some form of required community service potentially have better overall outcomes?
Six months seems like it could be enough to deter without it unnecessarily keeping someone who is normally harmless incarcerated. I'm not too dug-in on this point though, it really depends on how risky shooting a laser at an aircraft really is.
In the US, a first time DUI with no one injured can get you 6 months jail in many states (some higher, some lower). This seems about the same.
Maybe penalties are decided including factors such as possible outcomes for dangerous behavior and as a deterrence to others?
Pointing a laser at anyone/anything is possibly not as known to be potentially directly harmful as much as shooting a gun at someone. Ironically, your analogy is something that itself doesn't always have negative consequences related to it (ie how does that change when it's a police officer, or happens during a protest, etc).
Anyway, I am not sure it's cut-and-dry that a sentence like this is net better outcome, it definitely will make it more visible how bad this type of action is through news and what-not which is a good thing.
Shooting a gun at someone could lead to one person dead.
Shooting a laser at a plane could lead to hundreds dead.
If this is a metric, then 6 months is a great deal for the shooter, correct?
>I am not sure it's cut-and-dry that a sentence like this is net better outcome
It's probably impossible to measure that, since the factors are subjective. But it is in line with many punishments for similar action, as I mentioned.
Also 6 months sentenced means much less served in most cases, the same way a 10 year sentence may get out in 5.
“owning or using a laser of a class higher than 2 can lead to a sentence of 6 months of imprisonment, with a fine of 7,500 euros”
I would argue this is a bit of an issue… obviously it’s not in the US where we have our Freedumb^tm, but still.
There's tons of stuff that has legitimate scientific uses that needs to be licenced for lots of reasons. For example, you need a licence to have iodine with concentrations above 2.2%.
So is a house fire. Doesn’t make it OK to go around endangering the rest of the public
http://thepricker.synthasite.com/
on the plane from JFK to LAX and was feeling paranoid and it seemed like one of the helicopters was following me around everywhere I went.
It's natural that somebody would want to "reach out and touch" one of these annoying insects and periodically people laser police helicopters. It is always a bad idea because if you do that then they really will swoop down on you and take you away.
I would have loved to stay in California if I felt like there was any chance of fixing policy in the state (and relatedly fixing affordability of living there).