The US crackdown on not-so-harmless laser strikes | Hacker News Reader

The US crackdown on not-so-harmless laser strikes

arstechnica.com

27 pointssbochins55 comments

I'll agree that firing lasers at aircraft is dangerous ... for the pilot, and anyone in that aircraft's vicinity since it needs its pilot to fly properly. Makes total sense.

But ... it's hard to square that with articles like this one:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-23178484

Look at those pictures. Wow. Then you find out why the crowd was using the lasers ...

During the protests in Egypt, there came a point where there would be tens of thousands of people crowded into Tahrir Square, with military helicopters buzzing overhead.

Those helicopters would look like a rave party, thanks to darn near everybody in the crowd below firing lasers at them.

Initially journalists assumed it was to mess with the pilots, but after speaking to people on the ground the reporters discovered the protesters were very happy with the Army for trying to prevent Morsi's replacement from overstepping his authority.

That's right, they were firing lasers at the helicopters as a sign of solidarity, because they liked the pilots, and wanted to encourage them.

Given the topic of this thread, that activity seems utterly ridiculous (and, of course, dangerous). But I remember reading interviews with some of the pilots, and they didn't seem to mind.

Like I said, I figure firing lasers at pilots is not just a harmless prank ... but articles like that one sure cause a lot of cognitive dissonance with that perception.

Ah, now I understand. As mentioned in another comment, military pilots wear helmets with visors specially designed to deal with bright lights.

Life-flight helicopters, or hospital choppers transferring kids getting transplants, likely don't have such equipment.

Here's a video of the helicopter covered in laser light: http://youtu.be/S92XUsfI5ng

Lasers are high-tech and have significant pop-culture influence (Think back to 60s sci-fi. Everyone had a laser gun.).

I can see why many people are irrationally afraid of lasers. They have a number of connotations that may be negative.

How do we know that these concerns over $3 laser pointers and pilot taking "day off due to headache" are horseshit?

Simple. If it would be true all military aircrafts, ships and vehichles would have high-power lasers installed to blind enemy pilots and drivers and all guerrilla fighters would have pockets full of $3 chinese laser pointers to do the same. If it would be possible to disable a pilot for a many hours like this, no military aircraft would be ever able to approach any densely populated area. Dishonest horseshit.

Also from other comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S92XUsfI5ng How are they flying at all if this is true?

And such weapons exist. And military pilots were helmets that protects against sunlight _and_ bright light. If lightning is anticipated, one of the pilots of an airliner will usually wear sunglasses to protect the night vision.

And it's a matter of eliminating contributing factors to accidents. Pilots have downed airplanes because of a malfunctioning pitot tube or fuel indicator light distracting them. People that don't get the laser pointer problem don't really understand why flying is so safe nowadays.

> Pilots have downed airplanes because of a malfunctioning pitot tube or fuel indicator light distracting them.

To be fair, a malfunctioning pitot tube is a class of equipment failure that has had disastrous consequences, so I wouldn't put it in the same category as a distraction. Distraction is usually considered pilot error (or a fault of the design) as in Eastern Air 401 where the pilots were so focused on the landing gear light that they failed to notice one of them had disconnected the autopilot (due in part to a design issue).

I really don't mean to nitpick, but equipment failures are most definitely not analogous in this case. Mostly because you can do many things to reduce the likelihood of equipment failure, but distraction is very nearly impossible to eliminate.

I agree about equipment failure, I used those examples to point out that just because something has occurred several times before doesn't mean you can discount it as a potential contributing factor. A better example is the sterile cockpit rule. You can never eliminate distractions, but you can work on reducing them (though in a worst case scenario I believe that laser flashes can be more than just distractions).

Thank you. Now I see why it wasn't such an issue for the Egyptian pilots (see other comment). I can see why a military pilot would have such equipment, whereas a chopper transferring a kid to another hospital for a transplant probably wouldn't.

As I found out in a comment below, militaries do have weaponized lasers for the purpose of hitting enemy pilots ... such weapons have been used by many countries for over 30 years now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_%28weapon%29#First_use...

> I would not call it [the 14-year sentence] harsh. I would say it is a penalty that fits the crime, but I believe that it will have a deterrent effect, and I hope it will.

That she does not see sending a father of two young children to prison for this as "harsh" is quite frightening.

edit: typo

the article is misleading. He got arrested for pointing a laser at the aircraft but he got 14 years for committing an act that violated his parole. He most likely had 14 years left on his sentence when he was paroled, probably drug charges, and since he violated his parole he was sentenced to finish those 14 years. The girl probably got a fine and some probation which is what the guy would have gotten if it was not for him being on parole

I forgot about that, but even so, I find it excessive. Especially if you are right and it was merely drugs.

The only way I can envision it being justified is if his previous offense was violent or otherwise straightforwardly antisocial, with this laser-pointing being part of a pattern of malicious behavior.

Agreed. Prosecutors sometimes end up on a very high horse, unable to see the reality of the situation.

Have there been any recorded instances of actual harm due to laser strikes? I have encountered many anecdotes of annoyance and inconvenience but nothing tangible. At 9.5 instances per day there should be a reasonable amount of data to indicate the range of harm.

> there should be a reasonable amount of data to indicate the range of harm.

There is. And the obvious conclusion is that the harm is completely negligible.

There is absolutely no possibility of physiological damage from light exposure (some people still seem to be kicking that idea around), and the chance of causing the pilot to be unable to operate the aircraft due to distraction or damaging night vision is very low.

If you are so certain of that, I have an experiment I would like to test with you. One includes you looking into one of these lasers that can light cigarettes.

Next up I will give you basic landing training and you get to land a small aircraft at night all by yourself with a laser pointed at the cockpit. You are of course allowed to use the remaining eye.

Here's a video of what a laser looks like from a helicopter pilots perspective. It's a lot more powerful than you think it might be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI7Qq1mYQlI

I hate to say it, but... that's it?

I could see it causing serious problems if someone hit the copter and held it at exactly the right position for it to cause continued glare. But that brief flash? maybe it loses something in video, but it seems less intense and far more transient than oncoming traffic w/ highbeams on a dark road .

Continued glared isn't even necessary, losing the night vision (a problem that the camera doesn't show) is the real problem. It's not likely to directly cause an accident, but it might very well be a contributing factor (for many or most accidents that do happen, each contributing factor has usually happened multiple times before without causing an accident).

Nothing is lost in the video as someone else has already commented on in this thread, CCDs are actually more sensitive than the human eye to lasers.

That's not really true at night though, CCD cameras can change their light sensitivity quickly, something human eyes can't do (after a bright flash, you'll lose your night vision up to several minutes).

Firstly, they had to zoom in quite a bit to get that effect. Secondly, our eyes to not operate like a cameras sensor, it looks very different to the naked eye.

On the last page of the article we have this in the form of expert testimony: "You also have scattering occur which can affect vision performance when you hit like optometric lenses, like glasses, or if it goes into the eye, if you have any cataract or opacities in the lens or in the cornea of the eye itself, which can result in vision performance loss.”

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I may be), but ... don't you pretty much need perfect vision to fly[1]? And if so, how is the quoted testimony relevant to this specific case?

I accept that it's potentially dangerous and that it should be further studied. But by the pilots' descriptions no more so than oncoming traffic on a dark street. In addition, the only information we had about after effects was anecdotal and seemed to consist of a couple of pilots reporting migraines and tingling.

I don't know - when you're throwing someone in jail from 2-14 years, I just think there should be more than a couple of anecdotes to support threat of the action that got you there.

1. after reading further comments, looks like my assumption here is wrong - it's possible to fly with these conditions, presumably vision must be correctable to perfect?

>don't you pretty much need perfect vision to fly

Army helicopter pilots remain on flight status with vision sharpness as low as 20/400.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armytrng/ss/rotarypilot_5.htm

"20/400 vision is considered severe visual impairment just shy of blindness."

Yep - see my [1] edit from yesterday, could be you had a stale page :)

fta: Federal criminal charges were brought against both of them in March 2013, with a three-day trial concluding in December 2013. Despite his lawyer's best efforts, in March 2014, Rodriguez was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

wow !

That's horribly excessive, even with him being on probation. I imagine most people are not aware of how dangerous it is.

When you are on parole and get convicted of another crime that is less severe than the original crime you are on parole for the judge decides how much of your paroled sentence you must go back to serve and can add on some time up to the max for the crime you committed. Since this guy was unrepentant the judge just said fuck him and probably sent him back to serve out the entire remainder of his paroled sentence

Probably because there has been no evidence it is very dangerous and there would be evidence if it actually were.

Besides all of the pilots...you know...saying it is dangerous.

Then learn. A laser can blind you, and can distract you while you are operating a motor vehicle.

Should we ban laser pointer? No, because that's stupid.

Should we make sure people understand tools and how to use them? YES.

>A laser can blind you

Yes, it can blind you, the user, but it can not blind a pilot. Any consumer laser will have too high a divergence to create dangerous power densities at any significant range.

>and can distract you while you are operating a motor vehicle

Sure it can. But so can cell phones, shaving, eating, jaywalking... People aren't getting 14 years for those.

The difference is that by cell phone, and eating, you are distracting yourself.

Would you shove a phone in front of someone who is driving, to make them read a text? (I am obviously exaggerating, but you get the idea).

It's 14 years for blinding someone else.

You obviously don't know what kind of lasers are available for purchase online. They're not your average presentation laser pointers. I know one pilot that completely lost his night vision in approach after a green laser hit the windshield. By luck his copilot was looking down at the time.

14 years is fucking absurd.

> Despite his lawyer's best efforts.

If that was a jury, then its very easy to imagine how frightened they were thinking if "out of fun" the laser would hit a plane they've boarded and lead to a crash and death of hundreds of people.

I suspect the facts of hitting an emergency transplant helo from the local children's hospital with a child patient on-board and then repeatedly hitting a police helo sent to investigate would be equally or perhaps more compelling to a jury.

Don't screw with kids on transplant lists while shooting a laser at helicopters. Oh, you can't know that there was a child on board? Well, how about we just don't shoot at any air traffic?

I've been lased in my light airplane. It's only been annoying to date, but in just the perfect circumstances, it could be quite dangerous.

  > the severity of the strike depends significantly on how the laser
  > hits the helicopter...If the strike comes from the rear, it’s less
  > of an issue.

This may be a stupid question but how do you "laser strike" a pilot from the rear of the aircraft? I can understand how this happens with an Erickson Sky Crane when the pilot is in the aft facing seat.[^1] With a traditional helicopter it seems like there is a lot of stuff (helicopter/helmet/headphones) blocking any strikes from the rear.

[^1]: http://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft/helicopters/erickson-air-c...

ADDENDUM: I had no idea this was weaponized and had been deployed as early as the Falklands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_%28weapon%29#First_use...

I imagine that's their point, a strike from the rear is less likely to blind the pilot, but it's not impossible. There's a lot of glass, and lots of other polished glossy surfaces around an airplane, so a laser beam could still conceivably reflect off a surface in the pilot's field of view.

Much of the panic about lasers is completely unwarranted.

You can just do the math yourself to prove that most of the panicked news we hear is bullshit.

For any given laser, we know the divergence (the given figures are usually smaller than the actual divergence). Let's look at the wicked lasers arctic, a popular (but low quality) 445nm blue laser with a power output of up to 2000mW. This is one of the more powerful consumer handheld lasers out there.

Wicked claims a divergence of 1.5mRad. I think that's optimistic. It's probably really above 2 mRad.

Let's say you get within 300 meters of a plane. That's pretty tricky; you'd be lucky to do that even near an airport (and the closer you are to an airport, the easier it is to get arrested.

At 300 meters, the beam is (very optimistically) about 450mm. Because of the multimode properties of the 445nm diode, even with this very optimistic spec, it's probably more like a 1m x .45m ellipse. But let's just assume a circle.

pi.45.45 = .63 meters squared.

That's a power density of 2W/.63m^2, or about .00037W/cm^2.

According to the IEC and SPIE, that's a low enough power density that at visible wavelengths, you could be exposed to it for long periods with no eye damage. [1][2]

This is assuming ideal conditions, including a perfect beam, no atmospheric interference, and no reflection/filtering on the aircraft.

There is no physical danger to the pilot; the risk is that the pilot gets distracted. This risk is not substantial, as it's very difficult to keep a laser trained at a pilot long enough to be dangerously distracting, and you have to be very close for the laser light to even be noticeable.

By the way; There are a few videos floating around of lasers shining into cockpits. Most of these look really bad, because A)they filmed with the intention of making lasers look dangerous and B)lasers saturate camera CCDs very easily, so they can look incredibly bright on video even if our eyes handle them pretty well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEC60825_MPE_W_s.png [2] http://spie.org/Documents/Publications/00%20STEP%20Module%20...

Pilots take a lot of precautions to preserve their night vision (the red map lights aren't just for Hollywood dramatic effect).

I appreciate you doing the math on energy and luminous flux density (seriously), but the concern is beyond distraction.

I was hit at 2500 feet near Portland a few years back and it illuminated my left wing first (high wing), causing me to close one eye but the night vision in the open eye was seriously hampered for >5 minutes and even the eye that I quickly closed was modestly affected for a short time. I don't recall the height above terrain that 2500 MSL represented there, but I have to think it was better than 2000' distance, and that was over a populated (read: lit) area. In a darker environment, a laser's effect on night vision would be more pronounced.

> the night vision in the open eye was seriously hampered for >5 minutes

That seems like a very drastic effect from diffuse exposure to laser light at long distance.

Partial adaptation from full sunlight to darkness takes about 5 minutes [1], and the diffuse laser light you were exposed to is orders of magnitude weaker than sunlight.

I would be curious to see some more experimental research in this area. We know a lot about energy thresholds for eye damage, but we don't have as much precise data for adaptation thresholds.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)

>the diffuse laser light you were exposed to is orders of magnitude weaker than sunlight.

Sure, but the pupils would be much more open than they would be in sunlight.

> but the pupils would be much more open than they would be in sunlight.

That is the crux of the problem. In sunlight, your pupils are so constricted that negligible light hits the retina. But at night, they're fully dilated and a sudden burst of laser can cause harm.

I wonder if the dark adapted to sudden (relatively) bright light to dark adapted again time is the critical difference here. I was also comparing directly against a pretty well-adapted eye and that eye was much more effective at scanning the (very dimly lit) instrument panel.

I was about 40 when this incident occurred; eyes in generally good health (astigmatic, stable prescription, well-corrected, no color deficiency, nothing else significant)

I find it interesting how many people here discount the risks of laser pointers, and trivialize the stories of pilots. The very same people probably encounter the same attitude from customers and others in their work in the IT industry, for instance with regards to security measures ("why can't we just run our customer database on a publically reachable IP, it saves so much trouble, and I know a guy that has done it for years and never had a problem!").

http://igg.me/at/minilaser/ Shameless plug for my laser cutter.

Pewpew responsibly, please!

i'd say a must read for this discussion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#Old_system

"Class I

Inherently safe; no possibility of eye damage. This can be either because of a low output power (in which case eye damage is impossible even after hours of exposure), or due to an enclosure preventing user access to the laser beam during normal operation, such as in CD players or laser printers.

Class II

The blink reflex of the human eye (aversion response) will prevent eye damage, unless the person deliberately stares into the beam for an extended period. Output power may be up to 1 mW. This class includes only lasers that emit visible light. Most laser pointers are in this category.

Class IIa

A region in the low-power end of Class II where the laser requires in excess of 1,000 seconds of continuous viewing to produce a burn to the retina. Commercial laser scanners are in this subclass."

I'm not buying into the sensationalized panic over laser pointers and planes.

If modern air traffic isn't robust enough to tolerate random citizens flickering laser pointers at flying objects then they don't deserve to be flying.

Deleted comment

> especially since they can blind you or your equipment at the speed of light.

This is a myth. No portable laser has a low enough divergence to produce a dangerous power density at any significant range.

You haven't even read the article, have you?

I did read the article, and it seems like a situation totally blown out of proportion.

  Since the FBI began keeping track in 2005, there have been 
  more than 17,000 laser strikes in total—more than a fifth 
  (3,960) in 2013 alone. During the first three months of 
  2014, the FBI reported an average of 9.5 documented 
  incidents every single day.

Those are absurd numbers. To me, that alone immediately reads as: We have airplanes in the sky that can be tampered with far too easily.

Technological arms races are a recurring phenomenon as technology contues to evolve. This is a particularly interesting one. Think about what a massive technological upset this could be, if laser pointers are honestly so indomitable.

Planes and pilots are going to have to change, and it's going to be expensive and frustrating. And believe me, the last thing I want to see happen is for all manned aircraft to be grounded and replaced with drones.

But reading the whole article, it's obvious to me that law enforcement is fighting a losing battle, and that's a bad thing, because then what you get are fishing expeditions, witch hunts, emotionally charged propaganda and harsh penalties to make examples of people.

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