U.S. DOT Launches Laser Illumination Reporting

Unloaded writes "The U.S. Department of Transportation announced a new laser warning and reporting system for pilots . The FAA has it's own guidelines for reporting laser illumination." This is a follow up on stories reported earlier.

Re:Shield

[Gleef]

Sure, if they want the pilots to be unable to see. Lasers can be in any wavelength of the EM spectrum. There's no way to block out all lasers without blocking out all light.

Personally, I prefer the extra safety of having pilots able to look at their surroundings.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[mpathetiq]

TFA say there have been 400+ reported incidents since 1990. 31 of these happened since Dec. 23rd. That seems to be a sudden rash!

Re:Light aircraft?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That 100mw+ laser is EXACTLY what they're talking about- anything less just doesn't have the power to matter, and the one guy who has been arrested so far was using one of those babies.

Re:Shield

[scotch]

The really dangerous lasers are infrared. Certain frequencies in the infrared do major corneal or retinal damage. This happens without the eye owner knowing that it's happening.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[Greyfox]

Try 300 mph. IIRC stall speed on a 747 is around 155MPH. Also IIRC final approach speed is about 300mph up until the last few hundred feet. It's been a while since I've been over any of that, so if we have any airline pilots who'd like to provide exact numbers, please feel free.

The upshot of that being that it should be almost impossible to target the cabin by hand prior to the last couple hundred feet, and then you'd most likely have to be standing right in front of the plane for it to do any good. I also have my doubts that any automated system available to civilians could target a plane's cabin and hold that target for any amount of time at all.

That being said, I rather doubt that the space program will miss these nimrods if we throw a few of them behind bars for a few years. At the very least, that should put the kibosh on the public hysteria and perhaps make the rest of the nimrods out there reconsider their choice of laser targets in the future.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That makes sense. My original comment came from a foolish period in my younger days when I had a very nice Mazda Miata for a rental, I had just come off a marathon coding session in Las Vegas, and was headed for the strip at 2:00am passing the airport. I decided to clock a landing jet- and it came in at just about 100MPH. No, I don't remember what the jet was- for all I remember it might have been a small gulfstream, not a passenger plane at all.

OTOH- I think one would find it extremely hard to target the cockpit of any plane from the ground unless that plane was on final approach or takeoff. I still have my doubts about the reports over Oregon and Colorado that were supposed to take place at 30,000 feet.....

Re:Can anyone explain...

[YrWrstNtmr]

Have you ever hung out near an airport and watched aircraft land? On final approach, there isn't a whole lot of apparent motion, unti they get quite close. Landing is not that much nose up, until the get close to the ground. With a scope, it wouldn't be too hard to track the cockpit from a good distance off.

Add in scatter off the windshield, and eyes adjusted to night, and a couple of seconds would be enough to screw a pilots night vision, and completely distract him during a critical part of the flight. The workload for a pilot during a landing is quite enough, without throwing in "hey..I can't see the ground!"

Actually injuring/destroying the eyes is not necessary.

Re:How to aim at a target 1000's of feet away?

[scotch]

What matters is apparent motion. There is much less apparent motion for many jets-on-final scenarios than there was in the JFK assassination. Also, with a sufficiently powerful laser, pulsing, scanning, and essentially unlimited ammo, the threat of delivering enough energy to a pilots eye ball is quite real. Laser blinding is something the military worries about. For a few thousand dollars, some technical know-how, and a scientific or indurstrial catalog, you could put together a system that would be quite a nuisance at any airport.

IOW, your 100 mph number doesn't mean jack shit. If you want to pull numbers out of your ass and throw them around, I'd suggest starting with radial velocity, beam divergence, target jitter, angular extent of target, laser energy, pulse width, and physiological response.

That said, I think the threat is way overblown; the overhyping doesn't serve any interest except to keep the nation-of-fear tense and gullible.