5 ms·

Even without blinking, the plane is quite far away and moving with great speed. How could a laser actually get pointed into someone's eye for more than 0.2s?

• cyberferret 7y ago
  Never had it done to me while flying, but from talking to colleagues, the aircraft windscreen can diffuse the light signal so it is not a pin point anymore, but rather a wide splash of colour. That image in the article (while probably posted for dramatic effect) sounds like what another pilot I've spoken to experienced when a suspected laser was pointed at his cockpit.
  • tashi 7y ago
    Yes, from the pictures it looks like the light diffracts off the glass and fills the cockpit. The plane moves fast but it's also far away, so the angle it changes by relative to the guy with the pointer is small. To follow it, you wouldn't have to move the tip of the pointer more than (if my rough calculations are right) about a centimeter a second.
    • cyberferret 7y ago
      Even a split second of that bright flash is enough to make you lose your night vision and leave dancing squiggles all over your retina. Ever had someone's camera flash go off in a dark room? Now imagine that disorientation and loss of vision when you are in charge of several hundred tonnes of metal, plastic and glass containing 200+ souls hurtling towards ground contact. At that point of the flight, the pilot's eyes are constantly jumping from a methodical scan of internal instruments to the runway and back. Anything that distracts or jeopardises that process can snowball into a big problem. In many ways, the short term effects of a laser pointer pose a far more serious threat to safety.
• dmitrygr 7y ago
  This has happened to me while piloting a small plane over oakland. What happens is that the light hits the cockpit front window. That diffuses it throughout the cockpit. It blinds your momentarily. And you lose any and all night adaptation in your eyes. This particularly sucks on moonless nights, and doubly so when you have to look out the window to land.
  • fromthestart 7y ago
    Well, that's sort of good news then, you're reducing power density by what, 2-3 orders of magnitude? So much less likely to cause permanent damage. Edit: not sure why people are downvoting. If the point source is spread by diffracting through the window, count of photons per unit area is reduced in proportion to the square of the difference in radius from, say, an inch or so, depending on the spread of the beam with distance, to a large enough cone to apparently light up the cockpit. Which means a 1mW laser goes from ≈1mW/in^2 to ≈.01mW/in^2 if the cone spreads to a diameter of 10 inches by the time it hits the pilot's eye.
    • jaggederest 7y ago
      All of the high power lasers I've seen are fully capable of blinding people off tertiary or quaternary reflections from even relatively low albedo surfaces. Even closing your eyes is not sufficient for some of them. They can light up your eyelids brightly enough to cause damage even reflected twice. So even a glancing contact will give you a full dazzle, blinding you for at least a few minutes, and possibly permanent damage if you're unlucky.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • kentm 7y ago
        Are lasers at those power levels generally available to the public?
        • 7y ago
• joering2 7y ago
  And it had to be from up above the plane! I mean pilots sit in "shadow zone" (so to speak) in relation to anything on Earth. So the only situation in which such laser could actually harm and burn someone eyes, is the source came from another plane, flying above. Its quite possible - so many times on my flights I see planes below me going the opposite way.
  • ilikepi 7y ago
    If your hypothesis was true -- that the pilots eyes are always obscured from the ground by the plane's fuselage -- it would also be impossible for the pilot to see any part of the ground from the cockpit. This is easily debunked with a Google image search of photos taken by pilots looking out cockpit windows.
  • acchow 7y ago
    You can see some ground from the cockpit.