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FAA Releases Data Showing Trends in Dangerous Laser Strikes
- Gys 5y ago> 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. I wonder how they can locate the persons doing this? Good thing they are able to at least fine some of them.
- throwaway894345 5y agoAccording to TFA, there's a reporting form, so presumably it's people on the ground who are reporting others.
- heavyset_go 5y agoI read an article about this years ago. You can use triangulation or trilateration, or something similar to them, to ascertain the point on the ground from which the laser was shined.
- sva_ 5y agoDepends what kind of aircraft. There are a bunch of videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75aUKIIY1Lg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75aUKIIY1Lg
- ineedasername 5y agoWow, that was pretty amazing. "He chucked something into the corner near the garden". Pretty good accuracy.
- dmitrygr 5y agoYou call it in to the ATC, give an approximate "from" location, they dispatch local police, and often enough they find someone on the ground with a visible laser beam aimed up. Source: am pilot, have done this, talked to police for follow-up
- dogma1138 5y agoLocating is rather easy, you get a rough location just by having the altitude, position, heading and inclination of the aircraft you can also see which direction the beam is coming from so you can probably easily triangulate to a few blocks. 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.
- Causality1 5y ago"Trends in dangerous laser strikes" as if the worst consequence out of the tens of thousands of laser strikes so far wasn't one guy making one visit to a doctor. Exploding cell phones have killed more people than laser strikes. The FAA itself lists over thirty-two thousand laser strikes in the last five years alone, with zero deaths. 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.
- heavyset_go 5y agoJust because it hasn't resulted in death doesn't mean it can't, or that it can't cause other problems. 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.
- ffhhj 5y agoHmm > 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-federal-prison-pointing-laser-san-antonio-police-helicopter https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtx/pr/schertz-man-sentenced-f...
- newbamboo 5y agoA week is the same as forever for all intents and purposes. Blinding a pilot can and will eventually kill people. You have to be a moron not to understand that.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoHow about just don't fuck with airplanes? Don't fuck around when you're on the airplane. And don't fuck around when you're on the ground below the airplane. Get it?
- brokenmachine 5y ago
- lovemenot 5y agoThe FAA seems to want to educate people to mitigate the problem. Hopefully they'll be ready with a big campaign when the first major crash is caused by one of these idiots.
- camjohnson26 5y agoI wonder how effective this is when weaponized since lasers seem like a cheap way to disable aircraft. A few protests have used them already. https://youtu.be/zAfagq8PjpM https://youtu.be/zAfagq8PjpM https://youtu.be/Wrn6Ym9BG8s https://youtu.be/Wrn6Ym9BG8s https://youtu.be/KU56w8MX5Rk https://youtu.be/KU56w8MX5Rk https://youtu.be/NIOh9-RoAaE https://youtu.be/NIOh9-RoAaE
- echelon 5y agoLasers are single-wavelength, so it seems like you could coat the windshield with nanometer selective bandstop filters. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans
- shadowgovt 5y agoWhat does that do to the pilot's visibility through the window?
- amelius 5y agoQuestion: does a pilot even need a window, given that they should be able to fly in all weather conditions including heavy fog?
- dogma1138 5y agoYes, flying on instruments only is considerably riskier than flying with/on visual. 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.
- sokoloff 5y agoMost flights have a visual portion. While it’s legal to takeoff 0/0 and legal to land in 100/0.5 (or lower for Cat-III), airplanes are overwhelmingly flown in visual conditions. 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.
- dogma1138 5y agoYou won’t find a filter that blocks exactly 532nm light and most lasers aren’t that exact, blocking 500-600nm blocks more than a 5th of the visible spectrum and green is used for signaling specifically for landing, take off and taxi.
- ineedasername 5y agoAre people using something to help aim their laser? How do you accurately even target something like that so far away where you don't even know if you've hit the object? (And just to be clear, I'm not asking for instructions on this)
- dmitrygr 5y agoJust momentary swiping of laser across the cockpit is already quite debilitating. Precise targeting is not necessary. I've had lasers aimed at me while i was flying, and it is so bright that it blinds you for a minute or so. The actual laser strike on the aircraft was maybe 1/10 of a second long
- kesslern 5y agoIt's a classic survival technique to use a mirror to signal aircraft using the sun's reflection. In boy scouts I was taught to extend a "peace" sign outward and align the aircraft between my fingers, put the mirror near the eye, and bounce the reflection across the fingers.
- techrat 5y agoLasers still expand as the beam travels. The dot when you aim at your hand is smaller than the dot on the wall 10 feet away. 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.
- sokoloff 5y agoHaving been hit in a high-wing 182, I’d say it’s going to be quite apparent when you’ve hit the target. Half the wing lit up blindingly bright (when night adapted). I’m sure that “hit” was readily visible to the laser operator.
- literallyaduck 5y agoWhile shining a laser at an airplane is serious, laser pointing at anyone I belive should carry the same weight. Try to blind a driver, person you don't like, cop, firefighter, or anyone period the same penalty should apply. We don't need a class system and should punish them all equally. Maybe, if it is a vehicle driver while the vehicle is in motion it should be attempted murder charge for each person in the vehicle.
- tryptophan 5y agoIts also ridiculously easy to blind someone with a laser. You can buy a cheap, absurdly powerful, chineese laser pointer and blind someone by accident in less than a second.
- mometsi 5y agoIt's also ridiculously difficult to blind someone with a laser from far away. 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.
- ewokone 5y agoThanks and excellently written!
- taf2 5y agoIs there possibly a reflective glass for cars and planes that could help mitigate this? I found this doing a quick google https://www.laserpointersafety.com/laserglasses/laserglasses.html https://www.laserpointersafety.com/laserglasses/laserglasses...
- tzs 5y agoIf you want to be really serious about this, you fly some bait planes around. The bait planes contain a very powerful gas laser with a phase conjugate mirror designed so that any incoming laser light that enters is amplified and reversed so it gets sent back where it came from but powerful enough to make it really easy to find the (remains of) whoever fired at the plane. 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.
- barbazoo 5y agoHere's the link to the data on Tableau: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aoc.web.management/viz/LaserEventViz/LaserEvents20102020 https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aoc.web.management/vi... What's with this pattern of incidents around the end of the year?
- aftbit 5y agoRandom guess... people get lasers for Christmas.
- DarkContinent 5y agoWas there a regulatory change in 2015 that caused the spike in reported strikes that year?
- LatteLazy 5y agoIf memory serves, there were a bunch of news stories of someone doing it. Other idiots then copied...
- mmorris 5y agoClearly this calls for AR goggles for pilots, with built-in filters for high-intensity light.
- culopatin 5y agoI flew out of Chile last year and while taking off the plane had 5 different people hit it with green lasers. It is crazy how well you can see at night where it’s coming from. I’m pretty sure that with a video you could figure out exactly what house it’s coming from. Unfortunately for me I love looking out the window and some of those hit me right in the eye and it really disrupted my vision for a while
- eatbitseveryday 5y ago> Pilots reported 6,852 laser strikes to the FAA last year, up from 6,136 in 2019. > 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?
- edgedetector 5y agoAll the pilot has is an approximate location, which is then reported to the FAA (I assume). By the time the relevant authorities are dispatched, the person has most likely stowed the laser. There is not enough specific information (address, name, etc) to get a proper warrant, so the crime goes completely unpunished. The cases that do get punished are probably repeat or persistent offenders.
- zardo 5y ago> Hard to catch people shining lasers? Unless they repeatedly do it from the same location.
- sschueller 5y agoThis and the fact that these handheld lasers are shined into crowds is the reason almost all laser pointer except the dimmest ones are now illegal in Switzerland. 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.