FAA goes to the Web to fight lasers directed at aircraft battle | Hacker News Reader

FAA goes to the Web to fight lasers directed at aircraft battle

networkworld.com

10 pointscoondoggie14 comments

Does anyone know more about this phenomenon than the little in this and similar articles I've seen recently?

Pointing a laser at an airplane thousands of feet in the air traveling hundreds of miles an hour for long enough that a pilot notices the dot seems an impressive feat. Thinking about the geometry involved with the position of the cockpit windows on most airplanes, it also seems like it must be done from far away horizontally, at a fairly low angle.

It seems to my naive interpretation that accomplishing this would be substantially more than just a small prank.

You don't need scientific facts anymore - just a lawyer

"FAA released what it called a legal interpretation, which finds that directing a laser beam into an aircraft cockpit could interfere with a flight crew performing its duties while operating an aircraft"

If only they would release a legal interpretation that aircraft can fly without engines we would save a fortune in fuel, reduce noise and GHG emmisions.

Sigh. You know, there are some topics on which I might agree with your jaded view. But a topic like this? Where there is real risk of harm? And where the FAA is trying to figure out which laws they might use to protect people from such harm? I think your sarcasm is misplaced in this instance.

This is also after a 4 year study, which is on the FAA page(http://www.faa.gov/aircraft/safety/report/laserinfo/).

The study found that shining eye-safe levels of laser light into the eyes of pilots in a simulator affected their performance - it didn't show that it's possible to shine a mW laser pointer from the ground up into the cockpit of an aircraft and keep lock on a pilots eye for long enough to have any effect.

If it did then somebody is wasting an awful lot of money on air superiority fighters when the country could be defended by a grid of laser pointers from Staples.

Read the other posts in the thread. artmageddon's in particular. For an aircraft on landing approach, it's low enough that even a small fraction of a second's exposure can cause flash blindness.

The same FAA that forces you to put liquid in your checked baggage unless you label it saline - yet insists that you only put Li-Ion batteries with the energy capacity of a grenade in the cabin.

That has for years resisted smoke hoods being required while deciding that aircraft that only fly upto 300mi offshore aren't really over water and don't need life rafts.

That increases spending on staff moral while cutting local ATC and is so far behind in it's plans for radar at small airports that it's not funny.

You're confusing the TSA and the FAA.

The FAA is in charge of what goes on the plane FAA Office of Security & Hazardous Materials Safety http://ash.faa.gov

You have to love calling the office of Hazardous Materials Safety "ASH" !

That's things like flammables, combustibles, weapons and more insidiously dangerous things like mercury (eats away at aluminium, which is common in airplane bodywork).

Private pilot here - while I've never experienced a laser incident while flying (and I sure as hell never want to), it's not as hard to hit an aircraft with a laser as you might think. People who do this aren't targeting 767's at 33,000 - they're hitting the ones taxiing on the ground, those flying at low altitudes, or worse, those in the pattern for a landing. The night blindness from getting hit with a laser can have fatal consequences, and it carries serious penalties.

See the image at the lower right on the first page for a sampling of the effects of being hit with a green laser(warning: PDF): http://www.ifalpa.org/downloads/Level1/Briefing%20Leaflets/M...

Law enforcement takes these sorts of things very seriously. Here's a video(SFW) of one person who hit a police helicopter and was arrested minutes later:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6617532/guy-shines-laser-p...

With your average presentation style red laser pointer I don't think there's any chance you'd be able to disturb a pilot. The astronomy pointer lasers and similar high powered units are what I understand to be the issue. They still look the same as a regular laser pointer pen, but emit a much more intense beam that remains visible for several miles.

When I played with a unit a friend had, at 200 yards the beam was already ~3' in diameter--so it's not exactly a tiny dot your trying to aim. In addition, you can see the beam as it travels through air, making it much easier to align if you were trying to aim it at something distant.

Edit: For a decent video of these handheld units in action, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAeF_bTF9CM. Units can be acquired relatively cheaply now (sub $100) which probably explains why this is an increasing trend.

Were you at the other end of that 200 yard beam? I remember playing with presentation lasers when I was a teenager. At night, you could light up the side of a building, visibly, from over a kilometer away. The divergence factor is certainly substantial - this makes it easier to hit a plane from distance - but it's still very bright. I remember thinking that they would make useful point-to-point morse code transmitters at night, because the "dot" is highly visible at the other end of the beam, even over substantial distances.

But I'd certainly agree that the astronomy lasers are a far bigger threat, the presentation lasers are more likely to be just a minor nuisance over any kind of range.

So, is this an example of the US Federal Govt making a reasonable, non-hysterical response to a new-ish emerging threat?

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