> 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.
I 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.
You 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
Locating 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.
"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.
Just 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.
A 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.
How 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.
Not US, but I recall at least one story of an ER helicopter pilot in Poland, whose dream of flying was ruined after getting hit by a laser during one flight, and suffering enough eye damage to permanently disqualify him from piloting.
I do get being upset about apparent disconnects in criminal justice proportionality; I really do. And the US legal system is brimming with them, even before you get other problems.
But I rather suspect campaigning to reduce the penalties for lasering aircraft is a doomed effort.
"No one has died yet" is true until it's suddenly not.
If the penalty for doing this was a modest slap on the wrist, that would be a completely ineffective deterrent for an activity that is very easy to get away with and hard to prosecute in the first place.
It seems the only options to prevent misuse here are to restrict the sale of laser pointers, or make the penalty for improper use so well-known and draconian that no one would want to take the chance of being caught.
Problem being the degree of penalty is irrelevant because most of the perpetrators either have no idea it's illegal or don't know it's possible to be caught.
Your awareness of the actual risk of doing something illegal is not a factor. Do any harm at all to a person having a medical condition--known or unknown to you or them--leading to their death and that's a homicide rap.
I've had a laser hit a plane i was flying. I was basically blind for a minute after that. Had my engine failed in that minute, or had some other emergency occurred that needed my attention and eyes, i'd be dead, and so would some people under my plane.
I felt the same as you but in a previous discussion here on hn people informed me that you can now get 5000mW handheld lasers. That changes things significantly, that could do eye damage immediately.
There is a lot of places to push for decriminalization and lighter prison sentences in America. We ruin lives and ravage communities over minor, sometimes victimless, crimes. There is a ton of value for us as a nation to focus on this problem and undo the damage done by "tough on crime" stances..... but I don't know if "shining laser pointers in pilot's eyes" is where I would start. It's dumb, reckless and has such a high potential for tragedy.
Of the 1000s of incidents that get reported each year, I'm still waiting to hear about the aircraft that has gone down because someone pointed a consumer grade laser into the cockpit.
Is it an obnoxious thing to do? Certainly, but claims that it's dangerous don't have any legitimacy if there's no evidence to back it up.
> I'm still waiting to hear about the aircraft that has gone down
So sad to hear. No one shines a laser on an aircraft accidentally, and it is not like the police are using lasers as an excuse to systematically punish a minority. We don't need to wait for a tragedy to happen here.
Lasers 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
Yes, 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.
Most 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.
You 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.
Some of the projections in your video seemed to cross windows. Would there have been any danger to someone in the building who happened to pass by one of those windows at the time?
Are 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)
Just 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
It'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.
Lasers 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.
Having 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.
While 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.
Its 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.
It'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.
Sort of: laser-glases protect against specific wavelengths.
This is great when you are using a laser yourself as you can just get glasses that block the wavelength of your laser. It's better than nothing for pilots, since you can block against 1 or 2 of the most common wavelengths.
However if a particular wavelength were standard for protective eyewear, then an attacker would just get a different wavelength.
Unfortunately it wouldn't really do anything for pilots at night. The big effect when a shitty overpowered laser pointer hits windshield is that suddenly you have huge light bloom, blinding eyes prepared to operate in darkness (because you need to see outside).
The light-bloom is monochromatic though. For the case of one of (pilot|copilot) wearing one of these during takeoff/landing, that should be sufficient to mitigate much of the harm, right?
First thought would be to remove the windows entirely, replacing them with computer-screens. Then those could display the outside (perhaps with augmentations/filters) from cams.
Could have multiple cams, some of which might have shielding in different directions, with the screens showing a composite-image from the cams that seem to be working well.
Even a poorly-designed system that accidentally shows a laser should at least not hurt the pilots, as the screens wouldn't be able to show anything brighter than white-pixels. Sorta like how someone flashing a laser-pointer in your eyes over a video-call can't actually hurt your eyes.
Though a well-designed system ought to be able to maintain a pretty reliable view outside, allowing the pilots to still see outside even while they're actively being hit.
Or, maybe allow the pilots to rotate the screens away to reveal windows in the event of an electrical/computer problem. But primarily as a backup -- presumably an augmented-reality display that's protected from issues like laser-attacks would be the preference when everything's working right.
Or.. I guess pilots could get augmented-reality glasses/helmets with their own cameras to do the same in modern aircraft, if it's a major problem in the short-term. Perhaps not as robust in the absence of externally-mounted cameras on the plane itself, and perhaps not quite as comfortable if the glasses/helmet are bulky.
I think a better solution would be a pure materials approach of adding window coatings or internal layers which selectively reflect/polarize most of the light from the standard laser wavelengths available to the public.
An additional solution implementing electronics could be equipping all windows and possibly other areas on the craft with sensors which sound an alarm the instant any laser light is detected so that the pilots become aware of the problem before it takes its effect. Having two pilots and an autopilot also helps with this but this does nothing for most single pilot aircraft.
I'll bite. Lazing a pilot endangers a lot more than one person's sight. It's not even close to being equivalent with someone doing it to one person who's not flying a plane.
I really don't want a regulatory eye turned towards lasers, at least during a media cycle. Determined assholes will just take apart their BDR players. It'll stop most kids I guess, but I think more media coverage could lead to more behaviour like this.
I think it should be assault. Yes its more serious when doing it to someone operating a vehicle, doubly so for aircraft, but that doesn't make it ok to do it to randoms.
I dont particularly think we need new laws though, intentionally hurting someone is already illegal. The mechanism shouldn't matter.
Of course these are all illegal assault, and an assault with high potential of permanent damage is itself very serious, but an assault on a surgeon in the middle of a critical operation is both an assault and one attempted murder, for a pilot considerably more..
If 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.
I 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
> 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).
All 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.
This 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.
67 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI wonder how they can locate the persons doing this? Good thing they are able to at least fine some of them.
Pretty good accuracy.
Source: am pilot, have done this, talked to police for follow-up
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.
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.
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.
> 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-f...
Get it?
But I rather suspect campaigning to reduce the penalties for lasering aircraft is a doomed effort.
A slap on the wrist for him, because shit happens? I don't think so.
I mean this scenario has not happened yet, as far as I know, but eventually it will, if idiots keep doing it.
It is an assault, that can lead to injury or death. It is not a prank. It is a crime and deserves to be treated as one.
If the penalty for doing this was a modest slap on the wrist, that would be a completely ineffective deterrent for an activity that is very easy to get away with and hard to prosecute in the first place.
It seems the only options to prevent misuse here are to restrict the sale of laser pointers, or make the penalty for improper use so well-known and draconian that no one would want to take the chance of being caught.
How could someone possibly not be aware that trying to blind a pilot would be illegal?
I mean, trying to blind anyone is illegal. But a pilot that's actively flying a plane?
I still agree with you about the prison time.
Is it an obnoxious thing to do? Certainly, but claims that it's dangerous don't have any legitimacy if there's no evidence to back it up.
So sad to hear. No one shines a laser on an aircraft accidentally, and it is not like the police are using lasers as an excuse to systematically punish a minority. We don't need to wait for a tragedy to happen here.
Hopefully they'll be ready with a big campaign when the first major crash is caused by one of these idiots.
https://youtu.be/zAfagq8PjpM https://youtu.be/Wrn6Ym9BG8s https://youtu.be/KU56w8MX5Rk https://youtu.be/NIOh9-RoAaE
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
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.
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.
(And just to be clear, I'm not asking for instructions on this)
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.
I’m sure that “hit” was readily visible to the laser operator.
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.
This is great when you are using a laser yourself as you can just get glasses that block the wavelength of your laser. It's better than nothing for pilots, since you can block against 1 or 2 of the most common wavelengths.
However if a particular wavelength were standard for protective eyewear, then an attacker would just get a different wavelength.
Could have multiple cams, some of which might have shielding in different directions, with the screens showing a composite-image from the cams that seem to be working well.
Even a poorly-designed system that accidentally shows a laser should at least not hurt the pilots, as the screens wouldn't be able to show anything brighter than white-pixels. Sorta like how someone flashing a laser-pointer in your eyes over a video-call can't actually hurt your eyes.
Though a well-designed system ought to be able to maintain a pretty reliable view outside, allowing the pilots to still see outside even while they're actively being hit.
Or, maybe allow the pilots to rotate the screens away to reveal windows in the event of an electrical/computer problem. But primarily as a backup -- presumably an augmented-reality display that's protected from issues like laser-attacks would be the preference when everything's working right.
Or.. I guess pilots could get augmented-reality glasses/helmets with their own cameras to do the same in modern aircraft, if it's a major problem in the short-term. Perhaps not as robust in the absence of externally-mounted cameras on the plane itself, and perhaps not quite as comfortable if the glasses/helmet are bulky.
An additional solution implementing electronics could be equipping all windows and possibly other areas on the craft with sensors which sound an alarm the instant any laser light is detected so that the pilots become aware of the problem before it takes its effect. Having two pilots and an autopilot also helps with this but this does nothing for most single pilot aircraft.
I really don't want a regulatory eye turned towards lasers, at least during a media cycle. Determined assholes will just take apart their BDR players. It'll stop most kids I guess, but I think more media coverage could lead to more behaviour like this.
I dont particularly think we need new laws though, intentionally hurting someone is already illegal. The mechanism shouldn't matter.
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.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aoc.web.management/vi...
What's with this pattern of incidents around the end of the year?
> 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?
Unless they repeatedly do it from the same location.
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.