Laser Incidents With Aircraft On the Rise 546
EqualSlash writes "High-power laser pointers available for cheap are increasingly finding abuse as the ultimate long-distance weapons of pranksters and vandals. The Federal Aviation Administration says laser events aimed on planes have nearly doubled in the last year, leaping from 1,527 in 2009 to 2,836 in 2010. The highest number of incidents was reported at Los Angeles International Airport, which recorded 102 in 2010. Lasers pointed at cockpits can temporarily blind pilots, forcing them to give up control of an aircraft to their co-pilot or abort a take-off/landing. In March of 2008, unidentified individuals wielding four green laser pointers launched a coordinated attack on six incoming planes at Sydney Airport, which resulted in a ban on all laser pointers in the state of New South Wales."
How do you hit the cockpit? (Score:3, Insightful)
sad thing is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can somebody, pls find all the idiots involved (Score:4, Insightful)
and just beat the shit out of them for being well on their way towards having those fun laser pointers banned completely?
Re:sad thing is ... (Score:2, Insightful)
A handgun has precious little chance of knocking down an airliner from the ground.
And cars are much more dangerous weapons than handguns.
Accidental? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only pilots who are pussies (Score:4, Insightful)
Lasers pointed at cockpits can temporarily blind pilots
Please cite examples of pilots who have temporarily been "blinded" by a laser.
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
But America has given up on things like trigonometry, math and science, in favor of bullshit like this. The current situation is 1) Pilot and copilot see red dot jump momentarily around the cockpit and decide to report the incident, 2) Pilot and copilot agree to overstate the harm done to them in an effort to persuade authorities that this is a "serious problem" 3) The media gets hold of the story and distorts it further, screaming for the death penalty for anyone who owns a laser pointer and lives within 10 miles of an airport. But no one is willing to do the math.
Yeah it's irresponsible to point lasers at airplanes. Call me if ever there's a serious incident that puts an aircraft in danger.
Re:Accidental? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, that's right... People accidentally aimed lasers into the pupils of pilots when the planes were far enough out that the pointer-holder couldn't tell the difference between a plane and a star.
Learn some geometry and fucking get real.
Re:I've had it.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be new here. You can cuss as much as you want here:
"I've had it... with these fucking lasers on this fucking plane!"
Re:Accidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't go near airports to watch the stars.
Transposed Conditionals (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an example of the "fallacy of the transposed conditional" and how people use it to justify legislation that does nothing to address the problem.
See if you can assign a likelihood (high or low) to the following:
Probability that someone has a laser, given that they shined one at an airplane,
Probability that someone shines one at an airplane, given that they have a laser.
The likelihood that anyone having a laser will use it against an airplane is so astronomically small that legislation will have no appreciable effect, but will inconvenience many people.
The logic is precisely backwards, but it sounds like a justification.
Someone should introduce the legislators down under to Bayes Theorem.
it's a safety of flight issue... (Score:2, Insightful)
IAAP and we've had the cockpit lasered before. While it's certainly unlikely that the laser beam will hit your pupils directly, the pressing issue is, you can very quickly lose your night vision when the beam is refracted/scattered by the windshield. On short final (when these idiots are lasering the cockpits) a loss of night vision (likely) or partial blindness (less likely) will jeopardize the safety of everyone aboard during the approach.
Re:No! Lasers don't blind pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they don't.
There has not been a single case of a pilot blinded by lasers, nor is it likely there ever will be.
Not only do pilots look at the (rather tall) instrument board most at the time, and don't stare at scenery, but it's also impossible to keep the laser pointer pointed at a moving target at any distance. If anyone were able to do so, don't fine them -- hire them as gunners for the military, because that kind of precision is supernatural.
And at the distance a plane is away, combined with the rather thick windows of a plane, even if a superhuman was able to hit the eye of a pilot for a fraction of a second, it would have far less of an impact than a quick glance at the sun, something people frequently do.
Plain and simple, this is FUD, and another attempt at at the same time scaring people and showing that the powers do something about it.
Re:Says the guy with no flying experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
... however considering that these beams are usually powered by 5/1000ths of a watt or so, it's not a lot of energy to start with (the sun puts out around 24 times much energy per square centimeter). It's far less than 5 mW if you're not getting the whole "beam".
Your argument is like saying that a 600,000 volt stun gun is only powered by one 9 volt battery.
It's true, but irrelevant when you're lying on the ground twitching.
I suspect that the impact on night vision is not much greater than looking at the instruments (which also emit light in a dark cockpit, and have to be checked quite often as you know).
And now you're just making stuff up, but if you're confident in your assesment,
I'd encourage you to test the effects of a green laser to the eyes from 3 miles away.
Re:Yes, PLEASE ban cars! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but I've already had to fend off one attempted home invasion (in Phoenix) with my shotgun, so unless you have first-hand experience with violent criminals, I think your opinion is worthless.
I didn't create a violent, dangerous society. That would be the criminal class who did, plus stupid laws and courts who let violent criminals out early, while keeping non-violent drug offenders in. Don't look at me, I didn't vote for the people who did that; if I had my way, drugs would all be decriminalized.
The "rest of you" don't have the same situation we do. If you're in Europe, you live in small, homogeneous countries, so you don't have all the race and poverty problems we do. It's a lot easier to get along when you don't have giant groups of people mired in poverty for whatever reason.
Finally, even here, criminals don't always have guns, because they're not THAT easy to get (thanks to background check laws). So to commit a "gun crime", a criminal has to steal a gun first, and then commit a crime with it. But most criminals don't need guns for their crimes; they use other weapons: bats, knives, or good old-fashioned fists. They spend lots of time in prison pumping iron, so they're ready to use their physical size when they get out.
How exactly do you propose a 90-pound woman to defend herself against a 250 pound man? That's what guns are for, to level the field for physically disadvantaged people.
Re:Can somebody, pls find all the idiots involved (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sad thing is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You speak of Iran and N. Korea being examples of nuclear bans working. Really??? Technology/infrastructure is limiting them more than some 'ban' imposed by other nations. They are going slower because other nations are not doing it for them, they are not going slower because of a ban.
You seem to be confused. There's no ban inside these countries: their governments are acting according to their own laws. The "ban" is that other governments are embargoing any materials which would help them to make their own bombs: centrifuges, various industrial equipment, etc. And so, the ban is working: these countries haven't been terribly successful so far. NK has been more so, with one very low-yield test.
Just like a ban on high explosives limits an American citizen to whatever he can make in his garage, the international ban (really embargo) on NK and Iran is limiting them to what they can make all by themselves, which has severely limited them. No, it isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing: without an embargo, these countries would simply buy the equipment they needed, and they'd already have high-yield bombs by now. Just like I could buy some C-4 if it weren't banned, instead of trying to make it myself (which is probably not feasible).
As far as other bombs go, ask people in OKC how affective that is.
Go try to buy yourself enough fertilizer to blow up a building and see how successful you are. Or go try to buy some demolitions explosives. These things are tracked and limited now by the government.
Heroin is not easy to make yourself, nor is it easy to setup growing/refining operations and yet I could get some with a phone call. Do you think Cocaine is easy to make from scratch? The reason the ban doesn't work is because lots of people ignore the ban.
Wrong. These things aren't banned everywhere: it's perfectly legal to make heroin and cocaine in various central and south American countries, so it's made there, and smuggled here. As I said before, bans don't work so well when it's easy to get it from somewhere else. Besides, it's apparently not that hard to make cocaine, since a bunch of uneducated people in Columbia can do it just fine in makeshift buildings in the jungle. That doesn't sound like something difficult to me, just something that requires 1) farmed coca leaves, and 2) some manpower. That's not at all like something that requires high-tech machinery to manufacture.
Banning cigarettes would be far less affective than just everyone thinking they aren't cool.
Yes, again, because it would be easy to get around the ban: they'd simply grow tobacco elsewhere and import it here, just like they do with other drugs. Or, they'd grow it here, just like they do with pot. It's a plant, not a manufactured item. All you do is stick it in the ground and let it grow. Sure, you can get higher quality with better farming techniques or whatever, but these plants aren't genetically engineered, they're found in nature.
Now, for an alternate example, look at microprocessors. Suppose the government decided to ban all CPUs with more power than PIII. And suppose all other industrialized nations passed the same ban. Of course, they wouldn't be able to get all the ones already made, but they could easily stop all new ones from being made. Fabs are huge and extremely expensive, and it's not like you could set one up in a hut in the jungle somewhere. The knowledge needed to make CPUs is staggering, so getting a group of uneducated third-worlders isn't going to help you. Even if you have a few people who know a lot about them, it's not something you could possibly make in your garage because of the materials and equipment needed, not to mention the enormous capital costs. So here, if the governments decided to make high-power CPUs for themselves only, and ban them for everyone else, that ban would be very effective, and there's really nothing you or anyone else could do about it, even if all the people did want to ignore the ban.
Re:sad thing is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A single person gunning down a politician IS a crazy person. The only way a revolution ever works is to have a sufficient number of people organized and committed to the plan beforehand. This is usually called a "coup", and renamed to a "revolution" after it gains steam and popular support and starts looking successful. It doesn't start with one person shooting, and hundreds or thousands of people spontaneously joining in.
Just look at how America's Founding Fathers revolted. There were some riots and such beforehand due to very unpopular Crown policies and taxes, but the real revolution was carefully planned and prepared for by high-ranking, experienced people.
Shooting some random politician (not even one that's nationally known or especially notorious), or blowing up some unimportant Federal building, is NOT the start of a revolution, it's just some nutcase who thinks he's starting one. If you don't have plenty of people already backing you up before the first shot is fired, you'll never succeed.