Aiming on airplanes

Pilots themselves at http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/349414-l-sers-attacks-aircraft.html has described what happens when you shine a laser when they fly. You need to register to read the post.

ITS EXTREMLY DANGEROUS TO DO SO.

They are totally furious about those new gadgets!
They don't even understand that a 13 year don't understand that its dangerous to point a laser on an aircraft. That is how angry they are about them.

Raptor

can you paste the article here in the thread raptor

It's a discussion with pilots. Difficult to copy

Some links to news where kids shine the laser on aircrafts.

I remember when I was in the army, we had these wargame devices attached to our rifles that would emit a laser flash whenever the weapon was fired. You'd also wear a vest with sensors on it to record a "hit" when the other units fired at you. Basically, a very sophisticated form of laser tag. If I remember correctly, the system was called M.I.L.E.S.

Along with the lasers and sensors for all the men, each unit commander was also issued a "god gun". It looked like an old time flare pistol, but it housed a laser that could "kill" any individual sensor unit or remotely re-activate a "killed" unit, so the soldier wearing it could re-join the battle (once you got "killed", your weapons laser became deactivated).

The point of me mentioning it, is that I was an RTO (radio operator) on night manuevers one time, and the lieutenant I was with, shined/fired his god gun at a pair of attack helicopters that were doing nape of the earth flying, in black out mode (no lights, no infrared, only starlight goggles the pilots wore). We weren't supposed to fire at aircraft, day or night, but the LT did it as a goof.

As soon as he lit up those birds, they both pulled up high and the lead one banked left, directly crossing the path of the trailing chopper. It was only luck and the grace of God they didn't have a mid-air. Seeing it all through my own pair of AN-PVS 4 goggles, it looked like they did make contact, but they didn't as they passed right across from each other. For me to see that like I did, they were probably only a couple of meters apart where their paths intersected.

Less than ten minutes later, an emergency ENDEX came over the radio (End Exercise).

They tried to find the one responsible but the LT never came forward and I didn't drop a dime on him.

Oooooh SHIT!

That MILES god gun would have had total a blinding effect on those in the helicopters wearing starlight goggles!

Was he a butterbar?  1st or 2nd LT, I think I would have narc'd him out!  

Ironbar said:

Oooooh SHIT!

That MILES god gun would have had total a blinding effect on those in the helicopters wearing starlight goggles!

Was he a butterbar?  1st or 2nd LT, I think I would have narc'd him out!  

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He was a 2nd lou, straight from West Point, maybe a year older than I was. (so much for the honor code I guess)
He was only with us for a couple of months and got sent to Ranger School; we never saw him again after that. -I can see his face, but for the life of me, I can't remember his name.

Anyway, regular airline pilots would probably just get pissed off if you lazed them, but a police chopper, with passive thermal imaging, would totally freak out (not to mention the very real possibility of a modded green laser pointer being able to permanently damage it's $20K thermal imager).

That's the first thing my neighbor wanted to do when I showed him my 50mw nova..I had to send him online to see all the people going to jail

$20k for a FLIR imaging system is rather cheap.
come on, you cant even get a good thermal camera on Ebay for less than $5k! and thats just a hand held FPA. the FLIR I believe is a sophisticated device using low thermal mass/high thermal conductivity (diamond) sub-straight with millions of high TC film detectors (like the superconductor YBCO) and it must be cooled to the transition temperature of the superconductor and kept stable at around 70 degrees kelvin. plus it has image stabilization, rotation, pan, tilt, zoom, focus, auto iris, some have image recognition, estimated path tracking (incase a car goes under a bridge it stays locked on) and so on.

Its worth a little more than the average car...

Its funny that we are talking about light amplification devices and lasers, I was just working with a 100watt 800nm diode earlier today, the only we i could see it was using a PMT.
Even at 10watts output it saturated the scope, i had to make an aperture that fit over the front lens with a pin hole punched in it in order to attenuate enough light that i wouldn't damage the PMT. and this was just imaging scatter from 10 feet away. its amazing how blinding IR (or almost any laser) is to light amplification devices!

There was a guy in Philadelphia who was arrested, booked, and jailed for hitting a airplane with a laser. Police were able to pinpoint his location based on the angle the laser hit the plane. They'll find you, depends how much time and work they put in.

rem

One of my favorite authors is Tom Clancy, he wrote “The Hunt for Red October”, “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger”, -among many others. He’s a very nuts and bolts type of writer, with his stories full of real technology and insider knowledge of the Intelligence community.

The reason I bring him up on this thread, is that a number of his stories contain actions, by both the good guys and bad guys, -that did not take place until after the books were published!

In one book, a couple of years before 911; he had a fully fueled 747 hijacked and flown into the Capitol building. Explaining in detail how the burning jet fuel killed more people and acted to destroy the building more than the damage inflicted by the aircraft itself.

Another book had a US Special Forces Team conducting black operations against Columbian cocaine Cartels. A few years later, the same type of mission, with a number of similarities, was run against the poppy fields and heroin manufacturing facilities in Afghanistan.

One book had a laser guided smart bomb, taking out a terrorist’s house –specifically to kill that one terrorist, leaving all the other houses around his undamaged. –Years before the US started doing it in actual practice.

There were a lot of others and I’ll try to find the article I read that listed them all, but the one in particular, relevant to this thread, is in his book “Debt of Honor”; where US operatives use a Laser Dazzler device, aimed at passenger aircraft just about to land. The agents fired the Dazzler at the cockpit of the airliner from the top floor of a hotel facing the landing planes. This allowed them to be directly level with the cockpit, fully exposing the Pilot to the disorienting ray at the most critical point of the flight –landing.

When the book came out, Clancy was criticized for this scene, as being too “science fictiony”. Clancy responded that the device indeed existed and he had seen the device being tested and evaluated with his own eyes. ”. –This was well before most people had even heard of the Dazzler or even green lasers.

Sooner or later, some terrorist is going to use a laser, whether a 15W Dazzler or 200W CO2, to blind a pilot and cause a real crash. When that happens, you probably won’t be able to buy a laser pointer anymore.

~SK

I can't believe the number of idiots concerned with the legality of doing such a thing, or the likelihood of being tracked down. It's every argument ever made against private ownership of lasers, rounded up in one thread.

An airplane may be carrying a lot of passengers, moving at speeds where a "near miss" is on the order of kilometers. Anyone who would care to so much as risk distracting the pilot (who is doing a tricky job with a million details to keep an eye on) with a laser has no business being around one, and should just put them in the trash before they get someone injured or killed. There's no way you're going to hit the pilot in the eye for an appreciable amount of time, but distracting the pilot isn't the least bit hard to do, and the range is essentially unlimited. If you have a telescope that can show you an orbiting satelite, you can point at it with the laser and will clearly see it (they measured the distance to the moon with lasers, or have y'all forgotten?). It's not eye damage we're worried about. It's a pilot getting startled and making a critical mistake at the wrong time. Don't ask about cops, laws or the likelihood of getting caught; instead, ask yourself if you would want to be the one telling the next of kin that your laser prank got dozens of people killed for no good reason.

Incidentally, the scenario mentioned by Clancy occured in Norway a short while ago. A greenie was aimed at the cockpit of an airplane about to land by a civilian from a distance of 10km. The pilot was fortunately able to pull the plane up at the last moment and the copilot was unaffected. If the timing had been different, he would not have been able to secure the aircraft.

150 people nearly died because of that prank.

Consequently, outlawing of the private ownership of lasers is now being considered here.

Despite my fondness for lasers, I can't really say that I'm opposed to it, either.

Maybe the laser beam could effect the airoplanes controls ,computer navigaction equipment or radar????

suiraM said:

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - A. Einstein

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Hey suiraM,
Regarding the quote you have in your sig.

I think Einstein just called me stupid...the kraut bastard!

He did not call you stupid.

He just said you're the product of a restrictive culture, and that you are a creature of habit, like a sheep. If you feel that it is an accurate description, then whether or not it constitutes an insult should provide clues as to whether there is something you should change, or something irrelevant said by a man that was different from you. If you do not feel that it is accurate, then it's something insightful that you're statistically unlikely to have understood.

Quite simple, really; he was making an observation, s'all.

I just happen to think he was a keen observer.