the scarriest moments of my life! post yours!

On Saturday I was shining my laser in the air, comming back from my girlfriends house while she was on the phone. We were trying to see how far she could see my laser in the air, I made it to my house and was able to point it in a certian direction where it passed right over her house and apparently you could see it VERY well.

the spot I pointed it there was a tree to the right, and a house to the left.. my view behind the house was blocked.. then all the sudden a helicopter or plane flashing red and blue lights starts to fly right into my beam, I turned it off before it actually did fly into it, but it was heading right for it!
I freaked out and went inside.

2 days later (yesterday) I was watching TV, then during the commercials it shows the news, it says "comming up tonight, local man shines his laser at a patrol plane almost endangering the pilot's life!" and while they are saying this it shows a green laser being pointed from an aircraft view!!! I'm freaking out here. I notice the view also looks EXACTLY like the view I was from, with a streetlight to the left of me.. same in the video shown.. However in this video it actually shows the laser hit the plane, a few times, with me it was only NEAR the plane.
I keep watching and wait till the news on, well thank god it wasn't me! look here!
http://www.king5.com/video/?z=y&nvid=283067
article here:
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_091508WAB_laser_pointer_wsp_plane_TP.7d84bf85.html


well besides the fact that the laser was actually being pointed at the plane, everything else in the video pretty much matched up, it was VERY scary.


does anyone else have any similar stories?

geez what an idiot!

i will have to send him a thank you letter for ruining it for the rest of us!

A similar thing happened to me, (except I wasn't on the phone and I wasn't walking and there was no news report).
But there was a military transport plane.

That's stupid though. Nobody's life was in danger. Nobody has ever been killed by a laser shining into a cockpit.
It's so annoying.

they should spend their time on something that has actually caused fatalities or injuries!

If the "scariest moment" in your life is when you thought you "might" be arrested , you have had one hell of a nice life!

Peace,
dave

daguin said:

If the "scariest moment" in your life is when you thought you "might" be arrested , you have had one hell of a nice life!

Peace,
dave

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lol thats so true ;D I hope i'm not the only one here thats sat behind bars (nothing major though) all involving cars or "fights" does a one hit knock out count as a fight?

ROFL mikeeey that video is hilarious.
Scariest moment of my life... 9/11

maxkillz said:

all involving cars or "fights"  does a one hit knock out count as a fight?

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No. As you probably found out, that's called "assault and battery"

Peace,
dave

daguin said:

[quote author=maxkillz link=1221604386/0#5 date=1221611492] all involving cars or "fights" does a one hit knock out count as a fight?

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No. As you probably found out, that's called "assault and battery"

Peace,
dave[/quote]
Yea though i got let off as he started it and there were witnesses. I called it "self defense" but he ended up in a hospital so I kinda got in trouble for going a little overkill. he got a broken jaw 5 teeth missing and was in a neck brace. i got a bruised knuckle and sat in jail for the night :'(

sorry if my english sucks and you can't understand what i'm trying to say :'( english was way different from Korean and Japanese

mikeeey said:

"coming up tonight, local man shines his laser at a patrol plane almost endangering the pilot's life!"

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Perspective is interesting - people often don't seem to realize that if they are sending out a perfectly straight beam from their position, then from every other position that beam is a bright straight line pointing directly at the person with the laser.

I use a green pointer on nights when I have the telescope out... but if I see a light moving in the sky, even if I can't tell if it is a plane or a satellite or whatever, I stop. If it's a plane and if they even think I'm shining it at them, or even that it's just a potential threat, all they have to do is take a picture and they end up with a lovely map with a straight line pointing directly at my house. With the current pants-crappingly-scared climate in the US, I don't want to incite the government to come find out who was on the starting end of that beam.

But speaking of pointing things up into space:

My senior project was part of the avionics for the university Aeronautics Society's rocket. We had high-altitude FAA waivers for launches. We'd launch out in the Black Rock desert or in the eastern Oregon high desert, so if the rocket came down badly it wouldn't land in the middle of a city... but you never know who is going to be flying around in the airspace over your launch site, so you get these FAA waivers. You have to call them right before launch to activate your waiver, and they put out NOTAMs that alert pilots to the fact that there may be rockets zooming through certain places and it might be prudent to avoid those places.

Even with all of the FAA safeguards, we still kept our eyes the sky in the hours leading up to the launch. Some of us were pilots ourselves and knew that not everyone files a flight plan or has equipment to know about the NOTAMs, so we kept an eye out for small planes... unfortunately the sight of our launch tower usually interested small-plane pilots, who would come closer to get a better look, then scamper off when they realized they were looking at something that looked alarmingly like an 11-foot-tall surface-to-air missile. We were running up against the end of our launch window so we called in and activated the waiver (which was for 20,000 feet AGL, on this occasion) then continued getting the rocket ready. As this was going on a large commercial airliner flew overhead, and a number of us watched it for a while - it was probably over 30,000 feet, but still... as it got closer to our location, there was some speculation we might have to delay the launch while this thing moved out of the way.

And then the pilot must have read the NOTAM, because this huge commercial liner made a sudden bank and took off about 30 degrees from its previous heading. I wonder what they told the passengers, if they told them anything - but from the ground, it was pretty clearly an evasive maneuver, and it must have felt that way inside the plane.

Anyway, with that out of the way we launched our rocket. But seeing a Boeing do evasive maneuvers, combined with some piloting experience of my own, has made me pretty aware of the consequences of pointing things up into the sky.

thesk8nmidget said:

geez what an idiot!

i will have to send him a thank you letter for ruining it for the rest of us!

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lol, I wonder if it really was an honest mistake.. I mean I can understand the whole shining your laser in the sky by quickly moving your wrist around. Everyone has done it. He says it wasn't on purpose, but anyone would say that if they got busted, so who knows. hard to tell if that really makes him an idiot or not, what if I was the one that got caught? would I be the idiot? lol...
funny thing cuz another article on the news said "plane crashes and cell phone is to blame".
how stupid are people? they use the whole cell phone excuse when they have no idea why the plane crashed. I mean, are engineers really THAT STUPID to use the same frequency as a cell phone?? i mean come on! no one would do that!

daguin said:

If the "scariest moment" in your life is when you thought you "might" be arrested , you have had one hell of a nice life!  

Peace,
dave

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haha.. yeah i guess so. nothing really scares me as bad as the law getting involved.

RA_pierce said:

A similar thing happened to me, (except I wasn't on the phone and I wasn't walking and there was no news report).
But there was a military transport plane.

That's stupid though. Nobody's life was in danger. Nobody has ever been killed by a laser shining into a cockpit.
It's so annoying.

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I just wonder how bright the laser really is by the time it reaches the cockpit? probably pretty dim... they make a big deal out of it!

but I must point out though, it's pretty scary after watching that video, you can see how easily seen a laser is from a plane's view. the laser doesn't even need to be pointed directly at the plane and you can still see it, then when they use the infrared! thats even worse!

thesk8nmidget said:

i will have to send him a thank you letter for ruining it for the rest of us!

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I hadn't watched the video, but now that I have, I was thinking something more along the lines of sending him some dental floss and some books to read.

Just think about it - Bubba there was many news-watchers first exposure to laser culture.


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit on my porch and play banjo.

...

See the little black sphere? that's a thermal imager/IR camera. They have them hooked up to screens and controls inside the cockpit. That's how they get all their imagery. They have to have seen it through there, and reported it.  There's NO way they got that footage from the cockpit, or within the pilot's FOV. The camera's capturing a pretty wide view of the ground, and unless they were trying to dive-bomb the place...  No. You can see that the camera's mounted a fair ways back on the plane, too.

More fear-mongering by the media. tsk. I ROTFL'd when I saw the guy, though.

i think you mean rope floss!

Scariest moment of my life was probably the car wreck I was in over the summer. Even though nobody got seriously hurt it wasn't fun hitting another car that pulled out at 52MPH.