Beware laser wielding terrorists!Follow

Totem,

Is there no protection for such an attack, like the visors used in space helmets or arc welding?

Elder, there are visors which immediately turn opaque when touched with a sufficiently strong burst of energy, but they are military issue only --and not many of them are distributed --and are so costly that civilian pilots don't have access to them. Moreover, airliner pilots don't wear helmets like many helicopter pilots do, so they wouldn't even have a platform on which to afix a laser activated visor.

To the best of my knowledge, the only people given those visors are strategic nuclear bomber crews for obvious reasons.

Totem

We do. We load the sharks on a sling and dip them in a salt water tank every now and then to keep them alive.

Totem

the threat of using a laser to blind a pilot landing an aircraft is old. real old. as old as the cold war with russia, and has even been the subject of a few movies.

the homeland security team has also been warned of the potential application of lasers by terrorist in our current situation, and has issued public warnings about it.

that said,

lasers are concentraited light in a very narrow spectrum.

1. a properly coated pair of sunglasses would make most of them usless.

2. the angle needed to hit a pilots eyes when making a landing would require the laser be fired from an angle ABOVE the hight of the aircraft, limiting their usefullness significantly.

3. you would have to hit BOTH the pilot and copilot, which would require an increadable ability to aim the laser at a moving target traveling at over 200 MPH, and be able ot hit two spacific targets at several hundred yards away the size of eyeballs..literly....

4. cat 3 aircraft can land themselves. push a button, and a pilot CAN land the air craft from the toilet if necessary, and most certainly without seeing ANYTHING at all while in the cockpit. push button "a", read a magazine. soooo, this would eliminate all over seas aircraft, most modern passenger jets, all jumbo jets an reduce your liekly targets to commuter airlines, and budget airlines using older equipment, like DC9,s 727,s md80,s and such.

there are more powerfull lasers that can acutually burn holes in the aircraft, and destroy electronics.......but....a hand held surface to air missle would be a hell of alot cheaper, easier to hide, and simpler to operate. would take you about 5 minutes to train someone to use one, vs weeks of training to use a powerfull laser, and then have to aquire one to begin with.

not a significant terrorist threat people. move on to the next headline.

While viewing that it appears to me that the plane was suffering from too much lift. Be that the pilot didn't tilt the elevators enough or that an up current lifted the plane as it passed the runway. It almost looks as if it rises slightly before it goes into the trees. Probably not cool for the of that plane.

Yes, an airliner can almost land itself, to the point of touchdown, but afterwards it would just zoom off the end of the runway and crash into the town beyond the fence. There's no way for the bird to apply reverse thrusters, spool down its' engines, and touch the brakes without a human pilot at the controls. While it certainly could be done, no airline company has something like that installed onboard for obvious cost reasons.

Totem

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050104/ap_on_re_us/laser_beam_aircraft

I bet it comes out that he heard about the idea when they issued the memo.

Now here's the question I have:

Since he was trying to crash an airliner and helicopter by aiming the laser to blind the pilots, should he be charged with multiple counts of attempted homicide?

Yeah. What a pri[i][/i]ck.

"Oh, we were just stargazing" (explain to me how you'd use a laser to do that?), "and she, uh, targetted a helicopter and three planes. Right in the cockpits. By accident."

Honestly though, I think you'd be surprised at how many people just don't realize how dangerous lasers are. While not common, it's not terribly hard for someone to get ahold of a reasonably powerful industrial laser. A friend of mine had one about 10 years ago that wasn't much bigger then a large maglite, and he was always playing with it by shining into stuff on the other side of the canyon behind his home.

You can put all the warning labels on stuff you want, but someone will always do something dumb with something. Same logic here. Most likely the dad picked up the laser from work or something, and just thought it was a cool thing to shine at stuff. Low flying planes and helicopters are logical things. While he probably knows that it's unsafe to shine in the eyes, somehow when it's a distant object, you tend to forget about that and do it anyway. I'm willing to bet that part of his defense was something like: "Gee. I had no idea it would be dangerous!".

And it's not just aircraft that are in danger. I once came close to being lazed while driving my car home one night. Some dork was goofing off with a lazer and shining it out from his porch towards the street (where there happened to be a sharp corner). It was a foggy night so I could see the thing pretty clearly (probably why the guy was playing with it). In that case, whoever was playing with it wasn't specifically aiming at passing cars, but wasn't really paying attention to where he was shining it either.

As to how dangerous this would be in the hands of a terrorist? That's questionable, but still potentially a threat. There are probably cheaper and easier ways to randomly kill people if you want to, but as far as planes are concerned, they are potentially something to worry about. Some of you seem to be under the impression that these things are like the lazer pinlight you get in a cheap keychain. Not the case. The beams are pretty wide, and they are *very* intense light. You don't have to train it on someone's eyes to blind them. It just has to brush across them briefly. Additionally, lasers refract when they hit windows and reflect when they hit anything vaguely reflective (go figure!). An oncomming plane isn't really moving in terms of target area. What that means is that you can easily see where your point of aim is, but anyone not directly in line cannot (unless it's foggy and causing the beam to refract along it's course). Due to all of this, you'll get a lot of scatter when you hit something like the inside of a cockpit (windows on the outside and reflective surfaces on the inside), and only need to wave it around to have a pretty good chance of hitting both pilots sufficiently to affect their vision significantly.