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Laser'ed on Landing

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No, but I should invite Captain Novak of propilot.com to participate. It actually happened to him and it burned/injured his eye and this was many years ago (pre-9/11). He had written a short article on it and can shed further light on what happened and how it is a danger.

It seems like many pilots seem to think its nothing to worry about.
 
Heard about it?

It's all over the news, and there have already occured several threads on this site on the topic. Have a look.
 
big head (literally) bob novak is still in aviation?? I thought he hung up the David Clarks long time ago.
 
avbug said:
Heard about it?

It's all over the news, and there have already occured several threads on this site on the topic. Have a look.
Click to expand...
i heard about the lasers on this forum LONG before i heard about it through the media. and you know where the first place is i heard it? on ESPN radio. colin cowherd, or whatever his name is, a sports talkshow host, mentioned it. that's sad, people.
 
What type of lasers are being used? Those little pen-sized thingies? Or something larger?
 
Personally, I think this thing is getting fairly overblown. Much like my old aunt used to feign a different malady everyday to gain attention this is nothing different. I say that because I have worked around both lasers and aircraft. More precisely, I worked on the Airborne Laser system for the Air Force.
Lets first say all this did happen and now try to make it technically feasible. I would need something to reliably track and aim my laser. I guess I may be able to buy a radar tracker off eBay, so let’s say I do so. Next, what do I mount it to, make it mobile, and provide it power with? Once this little feat is resolved I know need to find a laser powerful enough to hurt someone. Easily found and findable anywhere. Now when we discuss the effects of said laser they are a determination of multiple things: exposure, energy of laser, and wavelength (continuous wave or pulsed). A majority of injuries related to lasers are a thermal effect or the "burning" of tissue. In any case this takes time or is in the very least variable dependant on exposure time and power of the laser. Factor this in with A. how fast the aircraft is moving, B. the viewing angle a pilot has over the cockpit (when on the ground and taxiing, how far ahead must you look to start seeing the ground?) C. and another small problem called atmospheric distortion reduces the power by distorting the beam making most lasers crap over longer distances. Oh yeah and the ability to close your eyes very quickly makes all the hoopla over laser exposure highly suspect.
Sorry but I know what it takes to effectively track a moving object and reliably aim a laser on that moving target. One other thing is that if I was a bad guy, I sure as hell wouldn't use a visible laser to point at my location, I would use an IR laser much like the one on Airborne Laser. If you are truly sacred go buy some of these http://www.rli.com/products/eyewear.asp but you may not be able to see some of your instruments! :D
 
anjinoo7- you wouldn't need any kind of radar tracker to do this- a simple riflescope with an illuminated recticle attached to the laser would work.

These commercial lasers aren't that big. Most are about the size of a loaf of bread. I don't know if they take 110V or 220V power, but a person could even run one using a car battery and a large inverter.

All the stuff needed for these attacks (except the laser itself) could have been purchased at Wal-Mart.
 
What if the point of these laser trackings isn't to blind the pilots but to illuminate the aircraft so that it can be hit with something that the laser has illuminated?
 
They wouldn't bother shining into the cockpit. I pulled on to the ramp at Lauderdale one night and the pax's driver thought it would be funny to shine a green laser light into our eyes as we shut down. Size of a pen, I was very suprised at how powerful it was.

This is being overblown. The most effective terrorist weapon to date is the car/truck bomb.
 
anjinoo7- you wouldn't need any kind of radar tracker to do this- a simple riflescope with an illuminated reticule attached to the laser would work.
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I'm not sure about you but you would be a better man than me to track a plane in the air, at night. I say at night because typically no one would notice if they were lased during the daytime and the "shooter" would not be able to see his beam. At any rate a rifle scope still does not overcome the other technological obstacles one faces when trying to accomplish this feat. We won’t go into the diversion of the beam diameter and loss of power associated with that over long distances, hence another hurdle a bad guy must overcome.


Cheers :)
 
Question...

I've read reports where, on one of the previous incidents, one of the pilots involved had his retinas burned. What about mirrored lenses? Would they have prevented the injuries?

'Sled
 
Vik said:
You can't see your beam anyway, nite or day. This isn't Star Trek.
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Learn before you post, anything within 694nm to 416nm is VISIBLE to the naked eye. Incidentally, a majority of the lasers available to the public are in the visible spectrum. Anything higher than 694nm gets into the near infrared and far infrared, anything below 416nm gets into the ultraviolet spectrums. Please educate yourself before making smart-ass posts.

Cheers
 
Lead Sled said:
Question...

I've read reports where, on one of the previous incidents, one of the pilots involved had his retinas burned. What about mirrored lenses? Would they have prevented the injuries?

'Sled
Click to expand...
Probably not. I say this because there is eye protection out there for almost every type of laser. These are used typically in a lab environment where the people working around the laser know the wavelength and type of laser they are using. With that being said you would have to know what type of laser you might be exposed to in the future and there is simply to many types and eye protection for each for you to reliably predict.
We were using Mike Melvill and Rutan's Proteus A/C to carry a target board for the Airborne Lasers validation testing and they simply used a curtain around the cockpit windows during testing. This would be your most reliable defense.
 
I stand corrected. I just read the article and it said green lasers which would fall into the visible range. I assumed they were the ones higher than 694nm wavelength based on whats generally available out there.

anjinoo7 said:
Learn before you post, anything within 694nm to 416nm is VISIBLE to the naked eye. Incidentally, a majority of the lasers available to the public are in the visible spectrum. Anything higher than 694nm gets into the near infrared and far infrared, anything below 416nm gets into the ultraviolet spectrums. Please educate yourself before making smart-ass posts.

Cheers
Click to expand...
 
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/1/42704.shtml


Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Person Questioned About Laser Beam, Planes
NewsMax.com Wires
Saturday, Jan. 1, 2005
TRENTON, N.J. -- A laser beam was aimed at a police helicopter Friday - one of several incidents involving aircraft across the country in the past week - and federal authorities were questioning someone who had been at a house where they said the light had originated.

Officials said no one was hurt when the laser hit the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police helicopter as it flew over an area where a similar incident occurred Wednesday. Soon after, Port Authority officials and the FBI went to a Parsippany home where they had tracked the laser beam and were questioning a person there in connection with both incidents, said Steve Coleman, an authority spokesman.
No charges had been filed as of late Friday night, Coleman said.

Police in the helicopter were trying to pinpoint the spot where three green lasers were pointed at a pilot preparing to land a plane at Teterboro Airport on Wednesday night. The force's superintendent and some detectives were in the helicopter at the time, Coleman said.

The plane involved in Wednesday's incident, a corporate-owned Cessna Citation with 13 people aboard, was about 11 miles from the airport when the incident occurred, authorities said. It landed safely and no injuries were reported.

Federal agents are looking into several recent incidents involving lasers and aircraft, including cases in Cleveland, Washington, Houston, Colorado Springs, Colo., and Medford, Ore. In some cases the lasers locked onto aircraft several thousand feet up as they approached airports for landing.

Though there have been no reports of accidents caused by lasers, they can temporarily blind and disorient a pilot and could lead to a plane crash. The FBI is investigating whether the incidents are pranks, accidents or something more sinister.



© 2005 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

--- Don't forget the Salt Lake City/Delta incident where reported "temporary" retina damage was experienced by the First Officer.
 
LXJ31 said:
............This is being overblown. The most effective terrorist weapon to date is the car/truck bomb.
Click to expand...
Effective where there is an ample and growing supply of drivers.
Over here they want to use their limited resources more effectively. Car bombs just don't have the spectacular effect. They would have done it allready if they wanted to.
 
We'll I understand that the actual effects of shining laser's at aircraft is way over-hyped, I still would find it hard to believe that this is a series of random unrelated occurences. I am the last person to get worked into a frenzy of terrorist "alerts", and tom ridge's color scheme, but this is definitly something to try and study and understand.

Lets look at the facts(or at the facts according to me :) )

This is obviously not an office laser pointer...as hitting something at 8500' is not possible with a standard laser pointer you buy at staples.

Some sort of tracking device must be used, or else someone of legendary sniper status using a scope which I find highly unlikely.

Seems to be coordinated. Unless this is a bunch of kids playing a prank and coordinating over the internet or something(which would surely be discovered eventually, since there is a "paper trail"), this is definitly larger in scope, and possibly more sinister than just getting a few jollies shining a laser at a cockpit.

My concern is not that laser's are going to make the skies rain airplanes, but rather that this is part of a larger scenario that we are not seeing.

I may be crazy and feeding into the media hype...and hopefully I am...but this sure seems awfully odd.

Question:
I noticed various articles stated that airport radar was able to track the laser back to a suburb. Radar can track laser's? I don't know much about radar...so if someone could explain.
 
Last edited:
Doug said:
Some sort of tracking device must be used, or else someone of legendary sniper status using a scope which I find highly unlikely.
Click to expand...
I doubt if any sort of tracking device was used. Using off-the-shelf hardware, you're talking about something that would cost $100,000+.
You don't need that precise of an aim. Even commercial lasers don't maintain a pinpoint beam of light out past several miles. The atmosphere will refract the beam, and any errors in the collimation of the optics will be magnified several miles from the source. Even engineers on the Airborne Laser project had trouble keeping the beam focused enough to be lethal out past 10+ miles. The beam is probably several feet wide at the distances we're talking about here.
Several of the laser reports mention a light that was flashing or flickering. That's consistant with someone sweeping the beam back and forth across the aircraft as they try to track it by hand.

Question:
I noticed various articles stated that airport radar was able to track the laser back to a suburb. Radar can track laser's? I don't know much about radar...so if someone could explain.
Click to expand...
Beams of light are not radar-reflective. What the reports probably mean is that the pilot reported what direction the beam came from, and the controller was able to determine a location on the ground by referencing the aircraft blip. Typical vagueness in the media's reporting of aviation!
 
SuperFLUF said:
Effective where there is an ample and growing supply of drivers.
Over here they want to use their limited resources more effectively. Car bombs just don't have the spectacular effect. They would have done it allready if they wanted to.
Click to expand...

Most car bombs don't have drivers. The IRA invented the car bomb and they never used it as a guided/suicide weapon. (Matter of fact, the IRA taught the methods to Middle East terror organizations many years ago.) In an open society, such as ours and the UK, there was never a need for a suicidal driver. It just gets parked and left to explode at some pre-determined time. What kind of spectacular effect would a car bomb have? Part of everday life in the Middle East, I believe here it would have a devastating effect to the national psyche.

Why it hasn't been attempted, I cannot speculate. Perhaps it has been, it was never revealed with the perp cooling his jihadi heels in sunny Gitmo.
 
eaglerj

good points...i wasn't aware of the specifics. That said a $100,000 piece of equipment is not beyond the relm of possibility in the arena of funded terrorism.
 
EagleRJ said:
I doubt if any sort of tracking device was used. Using off-the-shelf hardware, you're talking about something that would cost $100,000+.
You don't need that precise of an aim. Even commercial lasers don't maintain a pinpoint beam of light out past several miles. The atmosphere will refract the beam, and any errors in the collimation of the optics will be magnified several miles from the source. Even engineers on the Airborne Laser project had trouble keeping the beam focused enough to be lethal out past 10+ miles. The beam is probably several feet wide at the distances we're talking about here.
Several of the laser reports mention a light that was flashing or flickering. That's consistant with someone sweeping the beam back and forth across the aircraft as they try to track it by hand.


Beams of light are not radar-reflective. What the reports probably mean is that the pilot reported what direction the beam came from, and the controller was able to determine a location on the ground by referencing the aircraft blip. Typical vagueness in the media's reporting of aviation!
Click to expand...
Hmmmm...I would think that pinpointing the source of a laser would be pretty easy. After all...police point a laser at your car and you never SEE the beam. But an INFRARED viewing device would reveal it. You use a form of IR when you use your remotes for your entertainment system...if you put on NIGHT VISION goggles, you'd probably see the beam that's being emited. It's just my guess that they used some IR night viewing stuff to pinpoint where the lasers are being shined from.
 
FN FAL said:
Hmmmm...I would think that pinpointing the source of a laser would be pretty easy. After all...police point a laser at your car and you never SEE the beam. But an INFRARED viewing device would reveal it. You use a form of IR when you use your remotes for your entertainment system...if you put on NIGHT VISION goggles, you'd probably see the beam that's being emited. It's just my guess that they used some IR night viewing stuff to pinpoint where the lasers are being shined from.
Click to expand...
A police officer's laser gun used to measure your speed has an enormous spread or diameter. Very easy to aim at an object with a large enough beam and hit it, kind of like a shotgun vs. a rifle. If the beams were in the IR spectrum or the UV spectrum they wouldn't even notice the thing crossed their path, much like you never see a police officer's laser from his gun. Just because you have night vision goggles doesn't mean you can see all laser beams throughout the IR spectrum either. You may only be able to see a couple different wavelengths but not all in the spectrum.

EagleRj- The Airborne Laser uses deformable optics to compensate for atmospheric distortion and they are able to place a beam diameter the size of a basketball much much farther than 10 miles.

Cheers
 
anjinoo7 said:
EagleRj- The Airborne Laser uses deformable optics to compensate for atmospheric distortion and they are able to place a beam diameter the size of a basketball much much farther than 10 miles.

Cheers
Click to expand...
...and that would mean something if the bad guys were buying experimental optics from Lawrence Livermore National Lab! :)
Ordinary lasers- the kind you and I can buy- suffer from beam dispersion over distance. I Googled it, and here is a brief explanation of how to determine the maximum effective range of a laser:



There is a maximum distance that a beam of light can be kept collimated. Usually it is called 'Rayleigh length' and it depends on the wavelength and the minimum diameter of the beam. If the beam diameter is w0 at point z, then the beam will have expanded to at least 1.4 times w0 at Rayleigh-length distance from z.

The Rayleigh length, z_rayleigh, can be calculated like this:

z_rayleigh = pi * (minimum diameter)/(wavelength) For example, assuming a HeNe laser (632.8 nm) and a minimum diameter of 6 mm this makes about 180 meters. In practice, you might not get that far but 50 meters may be feasible. (Reality enters due to the fact, that the axial intensity distribution is assumed to be perfectly gaussian.)




So, if a laser beam begins to diffuse at 180M, we can assume that it is much wider and less intense at several Km.
I maintain my opinion that there were no automated tracking devices used in these incidents, and that the danger presented by this threat is minor.
 
anjinoo7 said:
A police officer's laser gun used to measure your speed has an enormous spread or diameter. Very easy to aim at an object with a large enough beam and hit it, kind of like a shotgun vs. a rifle. If the beams were in the IR spectrum or the UV spectrum they wouldn't even notice the thing crossed their path, much like you never see a police officer's laser from his gun. Just because you have night vision goggles doesn't mean you can see all laser beams throughout the IR spectrum either. You may only be able to see a couple different wavelengths but not all in the spectrum.

Cheers
Click to expand...
REALLY? A police officers LIDAR is enormous in spread? I guess that's why they aim it at your license plate or head light assembly when they attempt to determine your speed. I guess the next time I get nailed by a LIDAR equiped cop, I'll defend myself by saying it was the car next to me.

You do know that police helicopters are equiped with FLIR equipment...only the poor police departments have observers using NVG. I would expect that NYPD choppers have the latest in onboard FLIR equipment...especially since 9/11. That's why they knew that a laser was being pointed at them and that's how they knew where the laser came from...they saw it on their FLIR.

In fact, your argument would portend that no one saw the laser, so how would they have known they were being lased?

http://www.valentine1.com/lab/MikesLabRpt6.asp

Report #6
Laser Detector tests... What's Important and what to look for.

Speed laser amounts to shaft of faint light, very small in diameter, spaghetti size as it leaves the gun. A laser detector looks for that faint light. Laser enforcement is quick, and defending against a light beam is an iffy proposition. If the detector can’t find the light before the light finds its target—your car—warning will most likely be too late. But lasers, like other light, are reflected off various surfaces—posts and signs, other cars, the pavement. Moreover, the light gun is aimed by a human. His aim wobbles. At long ranges, he hits a lot of things beside his target. A good laser detector is sensitive enough to find these reflections, these aiming wobbles. Remember, though, that the bright section of the beam is only one-fifth of a degree wide, so testing laser detectors requires that the beam be positioned, and held in that position, with great precision.
Click to expand...
 
Captain X said:
Google:

Laser Guided MANPADs

Laser Guided SAMs
Click to expand...

No such thing. All MANPADs are IR guided (meaning the seeker in the missile is sensitive to IR light emitted by the target- there is no IR laser designating the target), and as far as I know, all larger SAMs are either IR or radar guided.

Did you notice that some of the sites those searches bring up are data sites for wargaming and role-playing games?
 

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