FBI Investigating Laser Beams Pointed at Aircraft

sakshale writes "In an earlier discussion about Laser Pistols, many people argued about the concept of using them to target pilots of airliners. Apparently the FBI is investigating incidents in Cleveland and Colorado Springs. They issued a warning on December 14th."

Green with envy

From LaserShoppe [shiftlock.com]:

Unfortunately, we have decided to STOP selling these lasers to the general public. Too many people have been doing stupid things with lasers recently, and this product is misunderstood. This laser DOES NOT pose a threat to airplanes or pilots

Recent events have prompted LaserShoppe (and other outlets) to pull their products from the market, or at least from sale to the general public. The issue has at least raised laser safety consciousness, and the FBI is right to investigate the incidents, but there is always a tendency for the public and media to over-hype issues like this.

Given some time, and--right or wrong--somebody will attempt to pile on the regulations and we can forget about buying green lasers from ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com] or anyplace else.

Re:Green with envy

Unfortunately, we have decided to STOP selling these lasers to the general public. Too many people have been doing stupid things with lasers recently, and this product is misunderstood. This laser DOES NOT pose a threat to airplanes or pilots

And what do you want to bet they had a visit from their local FBI field office? Purchase records subpoenaed?

When green lasers are outlawed, only outlaws will&

You'll take my green lasers when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Re:When green lasers are outlawed, only outlaws wi

Unfortunately, that's the idea.

Re:Green with envy

The utter ludicrousness of the claims in this article are astounding, mostly in how many people have bought it without any question.

While it's entirely likely "something" occured, the dilution of the story through the press has resulted in something that even a child would find fault in.

1. What constitutes a "laser" in the cockpit? A red dot? not likely at 1.5 miles altitude. Not to mention that the range would be a hypotenuse of the altitude and therefore MUCH farther.

2. The accuracy required to "track" the cockpit of a jet aircraft is astounding. This is the kind of test that prototype military weaponry fails routinly.

3. Assuming a laser was used, tracked accurately...what power output would be required for it to even be noticable? The thing would have to be semi-truck mounted.

Anyone think that maybe, it might be likely that this story has been utterly and completely misrepresented by the press? Or that maybe a drunk pilot noticed a reflection off a stray CD in the cockpit and freaked out? I see stray lights on my walls all the time, never once did I think terrorists were trying to blind me.

Re:Green with envy

The site says if you write an essay on laser safety, they'll sell you one. So write down the first 100 things you were going to try, with an introductory paragraph saying "The following actions are just the sort of irresponsible use of lasers that cause accidents. They should not be attempted".

nothing for you to see here

So fitting. I was blinded by the laser
-nB

Coast Guard checks out lasers aimed at boats...

By sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads...

Re:Coast Guard checks out lasers aimed at boats...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/newsletter/20 04/0104d.shtml

he Pentagon inspector general has asked the Navy to consider awarding JW client Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly (Ret.) a purple heart for injuries he suffered as a result of being shot with a laser by a Russian spy ship. Curiously, however, the Navy to this day maintains Jack's injuries never occurred. And evidence compiled by Judicial Watch suggests the Clinton Administration covered up the attack in order to avoid international conflict.

"Jack Daly certainly deserves a medal for his injury from a hostile force," said JW President Tom Fitton. "For more than six years, the U.S. government has refused to acknowledge an attack of a U.S. serviceman in American waters."

"Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly (Ret.) was partially blinded by a laser attack. The laser was fired at Daly from the Russian spy ship Kapitan Man in April, 1997, while Daly was on an official reconnaissance mission, flying over the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, WA. During his surveillance, which took place aboard a Canadian military helicopter, Daly felt a flash of brilliant light strike his eyes, causing him to turn away. Later in the day he would experience stinging in his eyes and sharp pains in his head. The next morning he awoke with a small pool of blood in one of his eyes.

Military doctors told Daly that he and his Canadian chopper pilot, Captain Pat Barnes (Ret.), had been shot at with a laser by the Russians. The damage would be permanent.

Rather than standing by their injured military official, however, Clinton Administration officials treated the incident as an inconvenient stumbling block on the path to improved relations with the Russian government and covered it up.

The Kapitan Man was not searched until several days later and only after at least 10 hours advanced warning given to the Russians. Though a thorough search should have taken 2-3 days, U.S. inspectors were aboard for less than 4 hours. Predictably, no evidence was found.

Judicial Watch currently has an appeal pending for Jack Daly against the Far East Shipping Company, the owners of the Kapitan Man."

More info

Some [freerepublic.com] good [freerepublic.com] links [freerepublic.com] from FreeRepublic [freerepublic.com].

Seems like Dr. Evil and his "laser beam" are finally starting to do their evil deeds!

Complementary article

More information in this [wikipedia.org] article that may be helpful. I think this is potentially a very serious problem.

Re:Complementary article

no it is not.

any laser that the general public can get their hands on will DO NO DAMAGE to a pilot or even distract them.

first off even the high power green ones, at the 100 meters or MORE distance these people are at, they need to retrofit the laser with a tripod, fluid head and a high power scope just to hit the plane.

Now let's addin the fac tt hat the angle if incidence of the beam to the cockpit window is at such an extreme angle that less than 20% of the beam will pass through the window, and THAT will get attenuated further by the cockpit glass.

let's further add that the pilot is looking at the centerline of the runway and not directly at things that might be interesting, and if it's a clear sunny day a reflection glint off cars in the parking lot is 200 times brighter than any consumer laser.

this is nothing but a bunch of people freaking out about isolated incidents.

if I was able to get my hands on a targeting laser, Yes, that MIGHT be able to hit the cockpit window because of the gyro stablization of the optics and laser, but then it's infrared so NOBODY would know it was hitting it!

can I get my hands on industrial lasers? yeah if I look hard enough, but you certianly will not run them off some portable battery for longer than a few seconds.

it is NOT a serious problem. Quit being a scared soccer mom.

Questioning this...

How can a laser beam travel round the nose of a plane overhead, and accurately reach the pilot's eyes from say, a few thousand feet away?

The guy pointing it must have steady hands, and damn good vision.

Re:Questioning this...

They didn't shine it at a plane directly overhead, the pointed it at a plane a few miles away. At that distance, even at an altitude of a few thousand feet, the pilots still have a clear line of site to the ground. The could be hit much closer if the incoming beam was slighly angled to come in from the front side and not straight ahead over the center of the nose.

Re:Questioning this...

I'm assuming the laser used was a large one, not some little pencil laser. A large one could easily be set up on a bipod or tripod mount (think of rifles or large caliber guns on mounts). Sharpshooters can hit things at extreme distance when their guns are properly braced. Snipers have taken out individual people with bullets at well over a miles distance. The cockpit is a lot larger target than a single human, plus at several miles the laser beam is going to spread a lot and be a LOT wider than a bullet.

Ever look at a plane several miles away that is coming straight or almost straight in your direction? Sometimes it seems like they aren't moving at all. The number of arc seconds they will move in 10 seconds time relative to you is very small. I don't think a gyroscope/mechanical tracker would be necessary.

Re:Questioning this...

Like the Cleveland article said...
Hawk said the laser had to have been fairly sophisticated to track a plane traveling at that altitude.

Am I the only one that has used a green laser for a legitimate purpose? Interestingly enough, that legitimate purpose (which seems to be one of two *only* legitimate purposes) seems to be the only way to carry out such a damaging illegitimate use which is what must have happened here... Someone strapped the laser to the side of a telescope! I do it so that I can use the green light to point at a spot in the sky and then not have to fiddle about finding that spot through the scope. It's just a matter of getting a plane in your sight and turning a knob to keep it locked in (funny that the DMCA can prevent me from telling you how to get around a copyright protection mechanism but I can't be touched for describing how to blind a pilot flying at 8,500 feet).

The other legitimate purpose I mentioned has to do with Pink Floyd and a fog machine... which once again can immediately lead to illegitimate activities.

tracking moving plane?

here is my question.

it has been mentioned and it is obviously required that the laser track the cockpit. exactly how has the technology to track the COCKPIT of an airliner moving 200+mph. (pilots mention a constant laser light for 10+ seconds)

tracking the plane is one thing, and even that is tough to do if you are talking laser accuracy, but the cockpit? also, this has to be done several miles out, since the cockpit windows don't have much downward view anyway.

outside of military technology, are there any commercial systems that could even do this?

Re:tracking moving plane?

It does have the ring of "post-Sep-11th-paranoia" about it, doesn't it?

Yes there are some

You can easily find computer operated 60w lasers [laser-mouvement.com]. And yes its beam is 5 inches wide [laser-mouvement.com].
That would hurt.

Regulation

Perhaps public misperception can eventually make lasers easier to obtain and more widely produced rather than regulated to the point of inaccessability.

1. People think the lasers are weapons.
2. Other people start selling lasers as weapons.
3. Weapons are constitutionally protected for civilian ownership in all civilized nations.
4. Ergo - the Lasers can be purchased at your local sporting-goods store after a background check and some paperwork.

(Author's note, Point #3 is intended to be a bit of a joke. But I expect at least one reader will not read all the way to this disclaimer, instead flaming me good and hard.)

FBI used to investigate UFO sightings as well

I have no doubt this will prove about as fruitful as their investigation into Bonsai Kitten

Hmm. I dunno.

This may or may not be a threat. Some interesting thoughts here [laboratorium.net]

But it seems to be that it would be awful hard for something from the ground to actually hit the inside of the cockpit unless it had some sort of tracking device to track the plane, and was high enough to hit the inside of the cockpit instead of the nose cone (perhaps on a tall building or mountain near an airport).

I think this could be another tactic to strike fear into the populace.

Real Homeland Security

If the so-called "homeland security" policies were doing their job, rather than trying to take more and civil liberties from US citizens, they'd:

1. Totally seal the borders
2. Confiscate and auction off the properties of all employers of illegal aliens to pay the expenses of
   • sending illegals home
   • back taxes and
   • social service costs of supporting illegals to date
3. provide huge prize incentives for commercial development of alternatives to the fragile air transportation infrastructure
4. provide huge prize incentives for commercial development of small-capitalization self-sufficiency systems so that small communities if not individual households could provide their basic necessities without reliance on centralized structures
5. tear down the prison system as unfit for human habitation and construct a new one in which none of
   • prisoner rape or other violence
   • hepatitis C or
   • AIDS
   was a substantial risk and
6. make sure that when national guardsmen come home from Iraq, trained in urban warfare and all pissed off at having been abused by the government, they at least have a job.

I know, I know... This is all way too sane for the scum who have occupied the positions of trust and authority within the de facto government of the US.

Re:Why green?

Green appears the brightest on the human spectrum. Most of these small lasers are DPSS (Diode pumped solid state). If the beam is coherent it is *INDEED* a danger, and nothing scares me more than the thought of hoodlums running around with 600mw "laser pointers".

Lasers for display are regulated by the Center for Disease and Radiological Health. Your not supposed to direct a laser above 5mw up into the sky.

At a long distance, the beam definitly becomes incoherent. Gas lasers are considered better than solid state in regards to beam colimation, and without optics my 2.5' long argon tube beam ends up 1' or more wide at a distance of only 1000 feet or so.

Targeting, no... Someone might manage to cross the planes path, but in order to track a plane I'd iamgine you would need to build a box filled with dirt sitting on innertubes to isolate vibration, then come up with a servo mechanism. I don't think 16 bit DACs would give enough accuracy with glavos.

Weapons targeting systems do not use visible lasers AFAIK. It would be a giveaway if there was a bright green dot on the target and a green line tracing back to the source.

Also, laser light is different then searchlights because the light is polarized. So you can see the beam better from one way versus the other.

Re:Yeah sure, is it an imaginary laser pen too?

Why does everybody think this is just a case of some kid who bought a handheld laser pointer and is trying to point it at an airplane that flew overhead?

Come on people, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out that a combination of a commercial/scientific laser [coherentinc.com] along with a good quality sighting scope [gunblast.com] mounted on a high quality tripod wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to slap together. Hell, just get a good laser and mount it on top of a good pair of military observation binoculars [opticsplanet.net] and you'd probably be ready to rock & roll.

It also doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to realize that from a mountain top or other high peak of land you could target aircraft flying directly towards your position from a few miles away. If it's flying in your direction then its horizontal and lateral positions won't change very much so you wouldn't need a sophisticated tracking system. You wouldn't even need a very high position if you intend on targeting aircraft that are landing - just an open area a mile or so from the end of the runway.