Lasers, Lasers, Everywhere

February 15, 2016

LASERS ARE BACK in the news again. This time, on Sunday, a Virgin Atlantic Airways jet bound for New York was forced to return to London after the first officer was injured in the cockpit by a laser strike.

We’ve been dealing with this phenomenon for over a decade now, but the number of incidents has been increasing. Not unlike the controversy surrounding drones, its mostly a matter of proliferation. Just as there are lot more drones around, there are a lot more laser pointers in the hands of a lot more people.

They’re small, inexpensive, and easy to obtain. And as with drones, users of these devices aren’t necessarily aware of their potential hazard. Many hobbyists see their lightweight drones as all but harmless, not realizing just how dangerous a high-speed impact with an aircraft could be. Similarly, it’s only human nature, I suppose, to direct your laser at something passing overhead. What’s the harm?

Well, laser pointers might be small, but they are able to cause temporary blindness and serious eye injury, even from a considerable distance, the ramifications of which are pretty obvious if the target is an airline crew during a critical phase of flight.

Hitting two pilots squarely in the face through the refractive, wraparound windshield of a cockpit would be difficult and entail a substantial amount of luck, and a temporarily or partially blinded crew would still have the means to stabilize a climbing or descending airplane. Still, it’s unsafe, and just a stupid thing to be doing.

The problem, by and large, isn’t one of nefarious intent. It’s one of not knowing better. And the solution isn’t going to be some elaborate technological fix or attempting to regulate users into compliance — though there’s certainly room for imposing stiffer penalties against abusers. It comes down to awareness and ordinary common sense.

In the immortal words of Gordon Gano: Don’t shoot, shoot, shoot that thing at me!

Regulators and airlines both have been taking the problem seriously. Here in the U.S., any laser strike must be immediately reported to air traffic control. The FAA’s website includes online forms through which pilots can submit the details of an incident.

As a pilot, I’m yet to have a laser encounter, knock on wood, but I remember something that occurred one night in the early 1990s, during an approach into Newark. It involved a high-intensity spotlight, not a laser, but the effect was similar. I was captain on an old Beech-99, a fifteen-seater, skirting the lower edge of Manhattan along the Hudson River. Suddenly a wayward (perhaps intentionally so) beam from a light show atop the World Trade Center caught and tracked our turboprop, filling the cockpit and cabin with a fiery incandescence.

Related Story:

THE DRONES DANGER

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.