LASER ban

A

Apple a Day

New member
I'm a little ticked off so bear with me.
It turns out that the jerk trying to spotlight airplanes in New Jersey with a LASER was just some moron who blamed it on his daughter. That's not the most irritating part: I tuned in to the news yesterday and there was a bit with some guy who supposedly used to work for El Al airlines who was going on about how easy it would be to use a LASER sight on a rifle to blind an airplane pilot. This morning they are interviewing a guy who, if I caught the info, was the manufacturer of the LASER used in the incidents. There was a lot of talk about banning LASERs to civilians. Too late, boobs, every kid out there has a LASER pointer. I have seen them sold at the counter at convenience stores.
My initial thought was that terrorists used boxcutters to take over planes and crash them into buildings; how far do they intend to go with banning objects instead of dealing with people? :mad:
Banbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanbanban.....
 
how far do they intend to go with banning objects instead of dealing with people?
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I'm afraid you ain't seen nothing yet.

Wait till the bed wetting liberals get back in control of things.

Mosey on over to Thomas Loc and plug in anything a bed wetter may consider offensive or dangerous as a search term. Then sit back and read some of the pap that's being introduced.
 
i have been in the cockpit of an airliner. how the heck is a laser on the ground gonna hit the pilot in the eyes? how is someone on the groung gonna track the laser at that speed to keep it on the plane?
 
Only the beginning

When you combine politicians who want to ban civillian ownership of any effective weapon with a population composed of ignorant and frightened cowards; you can expect the most ridiculous incidents used as excuses to ban those weapons.

Personally, I believe that the civillian disarmament crowd have, are, and will continue to stage these completely fabricated incidents in pursuit of their ultimate goal.

I mean, really, exactly how many people out of 250 million can see a laser hitting an airplane cockpit directed into it from the outside? TWO maximum, the pilot and co-pilot. The weapon-banners could be quite literally MAKING THIS UP and no one can dispute it as long as the pilots are on board (ha ha) with it.

Nevermind the technical aspects of the angle of incidence that the guy aiming the laser must achieve to hit a pilot in the eye FROM THE GROUND as pointed out above; the ability to keep it on target, etc.

Look for more Reichstag fires in the future.

C-
 
I,ve been wondering the same thing,PSE. What gets to me more about this incident is the prosecution of the guy under the patriot act. Sounds like more of that 'zero tolerance' BS which results in expelling kids from school for having aspirin in their purse or drawing a picture of a gun.
 
That was MY question. It would be nearly impossible to get a laser to steady itself on a plane like that.

Time to play with numbers.

How high do airplanes fly? "Most commercial jetliners cruise somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 feet above mean sea level" (http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae610.cfm)

So lets use the 30,000ft (5.68miles) mark. How fast: a 747 cruises at 570mph
That puts the angular velocity at 8.25 deg/sec. If the plane is a 747 it is 231.83 feet, then there is .44degrees of range for a person to be able to hit the ENTIRE plane. Suppose the laser was a large one, at one foot. This means the tip of the laser could move no more than .09inches. (90 thousanths)

So they would have to move the laser tip at 8.25deg/s +/- .44degrees. They couldnt fluctuate more than .09inches/s



I dont see a dude with a laser doing this. And I wont even get into the loss situations traveling through air.
 
Actually, one more thing. The spatial intensity of a beam depends on how big it is, of course. So even if there is no loss of the laser intensity as tho it were ina vacuum, the beam divergance would cause the spot to be large enough, that the human eye would only catch a small portion of it, and therefore a small portion of the radiation. The best lasers usualy are around 2mrad. So how about something like....by the time a laser gets to the plane, it would be .... 22.3inches across. Thats more of a "red haze" than a "piercing light" -hardly blinding
 
Actually, the plane in question was a corporate Cessna that was preparing for landing at the nearby airport, not a large commercial airliner. If that makes much of a difference. Plus a helicopter was reported to have been "painted" with the laser beam during the search. Other planes have been illuminated in other parts of the country as well. Most were making their approach to land.
Here are a couple links...
http://www.dailyrecord.com/news/articles/news2-laser.htm
http://www-cgi.cnn.com/2004/US/12/31/aircraft.laser/
 
a cesna is smaller (i think) so it would only be harder. Yea, I know. it would have taken less work to figure out the airplane in question that to do the figuring there, but Oh well. Still, you can see the impracticalities. and the mispellings.


edit: Im sorry, I didnt realize it was preparing to land. I guess depending on how low it was at the time, it may be a LITTLE easier, but still not by much. You're still dealing with a target at the bare minimum I'd guess 100 yards away. And the target to lind someone would be the human pupil (what, 1/8 inch max?)
 
Avizpls,
you owe me a clean up. your math made my nose bleed all over my keyboard.
"bloodborn clean-up, call OSHA".
 
The bottom laser line....

No matter what the talking heads on TV say and the FBI "experts" may claim, the idea of downing an airliner with any laser now available to the general population is so absurd on its face that it warrants no serious response. More of the Fear Factor strategy of the Federal government under George W. Bu$hco.
The U.S. has been investigating weaponizing lasers for 40 years. If they were a good candidate for attacking aircraft in the manner suggested, we'd most certainly be deploying them ourselves, doncha think?
This whole wild goose chase is in the same vein as the TSA patting down grandma's boobs.... a waste of time in more ways than one! :eek:
 
Well, JailMedic-The Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) is a very real, and only the first of its type to be de-classified. There is a very sincere and aggressive research project on this sort of thing. So dont brush the whole laser concept off, but it certainly wasnt a threat from this guy.
 
I repeat....

"....the idea of downing an airliner with any laser now available to the general population is so absurd on its face that it warrants no serious response."
 
I don't pretend to be an engineer....

You obviously have some experience in calculating such formulas, but it seems, to me, like overkill.
I might as well assert that I could down a commercial jet by standing on the side of the runway and tossing a baseball in the intake. It is possible..... not likely, but possible.
You could make all manner of calculation about that too, but really..... what is the real threat in something like that?
How about throwing pumpkins at the airport with a trebuchet? About as likely as anything.....
What's not silly is that ignoramuses buy into these sorts of things as real threats when the "government experts" and "major media" keep harping on them.....
Example?
War in Iraq....
 
I dont want to come off as rude, but I need to formaly cease discussion in this topic. Suffice to say...give it a few years.
 
It's your keyboard....

Okie-dokie.... I s'pect you'll have all the years you want.....and more. :)
I did appreciate your analysis of the problem, though. You certainly know how to break down a physics problem.....
 
There is a big difference between a helium-neon (red) laser used in laser pointers and a CO2 laser used for "defense". A CO2 laser will definitely tears things up...

Not to mention the "air defense" laser is HUGE.
 
With the angle of a plane's windshield, how is a small laser on the ground going to affect a pilot of a large jetliner in any way whatsoever? :confused:
 
That was MY question. It would be nearly impossible to get a laser to steady itself on a plane like that.
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Actualy it is quite simple. First, all the planes were in landing mode. They were not flying that fast. Landing is a controlled stall. Fly slow and you lose altitude. Increase speed and you gain altitude.

As to tracking, it's no more dificult than an astronomer tracking a star or planet with a mounted telescope. Just replace the telescope and put in a laser... It just that the target moves faster than a star.
 
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