You may not be the kind of person who gets his kicks by standing at the end of a runway and firing a small laser into the cockpit of jets during their takeoffs and landings—but plenty of other people are. In 2005, the FBI only heard about 283 such incidents; this year, it expects to record 3,700.
In an official blog post about the topic, the FBI quotes federal air marshal George Johnson saying that the laser attacks have reached an "epidemic level." Things have gotten so bad that the FBI has created a special group to address the issue, one with the unwieldy name "Laser Strike Working Group National Initiative" (which could use a laser strike of its own).
In its blog post, the FBI quotes Captain Robert Hamilton of the Air Line Pilots Association, who describes what it's like to take a direct cockpit hit from a laser beam. "I had temporary blindness. My eyes were burning. It caused disorientation, and it was distracting," he said.
In 2011, a Boston court gave a 52-year old man three years in jail for shining a power laser at planes and helicopters in the area. Here's how our own Matt Lasar summed up the incident after reading the court docs:
On the night of December 8, 2007, Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Timothy Riley and State Trooper Michael Basteri were flying a helicopter over Boston Harbor. It was about 9:30pm and they were escorting a tanker carrying liquid natural gas. The chopper hovered over the Mystic River somewhere between the Distrigas facility in Everett and the Tobin Bridge.
Suddenly Trooper Basteri saw the laser—a powerful green beam coming from the shore. It snaked across the water and up towards the helicopter's cockpit. Basteri warned Riley that the blast of light was imminent, and warned him not to look at it.
Riley in turn quickly struggled to bank the copter to the right so the beam wouldn't penetrate the vehicle. But the concentrated stream moved too fast. "When the laser beam reached the helicopter it immediately filled the cockpit with an intense bright green light unlike anything either man had experienced before," the affidavit said.
After the beam left their vehicle, Riley and Basteri began trying to track it down. To their alarm, it started shining on landing paths at Logan Airport. They called Logan Airport Tower to alert air traffic control, then received permission from their command to leave the tanker and locate the origin of the threat.
What does it look like when a helicopter tracks down a guy with a laser? The FBI released the video we included at the top of this post to show you exactly what happens. Those caught could face up to five years in jail and up to an $11,000 fine.
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