Are you terrified? I'm not terrified. And I'm a professional pilot.
The type of laser that aircrews are reporting are not exactly ones that I'd expect terrorists to be using. Visible light in a cockpit, even to the extent of damaging pilots' eyes, probably wouldn't keep a plane from landing safely. Commercial airliners can be landed on autopilot quite easily.
In order to cause serious problems, you'd need something with a lot more power than a laser pointer that can be purchased at Staples. The wavelength would probably not be in the visible light spectrum. Also, the tracking system would need to be more sophisticated than a pair of binoculars - it wouldn't be the easiest task to manually hold a laser beam on an airliner cockpit from thousands of yards away.
I will grant that this could potentially be terrorist types practicing targeting, using commercial lasers. It is also as likely as not to be kids playing.
This is TERRORISM! It is concerted TERRORISM. This has occurred in 5 cities in 7 days. The good news is that the lasers don't work!! YET! but there is no doubt in the mind of anyone with a brain that these are terrorists, pure and simple.
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Terrorists would start out with a 10W laser or 30W laser that would really, guaranteed, hurt, not little ones that generate reports and concern.
Do you think Mohammed Atta practiced with paper planes, then RC models?
The price of green lasers just dipped below $100; they are advertised on the web and in astronomy mags, and we just passed Christmas, and they are in the news.
Also, if someone pointed a laser at the belly or tail of a plane, the pilots would not report it- they wouldn't see it! They are just reporting the cretins out in front of them.
I agree. WHoever is doing this, even if it's a joke, should be strung up.
It was suggested on another thread that there's a possibility of collecting flight data going on here.
To me, hitting a moving plane with a handheld laser (at the angle it would be seen in the cockpit by the pilots) would be very, very difficult. Higher end equipment (measuring altitude, speed, etc) would have a far easier time of it than your $95 OfficeMax special.
There's likely a bit more to this, IMHO - and the tracking angle does make some sense (SAMs? There's a lot of them on the market, and they're relatively cheap), assuming that AQ remains fixated on aircraft-style terrorism.