Originally Posted by
FullMetalJackass
I just wish that they would put half as much effort in catching the bar stewards who seem to take delight in targeting landing aircraft with laser pens.... fortunately it's only ever happened once to me but even so.......
Not just pens; I recently bought a laser red dot sight for one of my air rifles; £7.59p on e-bay.
It's about 2 inches long and would be equally as dangerous to pilots so naturally I make sure it's never pointed skywards.
In the early days of FLIR development at Farnborough, the test aircrew oftten showed us the videotapes of their night time flights and on one occasion (Varsity operating at 250ft agl) someone on the ground shone an ordinary torch at the aircraft and it 'overloaded' the sensor causing the screen to momentarily go blank. Course they soon developed a 'fix' for this and it w(sh)ouldn't happen nowadays.
(Thinks: Why on earth has Pprune software changed the 'a' in 'laser' for an '@'?)