I was hit with a green laser last night at 6500 over Fresno. Didn't register in my mind what it was until I was already turning my head to take a look. Luckily the door frame saved me from looking straight at it before I realized what was going on.

I let Fresno Approach know, and they warned all the other aircraft in the area and had a CHP helo over there within minutes. When approach asked me where it was relative to my position I had to consciously refrain from looking over there. Controller was great and made a comment equivalent to "WTF is wrong with people". Next time I will know to look away immediately, and not be tempted to look back and see if it is still there. Never heard if the CHP had any luck.

A buddy of mine had a similar incident over Sacramento a few months ago. Makes me think this is more common than I thought. Anybody else been lit up?

The only lasers I've sold are firearm mounted. Refuse to sell any other type....self imposed ban. This spring one of the wholesalers was promoting a cool tactical knife....but it had a laser. The 100 lot price was excellent? The guy was miffed! Why don't you want them.... Because I don't want some idiot pointing one at an aircraft.


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I was, on my boat. Saw a red dot bouncing around the boat. then my right eye started burning.
This was years ago before the green lasers were out. Thank God.

Glad your ok CFOT. I haven't been lasered but I keep wondering why someone hasn't come up with a safety/reflective coating for glasses. I can only imagine the difficulty of doing this but doesn't the military have laser safe lenses for the HGU's?

Rich

PittsDriver wrote:Glad your ok CFOT. I haven't been lasered but I keep wondering why someone hasn't come up with a safety/reflective coating for glasses. I can only imagine the difficulty of doing this but doesn't the military have laser safe lenses for the HGU's?

Rich

Like an auto-darkening welding helmet. But, not too dark to stop reasonable control of the aircraft.

Mine works perfect in a split second welding bright TIG. $120 Summit Racing (I don't fly with it )

Yep in the work plane. Took them a few turns of running up and down the wing / fuselage before they finally made the cockpit. In turn I flew the dot right down to the yard it was emanating from… Guess they didn't realize it would be that easy to follow right down to the source as low and slow as we fly

A quick lap or two to light up the person lazing and I had all I needed to turn the Sheriff loose on him. Sheriff asked if I wanted to press charges, I declined, figured one visit from our local barney was enough to wake him up. I got lucky that he didn't blind me enough to have a bad day, figured he could be lucky enough to not have to deal with the law any further than that.

Rob wrote:Yep in the work plane. Took them a few turns of running up and down the wing / fuselage before they finally made the cockpit. In turn I flew the dot right down to the yard it was emanating from… Guess they didn't realize it would be that easy to follow right down to the source as low and slow as we fly

A quick lap or two to light up the person lazing and I had all I needed to turn the Sheriff loose on him. Sheriff asked if I wanted to press charges, I declined, figured one visit from our local barney was enough to wake him up. I got lucky that he didn't blind me enough to have a bad day, figured he could be lucky enough to not have to deal with the law any further than that.

Would be pretty satisfying to topdress the guy's yard with a hundred gallons of fungicide.

In Hawaii we are not too nice to people who do bad things. Lucky, for him, he over there

I did have to resist the urge to dive on him and flour bomb his ass, but thought better of it because I really didn't want to look in that direction, was over Class C, and didn't have a 50 lb sack of flower on board....but man, would that be satisfying or what?

A couple times. Usually in a position to reply with a fiery projectile.

It is pretty satisfying

Rob wrote:Yep in the work plane. Took them a few turns of running up and down the wing / fuselage before they finally made the cockpit. In turn I flew the dot right down to the yard it was emanating from… Guess they didn't realize it would be that easy to follow right down to the source as low and slow as we fly

Guess you went from GPS guided to laser guided eh.

Anybody carry a paintball gun when they fly?

They caught a person that night, but I am not sure it was the same person. It was related to me that being hit by a laser, usually green, is a weekly occurrence in Fresno. One of our crews got lased in Redding and caught the guy. He pled, to a five year sentence if I remember correctly. They are very powerful and can be very distracting p, especially at low level.

Got lased last year coming out of LGA. The captain gave a good description of the location to departure control. I forgot about it....three weeks later I get a call from the FBI, after the first few seconds of "what did I do now panic" he asked for further details of the incident. Never heard back.

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propeller26 wrote:They caught a person that night, but I am not sure it was the same person. It was related to me that being hit by a laser, usually green, is a weekly occurrence in Fresno.

Thanks for checking on that, and thanks to the crew that tracked them down. Does the flight crew have any kind of vision protection when they are hunting lasers?

For the most part, any commercial laser that these numbnuts are using will not be powerful enough to do damage to the eye outside of the temporary night blindness. for any of these visible lasers, they probably just aren't powerful enough to cause permanent damage. It's the invisible ones that you would never pick up on until it was too late that can cause damage quickly. Still, not a bad idea to get it checked out immediately by a doctor familiar with lasing incidents. There are things they can do immediately to help you out to prevent damage to the eye. If you wait too long, the damage can become permanent.

CamTom12 wrote:A couple times. Usually in a position to reply with a fiery projectile.

It is pretty satisfying

[emoji106]

A few of my friends have been TASERed (drinking a bit much). ha ha?

Guess they didn't realize it would be that easy to follow right down to the source as low and slow as we fly

Instead of fungicide like Zane suggested, Parathion would be more fitting.

Got lased one and a half times.

First one was a full on green laser, near KRAL out of the corner of my eye I see a green flash, I think to myself I'm getting light gunned, look over and, nope, told SoCal and they spread the word, didn't feel any burning or loose any vision, just was annoying.

Second time which I only counted as a half was like a super weak laser, on short final, turned out to be one of those laser Christmas light deals.

Seems these laser events are more common in big cities, we don't get much of that in the small towns and AG areas where I live now.

I also got hit in Fresno on an EMS flight from Fresno to the Bay Area. It happened just as I was getting towards the West end of town and took me a second to figure out what had just happened. Luckily it was brief and it didn't impair me or the flight crew...they were busy attending to the patient and only realized it because I said something. It had been happening in Fresno multiple times in certain other areas of town so nothing new to ATC, but most reports were coming from airline traffic inbound from the southeast. Hard to imagine anybody would be dumb enough to light up a helicopter given our ability to easily zero in on the source, but...

Just after I realized what happened I marked the spot on our 396 Garmin that had a roads/streets database installed so I gave ATC the nearest cross street and my phone number. Given the reason for our flight I didn't have any time to circle and investigate the source. By the time I got to the hospital in San Jose my phone rang and it was the Fresno PD saying they caught the perps in a gas station parking lot very near to the cross street I described. They were just a couple kids about 11-14 years old, so probably no charges, but got a very good scare I'm sure.

It's hard not to look when you're not expecting it, but are we ever expecting it?!?!