PILOTS BEWARE? SUPER DAZZLER MAY BE IN SIGHT

So nobody has downed an air­plane with a blind­ing laser beam, yet. But the task could get a lit­tle eas­ier, if research at the University of New Hampshire pans out.
For decades, the world’s mil­i­taries have been devel­op­ing laser “daz­zlers” — bright pulses of coher­ent light, meant to ren­der some­one sight­less, tem­porar­ily. The Chinese (and, maybe, the North Koreans) have work­ing mod­els. And while U.S. research has damp­ened, ever since the Clinton admin­is­tra­tion signed an inter­na­tional pro­to­col ban­ning the blind­ing weapons, work on the devices never stopped com­pletely.
In recent years, the Air Force Research Laboratory put together a pair of laser spot­lights that “tended to daz­zle” peo­ple in their path, accord­ing to lab spokesman Rich Garcia. “It was like they were look­ing into the head­lights of a car late at night.” But the daz­zlers were either too strong run­ning the risk of per­ma­nent eye dam­age, at some dis­tances — or they were “put into moth­balls” after being out­paced by newer tech­nol­ogy.
The Air Force remains inter­ested in daz­zlers, Garcia says. But the prob­lem (from a mil­i­tary point of view) is that the devices, as cur­rently con­fig­ured, are pretty easy to stop. Special gog­gles can fil­ter out the laser light. New-​​fangled anti-​​laser con­tact lenses might even be able to do the trick, as well.
A group of sci­en­tists at the University of New Hampshire may have found a way to get around the specs and the con­tacts, how­ever. With money from the Defense Department-​​backed Non-​​lethal Technology Innovation Center (NTIC), they’ve devel­oped a laser than can sense the defenses, and adapt to over­come them.
The machine sends out an ini­tal laser pulse, to look for where a lens is, and how much it’s being shielded. The reflected glint from the lens gives away both its posi­tion and its level of pro­tec­tion. The device then changes the power and direc­tion of its sec­ond blast, so that the lens is over­whelmed.
“It some­one puts on sun­glasses on, it mea­sures the reflec­tion,” says NTIC direc­tor Glenn Shwaery, “and then it gives off a brighter flash, to com­pen­sate.“
But, Shwaery wants to make clear, “this has noth­ing to do with shin­ing lasers into cock­pits… It’s not the intent of this project what­so­ever.“
Instead, the idea is for police to use the daz­zler, now in an early lab pro­to­type, to dis­ori­ent a perp, or for a mil­i­tary flier to dis­rupt the mechan­i­cal lens on an incom­ing missile’s track­ing sys­tem.
Besides, to zap a jet or a heli­copter, you “don’t need any­thing that com­pli­cated,” Shwaery observes. Kids hav­ing been using off-​​the-​​shelf laser point­ers for years to wig pilots out.
Not that Shwaery wouldn’t be inter­ested in some­thing that could take down a plane. In an (as yet unfunded) request for pro­posal, NTIC asks for ideas on “NL [non-​​lethal] dis­rup­tion of air­craft. Investigate tech­niques to non-​​destructively force the air­craft to land or ren­der it inef­fec­tual as an asset when on the ground. Techniques shall not cause the cat­a­strophic fail­ure of air­craft in flight.“
THERE’S MORE: Over at Salon, Patrick Smith tries to put to bed — once and for all — the tin-​​hat notion that the recent round of cock­pit illu­mi­na­tions is some­how a ter­ror­ist plot.

To accept the propo­si­tion that ter­ror­ists are behind these events is to assume that gangs of al-​​Qaida oper­a­tives are hun­kered down in neigh­bor­hoods through­out America, openly risk­ing cap­ture in their attempts to test out obvi­ous, trace­able devices that even when used accu­rately are excep­tion­ally unlikely to bring forth an acci­dent. I sub­mit that ter­ror­ists do not under­take oper­a­tions with such high prob­a­bil­i­ties of expo­sure and fail­ure. They have lit­tle to gain and every­thing to lose. With respect to bang for the buck, why waste time with lasers when you could hide in a patch of trees with an assault rifle and inflict greater damage?

AND MORE: “Geeks, kids and copy­cats armed with a new type of laser pointer appear to be behind increas­ing reports of laser beams pointed at com­mer­cial air­craft,” accord­ing to MSNBC.

Experts — from the FBI to those in the laser indus­try — believe the most recent inci­dents do not stem from illicit use of pow­er­ful mil­i­tary laser weapons or the less pow­er­ful lasers used by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, both of which require high power sup­plies and bulky cool­ing medi­ums.
Rather, they think the mis­chief is being caused by laser point­ers that project a green beam of light that have recently been imported from China and Russia. They are increas­ingly avail­able on the Internet.
The hand-​​held lasers, pow­ered by bat­ter­ies, project a green beam that can be 50 times brighter than the more com­mon red-​​beam point­ers and can travel 8,000 to 10,000 feet into the sky.
Although the fed­eral Food and Drug Administration lim­its the power of laser point­ers, there are sev­eral Web sites and elec­tronic bul­letin boards that explain how laser enthu­si­asts can eas­ily dou­ble the power of the green lasers, which sell for as lit­tle as $50 and as much as $600. One com­pany boasts it can increase the power of its green pointer so the beam of light can travel 25,000 feet into the sky.
Enthusiasts vis­it­ing one Web bul­letin board said they use the laser point­ers to iden­tify stars, cre­ate sim­ple holo­graphs and even burn holes into plas­tic cups. One par­tic­i­pant said he used his laser pointer to help his fam­ily spot a UFO. 

AND MORE: The genius who lased a cou­ple of planes over Jersey has finally been arrested.

January 4th, 2005 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.