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In March 2012 Adam Gardenhire aimed a green laser pen at a business jet and then shone it at a Pasadena police helicopter sent to find the source. He is the second person in the US to be sentenced for aiming a laser at an aircraft. The act has been considered a federal crime in the US since February 2012. Gardenhire pleaded guilty in October.
Commercially obtained laser pointers project just a tiny beam, but its diameter grows much bigger as the distance increases and can result in temporarily blindness if shone in someone's eyes. According to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the high intensity light can dazzle pilots during the crucial phases of take-off and landing.
Shining lasers at planes is said to be very dangerous
The pilot of a Cessna Citation plane preparing to land at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank suffered "vision impairment that lasted for hours" after the incident, according to a statement from the Office of the United States Attorney Central District of California. The helicopter pilot, who had been wearing protective eye gear, was uninjured.
Glenn Stephen Hansen, of Saint Cloud, Florida, was sentenced to six months in prison for a similar offence in August 2012. Laser pen attacks on aircraft seem to be on the rise in many places around the world. In the past three years, there have been more than 4,500 reports of pilots being targeted by lasers.
BBC News - Man gets 30 months in prison for shining laser at plane
The solid state laser was mounted to a tactical military vehicle and carried out multiple tests between Nov. 18 and Dec. 10 at the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It was an important milestone for the Army toward its goal of using large lasers as a protection capability at military installations against incoming rockets, artillery and cruise missiles.
The weapon, called the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, involves a 10-kilowatt laser beam fired from a eight-wheeled vehicle that resembles a garbage truck. A dome-shaped turret called the beam director rotates 360 degrees and contains a set of mirrors that point and focus the beam on a target, so the solid state laser can engage it.
In the video of the test, football-sized mortar rounds are fired in high-arching trajectories and traveling at low velocities before being blasted apart. Drones are seen coasting along in flight before their tails catch on fire and nose-dive to the ground. In all, the Army targeted and destroyed more than 90 incoming mortar rounds and several drones. The targets were chosen because they are representative of the likely threats that are encountered by forces on the battlefield, the Army said.
The Army's testing involved a 10-kilowatt laser, which will be brought to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for more rigorous testing, including in inclement weather. The Army hopes to increase the laser's power to 50 kilowatts, then again to 100 kilowatts in subsequent demonstrations. In 2011, the Navy had success with another laser system mounted on a warship when it fired and set fire to an empty motorboat as it bobbed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the first time the Navy pulled off such a feat.
Army zaps apart mortar rounds, drones with new laser system - Army - Stripes
The Air Force Research Laboratory is forging ahead with a high-energy laser designed to shoot down drones, incoming rockets and mortar rounds and hopes to have a demonstration model ready by 2021, officials say. The Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator program, or SHiELD, which launched this year, seeks to equip supersonic warplanes, such as the B-1 Lancer, F-35 Lightning and F-22 Raptor, with defensive lasers mounted in external pods. The Air Force wants a high-energy laser system compact enough to complement the internal cannon and missiles equipped on its fighter jets.
The new system uses a type of optical fiber as the light-emitting material, instead of the neodymium-doped crystals used in conventional solid-state lasers. Since fiber can be coiled, more power can be packed into a compact system. "We have shown that a powerful directed energy laser is now sufficiently light-weight, low volume and reliable enough to be deployed on tactical vehicles for defensive applications on land, at sea and in the air," Lockheed Martin laser weapons expert Robert Afzal said in a statement.
Lockheed Martin is helping the Air Force Research Lab develop and high energy laser weapon systems for aircraft, including the laser pictured in this rendering.
The electric-powered laser is significantly more powerful than the chemical laser found in the defunct Boeing YAL-1A airborne laser test bed, Afzal said. The YAL-1A was scrapped after 16 years of development in 2011 due to its relatively low power. "One of the problems with the chemical laser is that first of all they're too big and too heavy -- and you have to carry the chemicals with you," Afzal told CNBC on Friday. "With an electric laser, your platform which is driving, sailing, flying around, usually has a power system that can recharge your battery back. But in a chemical laser, once the chemicals are gone you have to go back to the depot." The SHiELD program includes a beam control system to direct the laser onto a target, a housing pod mounted on the fighter jet to power and cool the laser and the high-energy laser source itself.
Lockheed Martin also recently demonstrated a laser capable of being based on the ground or at sea for the military. In September, the company demonstrated its Advanced Test High Energy Asset, or ATHENA, in tests run by the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The laser brought down five Outlaw drones. "The tests at White Sands against aerial targets validated our lethality models and replicated the results we've seen against static targets at our own test range," Keoki Jackson, Lockheed Martin's chief technology officer, said in a statement in September.
Air Force Aims for Laser Weapons on a Fighter Jet By 2021 | Military.com
