FReepathon Day 60 ... PLEASE Make Your Donation Tonight!
Less than $6.1k to GO!
$25 Keeps FR ALIVE
God bless and keep you all.
Posted on 08/28/2013 10:43:36 PM PDT by TexGrill
MOSCOW, August 29 (RIA Novosti) - Unknown people pointed a laser beam at a passenger jet as it was preparing to land outside Moscow late Wednesday, the Russian Interior Ministry’s transport department has reported.
The purported laser attack targeted a Tupolev Tu-204 jet, bound from the city of Krasnodar in south Russia to Moscow, as the plane was approaching Vnukovo Airport, a department spokesman told RIA Novosti on Thursday.
The plane landed normally, and all 220 passengers and 8 crew were unhurt, despite the jet's pilot saying he had been blinded by the beam, the Life News tabloid reported.
An investigation is underway.
The incident is the latest in a string of similar attacks. Several aircraft have been targeted by laser pointers in Moscow and St. Petersburg in August alone.
After a series of incidents involving lasers near airports in 2011, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, proposed such attacks should be punishable with prison terms of up to seven years in prison.
(Excerpt) Read more at en.rian.ru ...
It’s just Muzzies on jihad.
Lazer jihad?
Bingo!
UK: Military and police helicopters targeted by lasers coming from Birmingham, a predominantly Muslim area
http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/07/03/uk-military-and-police-helicopters-targeted-by-lasers-coming-from-birmingham-a-predominantly-muslim-area/
Muslim Terrorists Aim Green Laser Beam At Sun Country Airlines Flight 8800 Over J.F.K. Airport
http://www.romancatholicimperialist.org/2012/08/muslim-terrorists-aim-green-laser-beam.html
Laser Pointers from the Muslim Mid-WEST, Illegal Immigration & Abu Moskowitz
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/1017/laser-pointers-from-the-muslim-mid-west-illegal-immigration-abu-moskowitz/
...all 220 passengers and 8 crew were unhurt...
That's 228 people who are considerably braver than I. Board a Russian aircraft? Board a Russian aircraft in the employ of a (presumably) Russian airline? I'd sooner shovel sidewalks stark naked in the middle of February!
This has become a frequent problem in the Bay Area of North Cal. I’m not smart enough to be an engineer, but I would think somebody should be trying to develop glass for the cockpit area that is capable of reflecting the laser beam back out with close to equal force as it is absorbed by the glass dome. This repelled or bounced off beam should be sent back down at roughly the same trajectory as it was fed to the glass. This would be poetic justice if ever perfected, where a joker shining a laser gun at a jet would then himself become blinded by that boomerang beam. Okay, maybe it’s still science fiction for this week, just you wait.
Most of the airlines fly Boeings now. Aeroflot and S7 (Siberian Airlines) are pretty good.
I’ve flown Rusian airlines in the good old days, when the stewardesses used to offer bootleg caviar. those were the days...
Tu 204
This happens all the time in the USA, every day somewhere. The green lasers are worse than the red ones.
Good idea Lee. I would be surprised if no one has thought of it. We have had thin film optical coatings for at least seventy or eighty years. One of the pioneering companies was/is in Santa Rosa, your neck of the woods? For this threat I’d look for a tunable optical coating coupled to a cheap spectrometer to identify the frequency of any radiation of sufficient power to be dangerous, and apply a potential (voltage) to the coating, probably sandwiched like safety glass in the cockpit windows, to adjust its thickness to reflect the energy. The protective coating might simply be applied to goggles, but goggles or windows, the idea is reasonable.
We already have optical coatings that reflect most visible and infra red frequencies, but are transparent to an optical window in our sky that causes heat on earth to “see” the almost absolute zero temperature of space, enabling "Carnot" cooling of the space behind a window. Unfortunately, the building with the window to space would need to be extremely well insulated for the cooling effect to dominate the heating caused by air leaks around windows and doors. But optical coatings are widely used, and I believe some optical telescopes have tunable coatings already.
Chechnyans.
pilot was blinded? temporary or permanent?
couldn’t the glass on these jets be designed to diffuse the light?
Or just the same type of jerk that does the same thing near U.S. airports. “Stupid” seems to be a universal attribute.
I’m surprised this made the news. This is a nightly occurrence in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It’s usually at least two or three of them.
Pretty soon they've infiltrated your military and are selling off secrets to your enemies while touting that they are really women trapped in men's bodies and other perversions.
Your prejudice is certainly not based on facts. Russian airliners are more reliable than their average western counterparts by far. They are built under military philosophy with all critical systems dubbed. Airframes are stronger too giving more chances to walk away from a wreck.
Not doable other than possibly in a DARPA prototype lab and not sensible anyway.
He is talking about dynamically steering the reflected beam, not just tuning the reflectivity. You would need mirrors on piezo controls, at least a pair, that would pivot on on 3D axis to steer the beam back to where it come from.
No one would ever do it that way. In a military application, you would just fire your own laser beam (or other weapon) back at the incoming fire. Why bother with reflecting the beam?
The legalities of a civilian airliner firing back at civilians on the ground is a whole ‘nother matter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.