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Find your inner child and change its diaper. It's 2016, get going already.
Vile things, those. Growing reports of them
causing trouble for planes on final approach. I hope to never
encounter one.
I have often wondered how shining hessentially hundreds of laser pointers into the sky would affect aircraft but assumed they must just be very low power laseres that only travel a few hundred feet. You'd still see it to some extent I'm sure, if you were lined up just right.
A house I lived in was *directly* under the airspace for the alternative runway at a major airport. Every now and again it would be non-stop low flying planes going over the house. The planes came in south-south east to north-north west, and the front of the house faced north. If we had these lights on the house I could see a problem.
The house was a straight line three miles from the start of the runway (according to Google maps) If you looked up as the plane passed over you didn't see the windows of the plane you saw inside the landing gear compartments.
Yep, I'd totally believe it. Approach procedures vary by airport, but a rule-of-thumb standard glideslope on final approach is 3 degrees, or a 5.24% grade. A large aircraft on long final (meaning they line up with the runway several miles out) would be only 276 feet above ground level at 1 mile from the touchdown point. (1 * .0524 * 5280)
Many airports have homes to within a half mile or less the touchdown point, so you can see the reason for concern.
These devices are pretty new, but many pilots are already concerned about "lasing" from handheld battery-operated lasers shown at aircraft. It is a particular problem on final approach at night, when the aircraft is in a nose-down attitude, and vision is critical. Those lasers can refract across the windshield (basically making the entire windshield or cockpit look green) or cause momentary blindness (or simply eyes adjusting for bright instead of dim light). Any of those can be a big problem.