The number of incidents of lasers being flashed into aircraft rises sharply; federal, state prosecutors respond

Board (NTSB) also has taken an interest in the laser problem, ramping up its reviews after a 1995 incident that left a Southwest Airlines first officer temporarily blinded by light from an outdoor laser show as he lifted off from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.

The first officer was disoriented for several minutes and handed off the flight to the captain, the NTSB found.

A year later, the pilot of a Skywest Airlines flight coming into Los Angeles was exposed to a laser light in his right eye. When his eye began burning and tearing, he had to relinquish control of the final approach and landing to his co-pilot. The laser had come from an area near a college campus, and tests confirmed that the pilot had flash burns to his cornea, an NTSB report concluded.

The NTSB soon urged the FAA to research laser exposure limits for pilots, which led to several studies, including one on the effects of laser strikes on pilots during final approach.

Flaherty writes that as ever-cheaper lasers have made their way into ever-more hands, federal and local prosecutors have picked up the pace of criminal cases. In January 2005 the federal prosecutor for New Jersey drew national attention when he used the Patriot Act, which was passed in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to charge a Parsippany, New Jersey, man with flashing a laser at a charter Cessna carrying six passengers into Teterboro Airport. The antiterrorism measure included a provision about deliberately interfering with the pilot of an airplane or “mass transportation vehicle” with reckless disregard for human safety.

The laser case was brought in under that legal umbrella — and eventually drew criticism for using a legal tool crafted for terrorists to pursue laser wielder David Banach. Banach pleaded guilty to interference with the pilot and in 2006 was sentenced to two years’ probation.

In April 2009, Dana C. Welch became the first defendant in the country to be convicted by a jury of interfering with pilots by shooting lasers at them. Welch, then 37, of Orange County, California, shone a handheld laser at two Boeing jets coming in for landings in 2008 at John Wayne Airport there. One was a United Airlines flight with more than 180 people onboard; the other was an Alaska Airlines flight carrying more than 80. Welch was acquitted of charges that he also aimed the laser at a Delta Airlines aircraft and the police helicopter brought in to investigate. Welch was sentenced in November to thirty months in federal prison.

 

Others have been convicted since then, including Clint J. Brenner, 36. He was convicted in May in Arizona on state charges that he trained a laser on a police helicopter searching in Prescott for a robbery suspect thought to be atop a store’s roof.

The roof was within hitting distance of Brenner, who was watching the air search and trained his green laser on the helicopter’s windshield. Brenner apologized at the end of his trial, in which news accounts say his attorney acknowledged an “immature act” in which “alcohol consumption” may have played a part in what the sentencing judge deemed “foolishness.” Brenner was sentenced to two years in prison.