11 March 2015

Idiot for the day


Alan Baker (Russell's son and once Rico's roommate, when Rico lived in Nantucket) and Winnie Hu have an article in The New York Times about a moron with a laser:
The weapon was a black tubular laser, small enough to slip into the front pocket of a pair of pants. But its pinpoint beam of bright green light, when aimed at aircraft in the dark skies over New York City recently, was powerful enough to injure the eyes of four pilots, including two officers in a New York Police Department helicopter (photo), jeopardizing their ability to fly safely, the authorities said. Detective Richard Mardarello, left, and Police Officer Royston Charles are credited with identifying the Bronx apartment from which a laser beam was flashed at planes.
After the Federal Aviation Administration alerted the police to the skyward-pointing laser beam flashing across the cockpits of several commercial jetliners taking off and landing at La Guardia Airport, the officers in their Bell 429 helicopter saw it emanating from an apartment on Coddington Avenue in the Bronx, police said.
Officers from the 45th Precinct who knocked on the door were invited inside by a woman and saw a device atop the refrigerator labeled Laser 303 and Danger, the police said. Then they questioned Frank J. Egan, 36, the woman’s son, who “admitted to officers that he is the owner of the laser and did use it that evening,” according to a statement from the police. Officials said that, in cases like this one, such tidy investigative work was rare and making arrests was a frustratingly difficult feat.
Egan, who the police said works in his sister’s flower shop and lives with her, her husband, and the siblings’ mother, was arrested and charged with several offenses, including two counts of assault on a police officer, three counts of felony assault, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon.
Egan appeared in the Bronx Criminal Court for arraignment. Prosecutors requested $75,000 bail, but Judge Brenda Rivera released Mr. Egan on $5,000 cash or $15,000 bond shortly after 11:30 p.m. Egan was represented by his lawyer, Francis J. O’Reilly, who said that Egan “vehemently denies” the accusations. O’Reilly said Egan was sleeping at the time of the incident and was not home alone.
At his building off busy East Tremont Avenue, about eight miles from La Guardia, Egan’s mother declined earlier to allow reporters inside, but at one point she looked down from the second-floor window and shouted: “My son’s a good kid and that’s it.”
Overhead, the whine and drone of plane engines rumbled on, with fuselages seeming to get so low that pedestrians could see the landing gear and make out a carrier’s name. One local resident, Rob Lenhard, 24, said he could understand why someone would resort to laser pointing. “Honestly, I’ve gotten drunk a couple times and thought about doing it myself,” he said. “I’m not going to lie.” He does not own a laser, Lenhard added.
To Federal and local authorities, though, “this is no joke,” said Samuel M. Goldwasser, a laser expert and a former professor of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It is only a matter of time, he said, before a pilot, perhaps a “weekend pilot” in a single-engine plane, feels a sudden blast of laser light, panics, and loses control.
While the Federal Food and Drug Administration regulates laser devices, it is easy to buy hand-held lasers that exceed “the legal limit of five milliwatts by a factor of a hundred or more,” Dr. Goldwasser said. He said the laser the police accused Egan of using was more powerful than the law allowed and was “definitely not a presentation pointer.”
“But there is a danger to aviation, even with low-powered lasers, which can result in distraction and temporary flash-blindness,” said Dr. Goldwasser, who writes the online guide Sam’s Laser FAQ. “It all depends on ‘How powerful is the laser? How far away is the aircraft?’ To what extent the person holding the laser can sustain contact with the cockpit.” He added: “Unlike in Star Wars, the beam does expand.”
Across the country, reports of lasers being pointed at commercial aircraft rose to 3,690 in 2013 from 283 in 2003, the FAA said, though no such instances have been cited as a factor in a crash.
Last year, the New York City office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a national campaign to deter “laser strikes” since the number of episodes in the New York City area had nearly doubled, to 99 in 2013 from 52 in 2010; it offered up to ten thousand dollars as a reward for information on people pointing lasers at planes. The number of episodes in the New York area fell to seventy for last year, said J. Peter Donald, an FBI spokesman, but there have already been more than thirty this year, he said.
Most cases are directed at planes flying around La Guardia, officials said. In May of 2014, the cockpit of a Shuttle America jetliner approaching that airport in northern Queens was illuminated four times by a burst of green light from a laser, the FBI said. The beam came from about five thousand feet below, from a residential area of the borough about eight miles south of the airport. In September of 2014, the police arrested a man in Queens who they said had pointed a laser at a police helicopter hovering at 750 feet.
In the recent case, officials said, the co-pilot of an Air Canada commercial airliner was taken to a hospital in Toronto and treated for injuries after being affected by the laser on takeoff from La Guardia, while the plane was at an altitude of three thousand feet. The pilot of a Shuttle America flight reported suffering eye injuries after a laser splashed across his cockpit as he approached for landing at La Guardia, the FAA said.
And the two police helicopter pilots, Detective Richard Mardarello and Officer Royston Charles, were taken to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Hospital and treated for eye injuries before being released, the police said.
At a news conference at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, where the Aviation Unit is based, the officers said they had tried to bait the laser user by rising to two thousand feet and switching on a light closely resembling that of a jet on approach to La Guardia. It worked. The chopper’s window was hit by the green light, and glowed. The officers turned toward it and followed the beam to the building, floor and window it was coming from. “I didn’t even want to blink until I got really close,” said Detective Mardarello, the pilot. “I thought that I would lose it. I followed it like a tunnel to the source.” It felt, he said, “like sand in your eyes.”
Rico says you don't get to tell the cops you did it and then later say you didn't, but laser-proof goggles should be issued to all pilots in the area:

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