IRISH PILOTS have warned that "sooner or later somebody will be killed" if there is not an island-wide concerted crackdown on the increasing use of laser pointers to dazzle or blind pilots.
The Irish Aviation Authority confirmed that since September there were close to a dozen attempts to dazzle or blind pilots flying in and out of Dublin airport.
The British Civil Aviation Authority said that in the past six months there were at least five attempts to dazzle pilots with laser pointers in Northern Ireland. In Britain this year there were scores of such incidents.
The most serious incident in Ireland happened at George Best Belfast City Airport in August, when the captain of a Boeing 737 was hit in the eye with a laser as he made his approach to land.
On Halloween night this year several planes were targeted by a green laser at the same airport.
Capt Michael McLaughlin of the Irish Airline Pilots' Association (Ialpa) said the use of high-powered laser pointers or beams was becoming an "enormous problem" in Ireland.
"This is certainly a very, very serious threat to safety," he said. "The level of stupidity that you are dealing with is almost unfathomable that somebody would think that this is a reasonable thing to do. They are potentially risking the lives of vast numbers of people."
Gardaí confirmed that it scrambled its helicopter three times at Dublin airport to try to catch those using the lasers. "While there were no arrests a file is currently pending in relation to one of the incidents. All incidents are treated very seriously," said a Garda spokesman.
"We treat this very seriously and know the Garda [is] very keen to stamp it out," said a spokeswoman for the Irish Aviation Authority. "This is reckless behaviour that potentially could have very serious consequences."
The use of laser pointers has become such a serious issue over recent years that the internet trading companies eBay and Amazon decided they would ban them from sale on their sites.
The high-powered pointers can be used responsibly by people such as astronomers for star-pointing. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing malicious use of the lasers. One airline source said she was aware of a pilot in Australia who was forced out of work when a laser was beamed into his eyes.
In November, 16 boxes of the high-powered lasers, which have a range of several miles, were seized by British trading standards officers from a container in Suffolk in England. They were judged illegal because their power rating of five milliwatt was more than the one milliwatt allowed.
The lasers can be bought online for about £40 (€42) or through some gadget shops.
In October an Ipswich teenager received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, for using a laser beam to dazzle the pilot of a police helicopter. Other reported use of the lasers have been at airports such as Heathrow, Newcastle, Exeter and Norwich, while at Cardiff Airport in August a pilot was temporarily blinded by a laser beam.
The British Airline Pilots' Association said those using the lasers were "effectively playing Russian roulette" with passengers' lives. Anyone using them maliciously should be imprisoned, said a spokesman for the association.
Capt McLaughlin said he understood that some people could use the beams innocently to identify stars and constellations. "But a lot of the use appears to be malicious, and people will be deliberately pointing them at aircraft in the same way that some people throw bricks off motorway flyovers."
If you shine into the cockpit "you will probably blind both pilot and co-pilot", he warned. "Sooner or later somebody will be killed if this goes on."
