Report on laer pointer incidents in the United States

Everyone who's ever picked up a laser pointer has had someone warn them not to shine it at an airplane. When I first heard that I thought that planes were dropping out of the sky left and right because of a cat toy, but how dangerous can laser pointers really be to planes? What types of people go around intentionally trying to blind pilots? Do these "Laser Pointer Events" ever result in injury? Where could you even find information about this?

As it turns out, the FAA has made all this information public. Dates, times, even the color of the laser itself. So, according to the data, where are lasers the biggest problem? All of the data visualizations you're about to see are taken from the FAA's data, specifically from 2022's file unless stated otherwise.

Strangely enough, states with the highest population do not necessarily have the most reported incidents. As seen in the chart above, California had more than double the reported incidents of Texas, which is not representative of their populations. For comparison, California's population in 2021 was estimated to be 39 million while Texas' was 29 million. That's only a population difference of 25% against a 50% increase in incidents. New York, one of the most populated states, is also noticeably far down the list.

Sometimes looking at the same data another way can help you see things you couldn't before. Below is the exact same data set as the chart above, but in the form of a heatmap. The darker the color of a state, the more reported incidents the state had during the first two months of 2022.

California is by far the most active western seaboard state. None of its neighbors even come close to the number of reports. This map, combined with the massive gap between California and Texas, tells me that whatever is causing California's level of activity is not related solely to population. It could be any number of factors such as regulation on laser pointers, amount of air traffic, or even air purity. Why is New York so far down then? Put a pin in that one, we'll come back to it.

Is there a pattern to lasers being pointed at planes? Logically if there was a pattern at all, it would be that most incidents occur on the weekends. Let's look and see if that hypothesis holds water.

The chart above is a line graph which shows how many laser events happened on each day of the week during the month of January 2022. The first two weeks show us that the number of reports actually declined over the weekend and spiked around Monday/Tuesday. Even more interesting is that on the third week this pattern changes. Laser reports during the week flatline and the weekend lights up with activity. Believe it or not, this tells us exactly who is behind these sorts of incidents. Most working adults don't get so much time off after New Years, but children and young adults do. The FAA report is missing detailed information for the people responsible for shining a laser pointer at planes due to privacy concerns, but the schedule alone tells us that these incidents are more consistent with the schedule of a student than a working adult.

Not only does this tell us who is shining lasers and when they're doing it, but it also helps us make sense of the distribution of laser incidents across the States. New York is the only one of the most populated states to not be represented at the top of the bar chart because selling laser pointers to minors in New York is illegal. This makes perfect sense as its incredible population density makes shining any sort of light in any direction potentially dangerous.

Now we know exactly when during the week those dastardly children are ready to strike, but let's get more specific than that. When during the day are planes most at risk? Common sense tells us they're only in danger after dark, so let's test that hypothesis too.

This chart type is called a scatterplot. It measures the altitude at which the planes reported seeing the laser on the vertical axis and the time of day is recorded in military time along the horizontal axis. Unsurprisingly, there's zero activity from 11 am onward, but what is surprising is that there's hardly any activity before midnight. what this says about the people pointing lasers, I'm not sure. It could mean there are a lot more adults doing it than our previous charts let on, but it could also be because children want to attract attention even less. Laser pointers are illegal in one of the most populated states, after all. Can't have your family catching you up at 11 pm pointing one out the window.

Here's something that tells us a little about the motivation for these incidents. Most laser pointers you can find at the store are red, but it's a decently well-known fact that green is by far the most powerful color of commercial laser. 

The fact that 80% of lasers pointed at planes are the strongest variant could just be because they would be able to reach the most planes, but take a look back at the scatterplot. The majority of planes that experience these events are flying at extremely low altitudes. It would be reasonable (but not airtight) to assume that green lasers are chosen deliberately because of how bright they are. That's right, the kids with these lasers are pointing them at planes just to see what they can do.  Makes you think that lasers might just be as dangerous as you were told.

This is the big question, is shining a laser on a plane really going to permanently blind the pilot or make the plane fall out of the sky? This chart is called a treemap, it displays percentages in the form of rectangles stacked together. This particular treemap shows us exactly how many of these laser events in 2022 have resulted in injury.

Out of 817 reported events as of February, three of them resulted in injury to someone on the plane. At first, you might be tempted to laugh at numbers like those, but just think about how significant every one of those incidents is. Most pilots got lucky and weren't injured at all, but three of them in one month alone got unlucky. If one of those unlucky pilots got really unlucky, they could hurt a lot more than just three people.

During the twelve years the FAA has recorded, the number of laser incidents has fallen and risen. Unfortunately, the general trend has been growing with a sharp increase since the pandemic began. 

It's too early to tell, but it's very likely that 2022 will continue this trend. Look at the bar on the right in the chart below. In the first month of 2022 alone there were 813 laser incidents across the United States. The bar to its left represents the 833 events that were reported during the first five months of 2010. Despite the stern warnings we've all heard this problem has done nothing but grow. All we can do now is to spread awareness of how widespread and potentially dangerous this trend is.

With all this data, have we accomplished our goal? Now we know that laser incidents usually occur in highly-populated states without regulation against laser pointers, Usually, they are carried out largely by younger people in the early hours of the morning, most often with green lasers, and they have the potential to be extremely harmful although most of them are not. A few things still remain a mystery such as why people point these lasers or what kind of risks are posed to the pilots, but this is as far as the data can take us for now. 

Thank you for reading!