Laser Attacks against Aircraft: Past, Present and
Future
Efthymios Kallos, George Palikaras
Metamaterial Technologies Inc.
Dartmouth, Canada
themos.kallos@metamaterial.com
AbstractLaser interference attacks on aircraft, air traffic
control towers and law enforcement officers have grown
significantly over the last few years and pose serious risks to
aviation security and safety. In this paper we review the history
and present status of the problem. We also examine the use of
nanostructured materials and metamaterials for the development
of transparent, ultra-thin optical filters for laser protection in
aviation.
Keywords laser attacks, aircraft, holography, Bragg
I. INTRODUCTION
Protection from laser light has become increasingly
important due to the proliferation of cheaper and more
powerful laser systems on a variety of markets. When the eye
is exposed to laser light, significant damage can occur, mainly
via the absorption of incoming photons and the heating of the
living tissue. The damage depends on the intensity of the laser
(the energy per second impinging on a certain surface area) and
the duration of the exposure. Interference events with aircraft
operations by third-parties are usually described as security
events rather than safety occurrences. Nonetheless, security
related events such as interference from laser light pointers
can also have potential safety consequences. The reason is that
although laser light pointers do not have the ability to damage
or destroy aircraft, they can and sometimes do interfere with
the ability of the crew to maintain visual contact with the
runway.
II. LASER ATTACK STATISTICS
Laser pointer incidents are on the rise, as data from
Eurocontrol and several National Aviation Authorities show.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced in
January 2014 that laser attacks have more than doubled since
2009, from 1,527 in 2009 to 3,894 in 2014 in the US alone. In
addition, the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has reported
a 63% average annual growth of laser attack incidents for the
last 10 years, with the latest data showing 1595 incidents in
2010. At this rate the number of incidents every year is
estimated to rise to over 30,000 worldwide. This means that
during the peak evening hours (where laser attacks have been
found to occur more frequently) at least one laser attack every
3 minutes may be taking place by 2018. 92% of all laser
attacks utilize 532 nm green lasers.
III. EXISTING FILTERING SOLUTIONS
There are several technical issues regarding currently
available Laser Protection Systems (LPSs) that affect their
feasibility in the proposed application for aviation. First, they
usually operate over a single band of light such as green or
blue, providing protection from a single laser wavelength only.
Second, they are not strictly narrowband. The consequences of
broadband filtering are a loss of accurate sight, in particular
through a lack of transparency and color vision deficiency,
which is the decreased ability to perceive differences between
some of the colors that would be otherwise perceptible without
the use of LPSs. Third, LPSs are usually tinted, which once
again distorts visual perception. Fourth, glass-based filters are
heavy and cannot be comfortably worn by individuals over an
extended period of time. These issues make existing LPS an
ineffective solution to the problem of laser interference.
IV. NANOSTRUCTURED FILTERING SOLUTIONS
Metamaterials and other nanostructured solutions such as
Bragg mirrors or plasmonic nanoparticles offer unique
advantages in the precise filtering of narrowband laser lines,
without affecting the visual appearance. At the same time, a
suitable and affordable fabrication methods needs to be
implemented, to produce filters that can be adhered directly
onto aircraft windscreens, which are typically up to 1.2 m in
size (e.g. Airbus A320 pilot Window 1).
Fabrication options include: i) GLAD (Glancing Angle
Deposition), which is a fabrication technique in which the
dynamic control of tilt and azimuthal rotation of a substrate
during deposition is used to tailor film morphology in the
nanoscale. ii) Sol-gel, which is an elegant, low cost, and
powerful approach which offers innovative strategies to tailor
nanostructured particles with controllable properties including
size distribution, morphology, porosity, shape, and surface
area. Sol-gel also provides an alternative route to the synthesis
of multi component oxide materials with different
compositions and where the distribution of heterometal bonds
is highly homogeneous. iii) Photorefraction, which offers the
possibility of a parallel fabrication method where even the
most complex large area Bragg gratings can be completed in
minutes. The process scales relatively easily to large surface
areas as lasers with a larger spot size could be used.