Are people really this stupid?

[Jude Bradley 659]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21939795

[Rations 102]

On the bright side, the aircraft and pilots made it through without receiving permanent damages.

[vc10man 732]

Why look that far in the USA?They were doing it at Manchester Airport until a year or so ago.

[Dave_YVR 997]

We see these laser incidents happen alot.. It's nice to finally see one of these idiots actually get caught and penalized.

[Fox-Bat 31]

Good to see the wanna be muderer get punished. Considering he is 19 and old enough to understand the world - I can only fathom that he was trying to bring a plane/helicopter down with all its consequences on purpose. 30 months is too low for such forms of life.  Now we are stuck with his upkeep, room and board which all taxpayers will bear. A Net negative to society.

[jeroen79 0]

He should have used this:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/tracker.shtml

[TheDanger 182]

He should have used this:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/tracker.shtml

 

'Arrives with a voucher you can redeem to get 5% off your first fine of $25,000 or greater!'

 

Classic

[WILDHEART3003 8]

 

Considering he is 19 and old enough to understand the world

 

People can act foolishly at any age. I see people in their 30's driving recklessly on the road everyday. Is the common sense that matter. 

[xplanery 250]

30 months in jail, that's pretty good, great to see that some areas still have juridical system that isn't concerned about freedoms of criminal but safety of regular people instead.

 

In this country with messed up legal system he would have gotten fined at best, to get into jail for 30 months here you would either have to go scam big amount of money or severely beat somebody.

[Werner747 107]

Yes, even in my country these incidents are not few and far between!   It happens with disturbing repetition, and it certainly is not so easy to catch the perps.   It is very dangerous, and in one incident the laser was shone into the cockpit of a Kulula flight (one of our low cost carriers) and the pilot (a lady), averted danger by swithing over from what would have been a visual landing to a straight instrument approach.

 

I think they should impose minimum sentence laws for these people, treat it as attempted murder and give them a sentence of ten years minimum, unless they can show good cause as to why that sentence should not be imposed - good luck with the last part though!

 

Kind regards

[Rocky_53 1,594]

Actually I found it quite refreshing to hear that it happens elsewhere in the world, as I though we had all the dickheads in the UK!

[Mickel 42]

Was listening to YSSY on liveATC and heard a report of a laser one day. Heaven forbid that it happened, but I could just imagine after an accident some idiot saying 'I didn't mean to do it...'

[Gregg_Seipp 571]

They either need to either stop selling them, cut down their strength and/or put on all the packaging that shining it at an aircraft is a felony.  There is scant reason to be selling lasers that shoot 500 ft to the broad public.  With so many lasers out there, as the saying goes "If you give an infinite number of gorillas a typewriter, one of them is going to write War and Peace."  Too many of them...someone's going to do it. 

[Fox-Bat 31]

True foolishness is not entirely related with age. I meant 19 years old is usually old enough to understand the consequences of pointing a laser into a cockpit and then doing it again. 30 months is not enough for such actions.

 

People can act foolishly at any age. I see people in their 30's driving recklessly on the road everyday. Is the common sense that matter. 

[g_precentralis 191]

 

I can only fathom that he was trying to bring a plane/helicopter down with all its consequences on purpose

 

Cmon, you're overreacting. 30 months is really enough. He just thought it's fun to point laser beam to aircraft (it's NOT).