Pentagon: Back Off, Flyboy!
This should not be surprising. Given our loving government's lack of concern for general aviation, why should they care if they happen to temporarily blind some student pilot on a solo who wanders too close to the ADIZ? They've already shown how much they care about people who are close to fuel exhaustion while waiting to get back into the ADIZ and bring their aircraft home. They've already shown how much they care about the small businesses destroyed by prohibiting transient pilots from landing at the DC3. And we can all feel the love as still, 4 years later, they haven't allowed general aviation to land at DCA.
So why should it matter to them that the average life span of a blinded pilot is about 90 seconds? Why even consider the possibility of lives lost if one of those pesky small airplanes happens to crash into, oh let's say a schoolyard? I wonder if they've even bothered to run tests to estimate what happens if a student pilot becomes disoriented. And, of course, we know that those lasers will absolutely positively prevent a terrorist from crashing a small airplane into the White House and possibly denting a few rose bushes while the pilot perishes in a fire ball.
NORAD says that the lasers can replace fighter jets. This says to me that there is NO REAL DANGER from general aviation aircraft, since you can't STOP these planes with a laser (unless they happen to crash due to disorientation). So why not drop the pretext and the useless "let the stupid masses feel better" approach and let us fly as if we were in a free country?
Pentagon: Back Off, Flyboy!: "Despite aviation officials' concerns that terrorists or others could use lasers to blind pilots, the Pentagon says it will use the light beams to warn pilots who stray too close to the airspace around the Capitol and White House."
(Via Wired News.)