Laser pointers could be declared prohibited weapons in Australia after a series of "attacks" on pilots of airliners coming in to land at Sydney airport, officials said.
In the worst incident, six aircraft had to alter their flight paths on Friday after their cockpits were targeted in coordinated assaults by four green lasers over 15 minutes.
"My [police] minister is examining making these things prohibited weapons," New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma said yesterday.
"These fools think it's a joke. It's not a joke if you end up blinding a pilot, bringing a plane down and potentially killing dozens if not hundreds of people on the plane and on the ground. This could be mass murder," Iemma said.
Federal government agencies began meeting with police yesterday to produce recommendations by Friday on how to curb laser attacks on airplanes, Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus said, noting a fresh incident on Tuesday night.
"The attack on an airplane from Cairns to Sydney last night adds renewed urgency to the concern of the government," Debus said in Sydney. "We are in fact dealing with a new kind of very destructive behavior."
Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman Peter Gibson said the coordinated incident last Friday was particularly worrying.
"Normally we just get one and it is intermittent," he said. "It is happening probably five or six times a week, so almost every day somewhere around Australia someone is pointing a laser at an aircraft."
Laser pointers are hand-held devices, often no bigger than a pen. The power of the laser beams varies; a power of 1 milliwatt or lower is legal in most Australian states, but lasers with up to 50 milliwatts or more can be purchased online, laser dealer John Bowen said.
Even with those it would be difficult to blind a pilot in a rapidly moving aircraft, Bowen said.
"The claim that the conventional hand-held laser pointer that any Joe Blow could buy over the Web could bring down a plane by blinding the pilot I think has been exaggerated," he said.
Norman Heckenberg, professor at the University of Queensland laser science center, also said that common laser pointers are unlikely to pose a danger.
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