FAA: Laser Attacks on Planes Are Down, but They're Still Far Too High
Pointing a laser pen at the sky might seem harmless, but it can be extremely dangerous: distracting and even blinding pilots. Since 2010 laser strikes have plagued US aircraft, with experts chalking up the problem to easily available cheap laser pens, and people either not knowing or not caring about the risks it entails. Though thankfully these types of incidents haven’t caused any crashes, the FAA says pilots have reported 328 injuries since it started tracking the number in 2010.
- ▪Pointing a laser pen at the sky might seem harmless, but it can be extremely dangerous: distracting and even blinding pilots.
- ▪Since 2010 laser strikes have plagued US aircraft, with experts chalking up the problem to easily available cheap laser pens, and people either not knowing or not caring about the risks it entails.
- ▪Though thankfully these types of incidents haven’t caused any crashes, the FAA says pilots have reported 328 injuries since it started tracking the number in 2010.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/faa-laser-attacks-on-planes-are-down-but-theyre-still-far-too-high |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 26 17:07:58 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T17:13:47.123Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T17:13:47.123Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Jzl_aq6JFnZH · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Pointing a laser pen at the sky might seem harmless, but it can be extremely dangerous: distracting and even blinding pilots. Since 2010 laser strikes have plagued US aircraft, with experts chalking up the problem to easily available cheap laser pens, and people either not knowing or not caring about the risks it entails. Though thankfully these types of incidents haven’t caused any crashes, the FAA says pilots have reported 328 injuries since it started tracking the number in 2010. But the good news is that laser strikes against aircraft are down again this year, for the third time running, falling 24 percent year-on-year to 4,470 through July 2026 according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).This represents a huge decrease compared to 2023's all-time high of 13,304.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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