A man was charged after reportedly shining a high-powered laser pointer at airplanes, and police discovered drugs on the person during the arrest.
Most people are aware that firing a laser at an airplane might have legal ramifications because the high-powered photons can obscure or even blind the pilots’ vision, and one individual is discovering the full extent of those implications the hard way.
An aircraft monitoring traffic reportedly noticed the suspect, 41-year-old Jose Alonzo Duarte-Campos, pointing a laser at commercial jets.
“Y’all can go ahead and just detain him and start searching for that laser pointer, but this is a felony,” one officer could be heard saying over the radio.
Kathleen Mayer, executive director of the air medical transport organization Flight for Life, described how dangerous laser pointers could be for pilots.
“It was a clinical crew member in an airplane on short final into Centennial Airport,” she said. “This was back in 2017, happened to look out the window at just the wrong time and was struck by the laser.”
The crew member had to leave the company since the laser apparently caused him to lose 30% of his eyesight in one eye.
“The lasers tend to fan out the further away they are,” said Roy Trani, a pilot. “So a pinpoint laser from 8 to 12 feet, you know, at a distance of a couple hundred or 1000 feet tends to get wider, so the whole cockpit starts to kind of sparkle and light up.”
While Duarte-Campos faced accusations of shining a laser at an airplane, authorities also charged him with drug offenses after discovering meth during his arrest. According to local station KRDO, the Colorado State Patrol also stated that he had a warrant for a previous narcotics arrest.
