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US: Study of U.S. incidents, 2010-2014 gives insights into laser-aircraft safety

A study by aviation website AirSafe.com analyzed 17,663 laser/aircraft incidents reported to the FAA from 2010 through 2014. The study is noteworthy for “cleaning up” the FAA statistics to fix data entry errors, in order to get a more accurate picture of the problem. The cleaned-up data is available for further analysis by other researchers (see links below).

An AirSafe summary noted that from 2010 through 2014, there were only eight days with no laser encounters reported in the U.S. The graph below shows the distribution of incidents, with most days having between 7-12 laser strikes:

AirSafe distribution of laser incidents

Analysis by day of the week, and by month of the year, showed Friday and Saturday evenings as having a greater likelihood of illuminations. July through November saw higher-than-normal numbers of incidents.

The AirSafe study also looked at six selected metropolitan areas. It compared the number of flights to the number of incidents. Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco had higher-than-normal numbers of incidents; Chicago and New York were about average, and Atlanta was below average.

From AirSafe.com: summary page, and detailed analysis as a webpage, PDF and RPubs versions. Links are given to the raw FAA data, the processed version used by AirSafe, and statistical R code. Thanks to Dr. Todd Curtis who did the study and brought this to our attention.