Data recently released by the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) show that laser strike incidents reported to the CAA declined 12.6 percent last year from 2015. It was the second straight year that laser incident reports have declined, and despite up and down movement on a year-to-year basis, the incident reports are down 34 percent since 2011, according to CAA.
That’s good news, certainly, but it’s not great news, especially when you consider that the 1,258 laser incidents reported to have occurred in the United Kingdom last year still work out to more than three a day. If you add in the 274 laser incidents involving U.K. operators overseas, it quickly adds up to more than four reported incidents per day.
In Canada in 2014, there were 502 reported incidents, and in the United States in 2015, there were 7,703 laser strikes recorded. If you combined the reports for the U.K., Canada and the United States (recognizing that we’re talking about different years), it works out to…
