A Minnesota man was sentenced to two years in prison for pointing a laser at an airplane that was on its way to land at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in 2021, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Wisconsin. The cockpit of the aircraft was lit up three times by the laser and caused a “major distraction” that could’ve caused serious problems for the Delta Air Lines flight.
On October 29, 2021, 43-year-old Nicholas James Link of Rochester, Minnesota, was shining a laser seemingly at any and all aircraft flying over River Falls, Wisconsin—a town not far from the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, according to prosecutors.
Traveling from Raleigh-Durham, the pilots had just been instructed by air traffic control in Minneapolis that they should change their runway and started looking at their iPads to do just that when the laser first struck.
The pilots immediately shifted their priority to protecting their eyes, with the first officer using his iPad as a shield instead of using it to brief the approach,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a press release.
“The captain wrote that ‘[o]ne minor mistake during this critical phase could have led to catastrophic results.’ The defendant’s action caused a severe safety threat to the safety of the crew and all passengers on board the aircraft,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office continued.
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As the Associated Press notes, pilots in the U.S. reported 9,723 laser incidents in 2021, a huge jump from the year earlier.
Link was only caught because the plane’s surveillance equipment was able to give a rough idea of where the laser was coming from, and a Minnesota State Patrol aircraft was dispatched to fly over River Falls. State Patrol flew in circles over the town at 3,500 feet and, sure enough, Link pointed his laser at the police plane. After that, authorities were able to precisely locate Link and the local cops were able to pick him up.
At sentencing, Judge Conley remarked on Link’s extensive criminal record which included numerous domestic assaults,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in its statement.
“Judge Conley also discredited the defendant’s argument that it was not commonly known that aiming a laser at aircraft was dangerous. The defendant wrote in his sentencing memorandum that there were almost 10,000 reports of laser strikes on aircraft each of the past two years. Judge Conley said that these incidents are frequently reported in the news, so the danger is commonly known.”