Aiming a laser pointer at an aircraft is a terrible idea. Contrary to popular belief, pilots are not, in fact, cats. Nor are they here for your PowerPoint presentation. They're humans performing a difficult, high-stakes job, and laser beams can interfere with their vision, risking lives for what amounts to juvenile mischief.

Hopefully, you don't need a lecture explaining the ins and outs of laser physics to understand the danger. But curious minds might want to learn a bit more about how a tiny beam from a $10 gadget can ruin a pilot's night and land the perpetrator in prison.

At normal distances, laser beams look like they stay perfectly narrow, but they spread out gradually as they travel. After a mile or two, what began as a tiny dot a few feet away may have grown to several feet across.

It's easy to imagine pilots seeing an annoying but harmless dot in the cockpit. But the reality is much scarier. Between the beam's increased size and the aircraft's scratched and curved windshield, the pilot might see a window's width of light glowing and cascading across their field of view. An imperfect analogy would be driving toward an intense desert sun that's low in the sky. Now imagine trying to land a plane like that, with the lives of hundreds of passengers in your hands.

These incidents also tend to happen at the worst time. Handheld lasers mostly hit low-flying planes, which are taking off or landing. Plus, they usually happen at night, when the pilot's pupils are already dilated.

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