Tuesday night, the pilots of at least 11 commercial planes flying into New York City-area airports reported having lasers from the ground shined at their aircraft, including in some cases their cockpits, according to an analysis of air traffic control audio obtained by 404 Media. In some of the audio, pilots can be heard saying the lasers are “definitely directed straight at us,” that the lasers “are tracking us,” and, at one point air traffic control says “yep, we’ve been getting them all night, like literally 30 of them.”
The air traffic control recordings, which come from Newark Airport in New Jersey and JFK Airport in New York City, suggest that people in New Jersey are shining powerful lasers at passenger airplanes during one of the busiest travel times of the year amid politician- and media-stoked panic about “mystery drones” in New Jersey. The FBI warned people in New Jersey Tuesday not to shoot at drones or shine lasers at them. A military pilot flying over New Jersey also said he was injured by a laser earlier this week. The air traffic control analysis shared with 404 Media was done by John Wiseman, whose work analyzing open-source flight data has previously uncovered secret FBI surveillance programs. His analysis suggests that people blasting “drones” with lasers is not some theoretical issue, but instead could cause real disruption or harm to commercial pilots.
“Getting lasered about two miles up, our right hand side, our present position,” the pilot of American Airlines flight 586, a flight from Chicago to Newark, said.
“Okay, yep, we’ve been getting them all night, like literally 30 of them,” air traffic control responds. “Do you know what color it was?”
“Green and they are tracking us,” the pilot of American Airlines 586 says.
The pilot of United flight 1856 from Dallas then chimes in and says “we are getting lasered also.”
After Wiseman shared his analysis with 404 Media, we pulled audio of the air traffic control recordings from LiveATC.net, which broadcasts and archives air traffic control tower audio from all over the world.
Wiseman told 404 Media he began specifically listening to air traffic control broadcasts late Tuesday night after seeing a Reddit post titled “If you’re on Sea Bright bridge shining green lasers, STOP. Multiple aircraft are pissed at you and radioing you in right this moment.” Sea Bright Bridge goes right along the Atlantic Ocean; multiple of the supposed “drones” that have led to a panic in recent days have been sighted over the ocean.
“Days ago I was like, ‘Oh, no this is a collective delusion,’” Wiseman told 404 Media in a phone call. “I looked at videos of sightings and was able to geolocate them, then looked on [open source flight data website] ADS-B exchange and identified the planes that were flying right over them. People were going crazy over a beach webcam, but there were lights on the water I could correlate to ships in the ocean and flights on ADS-B exchange.”
While listening to air traffic control audio, Wiseman said he was able to find 11 distinct pilots that said they were getting lasered while flying into JFK or Newark airport in a four-hour period Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
Public Federal Aviation Administration data shows, sadly, that people regularly shine powerful green laser pointers at planes. But there has been no day in 2024 where more than three planes in New York City reported being targeted by lasers, and there had been a grand total of 51 planes reporting laser strikes in New Jersey through the end of November, according to that data.
The pilot of a Republic Airways flight (an Indiana-based regional airline) told air traffic control that they turned off the plane’s external lights to avoid being targeted. “Just hit with a green laser off our left about 9 o’clock,” the pilot said. “We’ve turned off all our external lights for now.” A Delta pilot said “we’re getting that green laser as well … looks to be on the bridge in Seabright.”
Rick Breitenfeldt, an FAA spokesperson, told 404 Media that the agency “has received multiple laser reports from pilots in airspace spanning NJ, NY and PA. Aiming a laser at an aircraft is a serious safety hazard and a violation of federal law.” Breitenfeldt declined to say how many reports it has received in New Jersey and New York in recent days.
A Delta airlines spokesperson said the airline regularly deals with laserings and that it has not seen any safety impacts from what has happened in New Jersey.
“Drones are not new to the aviation industry. Our pilots are trained on identifying, watching and reporting them to the FAA. The government has told us this is not a security concern. When we see drones, we report them to authorities,” Samantha Moore Facteau, the Delta spokesperson said.
Wiseman said that almost all of the videos he’s analyzed so far have actually been of manned aircraft. “I haven’t seen a video of a definite drone so far,” he said. “It’s not that hard [to film a video of a real drone]. Drones do exist.”
