Beautiful Subversion: Protestors Create Ad Hoc Light Show
As the deepening crisis of confidence in Egypt's Mohammad Morsi unfolds in the country's streets, a video shot yesterday offered a dose of the surreal: a military helicopter hovering over Tahrir Square with protestor laser beams dancing kaleidoscopically on the aircraft's belly.
As the deepening crisis of confidence in Egypt’s Mohammad Morsi unfolds in the country’s streets, a video shot yesterday offered a dose of the surreal: a military helicopter hovering over Tahrir Square with protestor laser beams dancing kaleidoscopically on the aircraft’s belly. The footage, published on the YouTube channel of an Egyptian video news site, shows a sky full of fireworks giving way to a military helicopter, which is quickly targeted by a staggering number of laser pointers. These shaky beams — mostly green — are ostensibly meant to distract the pilots, and the sheer number of them demonstrates the preparedness of Egypt’s protestors two and a half years after historic mass actions toppled the 30-year reign of Hosni Mubarak.
The Aviationist, an aircraft blog, reports that the searchlight-equipped military chopper is likely a Soviet Mi-8/17 Hip. Though it’s impossible to tell whether the laser pointers disrupted the Egyptian military’s helicopter mission as intended, there has been a crackdown in the United States on this very behavior in recent years, with one California teenager receiving 30 months in jail for shining a laser pointer at an airplane. The FAA claims it gets thousands of complaints regarding such laser pointer abuse annually, though only a handful are prosecuted, and the FBI produced a video about it in 2011.
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h/t Jalopnik.
