One arrested after laser aimed at pilots flying into Bremerton National Airport

After five pilots and trainees flying into Bremerton National Airport reported laser beams striking their windows while above the runway along Highway 3 on Tuesday, a man contacted by police on a nearby side road was charged with unlawful discharge of a laser, a felony.

On Tuesday morning three different aircraft reported to the airport's control tower that someone was shining a green laser from the ground at the planes, including one witness who said the laser struck her in the eye and caused a brief blindness and a headache that lasted approximately 20 minutes, according to court documents. Pilots in each of the three aircraft, two of which had students alongside flight instructors, identified the source of the laser as a silver sedan, seen from the air at different locations surrounding the airport.

Bremerton police were dispatch to the airport just after 1 p.m., after an airport employee located a silver Honda Civic parked on Airport Way SW, just south of the runway between the Amazon warehouse and the roundabout at Old Clifton Road, and called 911.

A 44-year-old Bremerton man was inside the car, and refused to answer when an officer asked why he was sitting in a parked car near the airport. The suspect also initially refused to provide his identification and told the officer that he was recording the interaction, according to a probable cause statement. No laser device was found in a search of his car, but due to multiple witnesses identifying his car as the source of the laser and the suspect's lack of an explanation for his behavior, the man was arrested and booked into Kitsap County Jail on $40,000 bail. He was charged in Kitsap County Superior Court Wednesday.

Three planes reportedly see green laser beam

The first pilot interviewed told police he had been doing "touch and go" landings at the airport, and when doing a southbound landing saw the green laser come at the cockpit from his right side, west of the airport. He told police he looked over to see a silver sedan driving southbound on Highway 3.

A second pilot, who was instructing a trainee, told a different Bremerton officer that his plane was using the same runway, taking off in the same direction as the first plane, when it was struck by a green laser coming from the west as well, twice in about a ten-minute span. At one point the two filmed a silver car on Old Clifton Road that showed the laser light coming from it, and the pilot also had a clear view of a silver sedan as the plane flew overhead, parked west of Highway 3 on a short paved connector road to Imperial Way in the Port of Bremerton's Industrial Park. The trainee in that plane told police her eyes were "spotting" after seeing the laser, and she experienced a headache. The pilot also reported a feeling of temporary blindness.

The third plane to report being struck, also with a flight instructor and student inside, told police that the laser struck their windows twice, also coming from the west at a site specifically described as on Imperial Way. The pilot also described a "silver car, like a Honda sedan," matching the testimony of witnesses in the first two planes.

The Honda was contacted by police on Airport Way, just across Highway 3 from Imperial Way and before the road's roundabout with Old Clifton Road.

State law specifically includes airplane pilots in the description of the crime of unlawfully discharging a laser, prohibiting action "causing an impairment of the safety or operation of an aircraft or causing an interruption or impairment of service rendered to the public by negatively affecting the pilot." The statute also applies to protection of law enforcement, firefighters, transit drivers and school bus drivers.