Laser reportedly hits incoming plane in Myrtle Beach; no landing problems reported

Sun News ^ | Sunday, May. 27, 2012 | Lorena Anderson

[babygene]

Dave the typical divergence (how much the beam get’s larger with distance) of a green laser pointer is 1.5 mRad. That says that a 1mm beam from one of these lasers, at 1000 feet will be 46.67 centimeters. At 6000 feet it would be 275.27 centimeters (or 9.031 feet. So, if your laser beam starts out at 5 MW or even 50 MWs with a 1 mm beam and you expanded the beam to 2752.744 MM (46.67 MM) after traveling 1000 feet, and the size of the pupil was approximately 1 MM... How much light energy would enter the eye?

The answer is almost none.

I’m not stating that you can’t blind people with lasers or even do structural damage to an aircraft with one. You just can’t do it with a hand held laser pointer. It takes high power combined with a really good servo system to track an object (in this case were talking about the pupil of an eye)with a laser at a distance.