[Kirkwood]

It is much more complicated than you imply. The aversion reflex prevents most damage. The determining factor is retinal illumination.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

The aversion reflex prevents most damage. The determining factor is retinal illumination.

Nonsense. Exoposure to a laser is almost instantaneous. There is no "aversion reflex" with a laser exposure. Where do you get this crap?

[DB]

If it's visible.

It all comes down to energy exposure levels.

low power for extended time has the same affect as high power levels for short periods of time. Obviously the chances of staying targeted on a specific location very long is low. Therefore low power lasers aren't normally very harmful. A 50 watt laser is 10,000 times more powerful than the typical 5 mW laser. So the time required to do damage is reduced by a factor of 10,000. That's pretty substantial. Instead of a couple of seconds to do damage it's down to a couple of hundred microseconds. In human time that's instantaneous.

It will be very interesting to find out what altitude this plane was flying at the time of the event.