No report about this incident which I’ve seen even makes a guess about the power of the laser. If fact even when they arrest someone and have the actual laser in hand they still virtually never mention such details. Have you seen anywhere that even identifies it as a green laser?
Morons who aim at planes are not that likely to have green lasers that do over 1W. You need to spend a lot of money and do some research to get over 1W in either DPSS or direct diode green wavelengths. If these people had the brains to do even a tiny bit of research they wouldn’t be aiming at planes. The vast majority of morons will just have lasers brought from random sellers. Poor quality DPSS 532nm lasers made in china as quickly and cheaply as possible. Because output power with DPSS depends on careful alignment, what you get from these cheap lasers varies a lot. 10-80mw is the usual range for basic ones. A hundred to a couple hundred mw for more powerful models. With the more powerful models, the advertised mw power is nearly always exaggerated, often greatly exaggerated. The people who buy from these sellers never have a laser power meter so there is no reason for the sellers not to make up random high numbers.
Then there is the fact that when you get into these very high powers the lasers don't do tight beams and the divergence is worse. You can get higher power density W/cm2 from a lower mw laser with better divergence.
Concerning the IR which is present in unfiltered 532nm lasers, as ImA4Wheelr said the divergence of it's IR is high. Even at moderate distances it won't be harmful. [quote=Sharpie] these lasers also pump out massive power in infrared, can do and have resulted in serious retinal burns to pilots, sometimes career limiting. [/quote] Show me even a single report of serious retinal burns in pilots from IR. At the distances that they are hit from the W/cm2 is just not high enough.
Laser visual interference hazard distances
A laser with 1W of actual power would need to be closer than 175ft to potentially cause damage. Not serious retinal burns, not even minor burns but a "minimally detectable change to the retina". You can't get that close to planes taking off or landing. So it's flashblindness at worse not "serious retinal burns". Now I am not saying that these laser incidents are not serious. They certainly are. Who here wants to be on a plane with a pilot who is even distracted by a moron with a laser? And flashblindness could result in a cash, kill people.