I agree that you can't simply extrapolate the flash blinding
by a nearby laser pointer to flash blinding of a pilot at
large distances (like thousands of feet). Beam divergence
of these inexpensive laser pointers would diverge the beam
to the point that the energy is just too low to do anything
other than appear to the pilot like a tiny green point in the
distance.
Assuming an initial beam size of 2 mm and a beam
divergence of 5 miliradians, at a distance of 40 feet the
beam gets to be 7 mm in diameter. At greater distances
the beam continues to expand so that it can no longer be
completely accepted by the dark adapted eye. For example,
at a distance of 100 feet the beam is 15 mm across and only
23% can enter the dark adapted eye, at 500 feet it is 66 mm
and only 1% can get into the eye. At one mile, the beam is
673 mm across and would require the pilot to use a 26 inch
diameter telescope objective to collect the whole beam (not
just any old concave surface which happened to be in the
cockpit. Not a likely chance occurrence.
What this tells me is that either someone is playing
games with an industrial strength laser or else is using
large diameter astronomical optics to focus the pointer laser
and reduce the beam divergence. I will not go into detail
how this could be done, but if this is in fact what happened,
the irresponsible meathead who did it should be prosecuted
and have his equipment confiscated.
Clif Ashcraft