Burned seems to overstate things as no specific harm was mentioned.
Lasers can very quickly cause permanent damage to the eye. But what amounts to ~1 square centimeter target in an aircraft going several hundred miles an hour is likely to be extremely brief. Though distracting and therefore still dangerous.
I think this goes beyond "overstated" to outright falsehood (assuming, as it appears from the article, that the pilots eyes weren't actually burned). It punches up the headline, so it's almost certainly purposeful.
They're not talking about combustion-type burning. How hard do you think it is to burn (as in tissue burn) the cells on the surface of the retina, given that there is a lens focusing light onto the retina?
If they are going to use a colloquial expression like "burn" to describe what the laser is doing to the retina, it ought to give a laymen an approximately correct idea of what is going on. So, "burn" should mean something like "does enough cellular damage to the retina to interfere with vision for days".
I'm not sure that matters much, it'd likely still be concentrated on a smaller radius than the pupil, even if it isn't focused to an absolute pinpoint.
Not really, if you look at an accurate model of the human eye about half the inner sphere is photoreceptive. Where a much smaller area collects light. It’s a very different model than how cameras work and how most simplified models are shown.
Lasers can very quickly cause permanent damage to the eye. But what amounts to ~1 square centimeter target in an aircraft going several hundred miles an hour is likely to be extremely brief. Though distracting and therefore still dangerous.