This has happened to me while piloting a small plane over oakland. What happens is that the light hits the cockpit front window. That diffuses it throughout the cockpit. It blinds your momentarily. And you lose any and all night adaptation in your eyes. This particularly sucks on moonless nights, and doubly so when you have to look out the window to land.
Well, that's sort of good news then, you're reducing power density by what, 2-3 orders of magnitude? So much less likely to cause permanent damage.
Edit: not sure why people are downvoting. If the point source is spread by diffracting through the window, count of photons per unit area is reduced in proportion to the square of the difference in radius from, say, an inch or so, depending on the spread of the beam with distance, to a large enough cone to apparently light up the cockpit. Which means a 1mW laser goes from ≈1mW/in^2 to ≈.01mW/in^2 if the cone spreads to a diameter of 10 inches by the time it hits the pilot's eye.
All of the high power lasers I've seen are fully capable of blinding people off tertiary or quaternary reflections from even relatively low albedo surfaces.
Even closing your eyes is not sufficient for some of them. They can light up your eyelids brightly enough to cause damage even reflected twice.
So even a glancing contact will give you a full dazzle, blinding you for at least a few minutes, and possibly permanent damage if you're unlucky.
Yep. Trivial to buy, cheaper used from EBay. And you can get infrared ones that will fry eyes without even noticing bright lights first. Your eye simply goes dark forever.
