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A comprehensive resource for safe and responsible laser use

For additional information visit the LaserPointerForums.com safety forum
For additional information visit the
LaserPointerForums.com safety forum
Concerned about laser pointers? Want them used safely?
While laser pens are useful and fun, they are all too often misused. This website has details such as…
- consumer eye injuries caused by laser pointers
- what makes bright laser light hazardous to aviation
- why you should never aim laser pointers at aircraft
- basic principles of laser hazards
- a laser pointer FAQ, and fast facts for media
- a video from the FAA and Air Force
- how to report a laser incident
- laser safety glasses for pilots
- how to safely simulate a laser strike
- an online Laser Hazard Distance Calculator
- an online Beam Diameter and Irradiance Calculator
- a 1-page "instant" laser safety officer course
- studies about aviation distraction hazards and general eye hazards
- consumer eye injuries caused by laser pointers
- what makes bright laser light hazardous to aviation
- why you should never aim laser pointers at aircraft
- basic principles of laser hazards
- a laser pointer FAQ, and fast facts for media
- a video from the FAA and Air Force
- how to report a laser incident
- laser safety glasses for pilots
- how to safely simulate a laser strike
… especially for laser safety experts …
- an online Laser Hazard Distance Calculator
- an online Beam Diameter and Irradiance Calculator
- a 1-page "instant" laser safety officer course
- studies about aviation distraction hazards and general eye hazards
Recent laser pointer news
The news items are fully indexed so you can find stories on the topics you want. More into on how to use the category and tag indexes is here.
Below are some of the most important or interesting recent news items.
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6,852 reported laser/aircraft illuminations in U.S. during 2020
- Pilots in the U.S. reported seeing laser light 6,852 times during 2020, according to FAA data. This is a 10.3% increase compared with 2019's 6,213 reports. While it is lower than the peak year of 2016 (7,398), the lasing rate has been rising about 10% per year since 2018.The FAA data represents 18.7 reported laser illuminations each day in the U.S. during 2020. The rate varied widely throughout the year, from a low of 8.9 per day in April, to 29.7 per day in November.
There were no reports of permanent or serious eye injuries to crew members. Out of the 6,852 incidents, 19 of them (0.5%) listed eye effects such as flashblindness, pain or irritation, or blurriness.
Since reporting was first mandated by FAA in 2004, there have been over 61,000 U.S. laser illuminations. Adding in figures from seven other countries, the worldwide total is over 90,000 reported laser illuminations since 2004.
A summary of 2020 U.S. statistics is here. All available 2020 statistics for the U.S., plus additional comparisons with other countries, is here.
In addition, LaserPointerSafety.com did a detailed analysis of the data showing the highest number of daily laser incidents in 2020 occurred just after the contentious presidential election in early November. The data does not show a similar rise for election years 2008, 2012 and 2016.
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Los Angeles bans lasers of any type from demonstrations
- On November 3 2020, Los Angeles municipal code section 55.07 was amended to prohibit carrying or possessing lasers while attending or participating in any public demonstration, rally, protest, picket line or public assembly. Specifically, it prohibits "laser pointers or laser-style device emitting any color beam, milliwatt output level, intensity class level or any visibility level, including infrared or non-visible."
At an October 27 2020 public meeting, the deputy chief of the L.A. Police Department, said "… we have experienced numerous instances of individuals among these groups intentionally using laser devices and pointers to attempt to blind and cause harm to officers by pointing them purposely at their eyes…. Laser-type devices have no legitimate use outside of the business or educational venues."
More details are here. An additional story about an LAPD officer who was seriously injured in a laser attack, in July 2020, is here. -
Online petition in UK looking for 10,000+ signatures to ban laser pens
- An online petition calling for a ban on the sale of handheld laser pens has been established by the wife of a Wiltshire Air Ambulance paramedic.
Claire Tucker undertook the effort out of fear for her husband Dan's safety. As of early September 2020, a Wiltshire air ambulance had been illuminated four times by laser light. Her husband was involved in at least one of those, on September 7. Tucker made an emotional appeal on Facebook, pleading to have the laser incidents stop.
She established a petition on the Parliament website. It was created October 5, 2020 and runs for 6 months until April 5, 2021. It needs 10,000 signatures of U.K. citizens to have HM Government respond, and 100,000 signatures to be considered for debate in the House of Commons or the House of Lords.
The petition's goals are "To prohibit retailers from selling handheld laser pens of any size and strength. To prohibit the importation of laser pens of any strength and size into the UK. To seize any imported laser pens at customs."
Additional information on Tucker's efforts and the petition are at LaserPointerSafety.com's news story. -
U.S. officials claim 113 eye injuries to officers during Portland protests; no permanent effects or blindness
- On August 4 2020, a U.S. Department of Homeland security official said that 113 federal officers had "eye injuries" from lasers being aimed at them, during protests at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon. All officers appear to be OK: "So far they've all kind of come back, if you will," said the official.
Some of these 113 "injuries" were said to be flash blindness, essentially the same mechanism as a bright camera flash. This is not classed as an injury. It is not known the severity of the non-flash blindness cases — if they were actual, medically observed eye injuries.
On July 21 2020 a DHS official said there were three officers "who currently have eye injuries and they may not recover sight in those eyes from those laser attacks." This was widely reported at the time. After a while, the "may not" was dropped in many news stories and it became "three officers were permanently blinded."
Based on the August 4 testimony that all DHS officers are OK, apparently the three officers regained their sight and have "come back."
We have stories about laser eye injuries to police caused by demonstrators, stories about non-laser eye injuries to demonstrators caused by police, and a page which goes into detail about laser use and misuse at protests. This latter page includes a discussion of ways police can help protect their eyes from lasers.
Some items above may include charts that will NOT appear if you are using Internet Explorer. Please view with another browser.
Laser/aircraft illumination incident statistics
Informative charts and videos
A helicopter being deliberately targeted by a laser pointer. The light is a distraction and, if bright enough, can cause temporary flashblindness. It is NOT likely to cause any permanent injury. A video of this incident is here.
In most incidents, the beam only directly hits the aircraft windscreen a few times. That’s because it is almost impossible to hand-hold a laser onto a target hundreds or thousands of feet away. For example, these frames show 8 seconds of a laser illumination. Only in one of the frames — 1/2 second out of 8 — does a direct hit obscure the pilot’s vision. Of course, the waving beam is a distraction.
Public domain photo from the U.S. FAA, showing how a laser beam spreads over long distances and can fill the windscreen. The FAA’s highest-resolution version is here.
This diagram shows the hazard distances of a 5 mW green laser pointer. It is an eye hazard up to 52 feet from the laser, causes temporary flashblindness to 260 feet, causes glare and visual disruption to 1,200 feet, and is a distraction to 11,700 feet (2.2 miles). Click to enlarge.
This diagram shows various ways to help reduce laser pointer incidents. These include: pilot training and glasses, arrests and prosecutions, laser labeling, user education, and new laws & restrictions. Click to enlarge.
“Dumb Ways to Blind” is a 2014 public service video that warns the Internet generation about the many ways lasers can be misused. As of May 2019, this has had over 7.4 million views on YouTube.
In April 2019 the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration posted this animated powerpoint. The narration says "…pointing a laser at an aircraft can distract or temporarily blind the pilot, potentially putting the lives of many innocent passengers at risk. That's why it's a federal crime with serious consequences like fines up to $250,000 or up to five years in jail…"
Learn from his mistake — don’t aim lasers at aircraft
I also want to educate anyone who owns a laser and might be inclined to use it the way I did: Learn from my mistake. I am now just getting out of prison. I have paid dearly, for I have lost my girlfriend, my dog, my home, my vehicle. Everything I owned, everything I have worked for 30 years of my life, is gone.
For shining a laser at a helicopter for three seconds, I lost my entire life. I am now 54 years old and I have no one and nothing but the clothes I was given when I was released from prison.

NOTICE: CALCULATOR WILL NOT WORK
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See how far lasers can be a hazard
The light level (irradiance) at the NOHD is at the Maximum Permissible Exposure or MPE. Farther than the NOHD, the irradiance falls below the MPE, and is generally considered safe.

Being exposed to laser light within the NOHD does NOT mean that a person will automatically receive an eye injury, or even is likely to have an injury. The NOHD is a “nominal” hazard distance, not an actual hazard distance. The closer the person is to the laser, the greater the chance of an injury, as indicated by the colors above.
Understand why laser beams are less hazardous at greater distances

A human pupil is about 0.16-0.28 inches (4-7 mm) across, depending on lighting conditions. If a beam is, say, 6 inches across, then clearly most of the beam power does not go through the pupil:
That’s why a laser beam that can pop balloons or light cigarettes up close, could be eye-safe hundreds of feet away.
Now, an eye-safe beam may still be very bright. It could cause temporary flashblindness, or vision-blocking glare, or be a distraction. This would be a hazard to persons such as pilots during critical phases of flight. The second part of the calculator above lists the distances for those visual interference hazards.
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Some sample eye hazard distances
- If a laser pointer had an output power of 5 milliwatts and a beam divergence of 1 milliradian, the beam would be considered eye safe for momentary exposure (blink or turn away within 1/4 second) after about 50 feet. At 500 feet, even deliberate staring into the beam would not cause an injury.
For a stronger beam such as 499 milliwatts — the highest power Class 3B laser — the beam would be considered eye safe for momentary exposure after about 520 feet.
The “eye safe” distance is called the Nominal Ocular Hazard Distance, or NOHD.
The NOHD has a built-in safety or reduction factor. As the color-coded diagram below indicates, a laser beam is most hazardous at close range (red), and gradually becomes less hazardous until at the NOHD the chance of an injury is considered “vanishingly small.”
The ED50 distance is about 1/3 of the NOHD. At the ED50 distance, there is a 50/50 chance of the laser causing the smallest medically noticeable retinal lesion under laboratory conditions where both the laser and the eye are stationary. Often such a lesion will heal, in the same way that a minor skin burn can heal. Beyond the ED50 distance, the chance of having a retinal lesion is further reduced.
For a 5 mW 1 mrad laser, the ED50 distance is 16 feet. For a 499 mW 1 mrad laser, the ED50 distance is about 164 feet.
This helps explain why a laser that is nominally hazardous at a certain distance (the NOHD) is extremely unlikely to cause even a small injury at that distance.
There is more information about the NOHD and the ED50 distance on this page. -
Technical details about the pupil-beam comparison
- The illustration above compares a 7 mm dark-adapted pupil to a 150 mm diameter laser beam. The title states that “Less than 1% of this laser beam’s power goes into the pupil of an eye 500 feet away”.
As with so many aspects of laser hazards, there are important details to consider.
The beam is brighter in the center
The area of a 7 mm diameter circle compared with a 150 mm diameter circle is 38.5 mm2 divided by 17,671 mm2, or 0.0022 which is also 0.22%. Said another way, a 7 mm circle’s area represents only 0.22% of a 150 mm circle’s area.
However, the center of a typical laser beam is brighter than the edges. If a person’s pupil was in the center as illustrated, it would receive more than 0.22% of the light.
The exact exposure would depend on what part of the laser beam went in the eye. To be conservative, we simply state that a 7 mm pupil would receive “less than 1% of the laser’s light”.
A smaller pupil is safer
Another aspect in many or perhaps most laser exposure incidents is that the pupil may be smaller than 7 mm, meaning it lets in less laser light.
A completely dark-adapted pupil is generally 7-8 mm in diameter. But for a pilot in an aircraft, their pupil is NOT dark-adapted. There are instrument displays and lights in the cockpit, and city lights (when landing) outside the cockpit.
Let’s say the pupil is more constricted, at 5 mm. This has an area of 19.6 mm2, which is half of the 38.5 mm2 area of a 7 mm pupil. This increases safety — only half the amount of laser light can get through the pupil and onto the retina, compared to a completely dark-adapted eye.
A moving beam is less hazardous
Yet another aspect that increases safety is that the laser light is moving, relative to the pupil.
If the laser light is always focused on the same area of the retina, this allows heat to build up. But in many situations where a person is trying to avoid a laser light being hand-aimed at them, the light is moving relative to the eye.- This movement may be because of the inherent difficulty of keeping a laser beam on target over hundreds of feet. (You can see this in videos of lasers being aimed at helicopters, where the beam only occasionally hits the camera lens. Each frame below is 1/30 of a second; only one of the frames is a direct hit on the lens.)
- This movement may also be due to the illuminated person moving their head and eyes to avoid directly staring into the beam.
In both cases, the laser light does not have as much time to stay on one spot on the retina. This reduces the chance of causing a lesion or burn.
Of course, if a laser is powerful enough and a person is close enough — say, within the NOHD and certainly within the ED50 distance — a brief 1/4 second exposure can cause a retinal lesion.
But for laser illuminations of pilots at aircraft distances of many hundreds or thousands of feet, even powerful lasers are considered by experts to be unlikely to cause serious or permanent harm.
A special message for laser pointer users
Plus, laser incidents create a bad image and can lead to laser pointers being banned. This has happened in a number of areas. (In New South Wales, you can be fined for possessing a laser pointer, and you can go to jail for up to 14 years for a laser assault.) There are strong calls in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. to restrict or ban lasers.
It is really simple: NEVER aim a laser beam at an aircraft, a vehicle, or towards strangers. In other words, DON’T ANNOY PEOPLE WITH THE LASER BEAM.
For more specific information about laser pen hazards and safe use, see the various topics in the menu at left. For a quick summary aimed at consumers, check out the FDA’s December 2010 safety notification.