Drew Wilkens can’t forget his flight into Houston on Jan. 15, 2010.
Wilkens, a first officer for ExpressJet Airlines, was the pilot flying an Embraer EMB-145 on approach to Runway 8L at Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport about 2005 local time, when, he said, “all of a sudden, there was a bright green flash on the right side of the airplane.”
Telling his story in October to a Washington conference on laser illumination of aircraft cockpits, Wilkens said he “couldn’t see anything but green.”
The captain, Henry Cisneros, told the conference — sponsored by the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA) and the Air Transport Association of America — that the laser illumination, which was the second he had experienced in three months, “lit up the whole cockpit … bright green and opaque.”
Wilkens said that immediately after the laser illumination — sometimes called a laser strike — he experienced flash blindness, a temporary impairment of vision …
