The study found that shining eye-safe levels of laser light into the eyes of pilots in a simulator affected their performance - it didn't show that it's possible to shine a mW laser pointer from the ground up into the cockpit of an aircraft and keep lock on a pilots eye for long enough to have any effect.

If it did then somebody is wasting an awful lot of money on air superiority fighters when the country could be defended by a grid of laser pointers from Staples.

Read the other posts in the thread. artmageddon's in particular. For an aircraft on landing approach, it's low enough that even a small fraction of a second's exposure can cause flash blindness.