Why don pilots wear goggles?
There are many reasons goggles aren’t practical. Here are a few of the major ones: • A laser exposure on a pilot is usually short and surprising; the incident would be over before goggles could be donned. • The alternative is to routinely wear laser-protective goggles, at least during take off and landing for fixed-wing airplanes. Helicopter pilots would have to wear them all the time. As you might imagine, pilots would strenuously object to doing this. • Goggles by their nature dim or block selected wavelengths (colors) of light. Pilots could not see all colors on their instrument panels and CRT/LCD screens, and their night vision would be reduced. • Goggles would have to protect against a wide range of potential wavelengths and brightness. This is not practical in a standard goggle which is usually optimized for one or a few wavelengths within a known power level (e.g., fixed optical density). • Active goggles are under development but the cost and effectiveness for civil pilots woul
