Just seen this, and my credulity is (I will admit) struggling [to recap - we were talking of a claimed hand-held laser attack on an aeroplane at FL360]
I'm sure you're clever enough to work out the difference between a hand held l@ser and a stabilised l@ser.
Maybe so, but how did YOU determine that the brief flashes you saw at FL360, at night, were a handheld device?
Well you were over 7 miles up, and I'm assuming your aeroplane didn't have wind-up windows in the cockpit and that you didn't have your head hanging out of the window looking vertically downwards, so we know it must have been at least 7 miles*. The convention we've been working with to date is that from you can see downwards by about 30 degrees with your head and eyes in the normal positions in the driver's seat - that says that the source must have been 14 miles away (sin30 being 0.5). No one has questioned this convention so far - what angle do suggest we can use?
PDR
* Unless you happened to be passing Mount Olympus at the time, in which case you can reduce that to 5 miles height and 11 miles slant-range @30 degrees