[addaon]

In terms of time constants: Yes, probably. Visible lasers can be eye-safe at much higher powers because of the blink reflex, and the blink reflex is on the order of a hundred milliseconds -- detecting IR and shutting down even a gas laser should be millisecond-scale at most. One challenge would be very specular reflections that hit an eye but not your sensor, but a wide-area sensor should be able to get reflections even off the pilot's eye itself. The remaining bit would be very high frequency specificity on the sensor to allow high sensitivity without false positives, but that's pretty trivial.