The photographer's flash blinded me from miles away!

The show: JAG
The episode: "Ghosts of Christmas Past," first aired December 14, 1999 on CBS. Now available on DVD as Season 5, Disc 3, Title 3.
What happened: One night close to Christmas 1969, Lt. Garcia (Randy Vasquez, normally Gunny Galindez in the present) is piloting a plane back to the aircraft carrier with Lt. Harmon Rabb, Sr. (David James Elliott, normally Rabb Jr.) when a civilian photographer on the deck of the carrier (Paul Collins, normally the Clinton-era SecNav) tries to take a picture of the plane coming in for the landing. The photographer's flash blinds Lt. Garcia (Lt. Rabb is OK because he was looking down at his instruments) and he makes a very sloppy landing that almost kills him and his copilot. Once safe on the deck, Garcia is told that the captain threw the photographer's camera overboard.
Why it makes no sense: If you've ever tried to take a picture of someone at night with a film camera, then you know that photographic flash just doesn't carry that far. In high school, one night I tried to take a picture of my friends standing on one end of a football field while I was on the other end; I thought it was going to make a great picture. The lab didn't even bother printing that one and the negative is just plain blank. My friends did see the flash, but it didn't blind them one bit (if I had put the flash two feet from their faces they would have certainly blinked).
The professionals have better stuff than the dinky cube flash on my old film camera, but for the picture I had in mind, they wouldn't have relied on any kind of flash: they would have made an elaborate lighting rig, or if they were shooting in a major league team's stadium, they would have full-power stadium lighting available to them.
So how do you light a photograph of a plane about to land on an aircraft carrier at night? You do it in the daytime, with the sun being all the lighting rig you need, and then you do a day-for-night conversion in the darkroom (you'd use Adobe Photoshop for that now, but I'm sure back in 1969 it would still have been easy). The crew of JAG ought to know this, even if they used stock footage for the plane. They would also know that not even the best photographic flash can carry across a football field, much less the runway of an aircraft carrier (at least three football fields) plus whatever distance the plane is still away from the edge.
But let's say that in the world depicted in JAG that photographic flash really can carry that far. How long would it take for America's enemies to realize that they can use off-the-shelf photographic flash to blind American pilots? They don't even have to get that close!
Maybe this incident in the story can be explained away as an allegory for how damaging the news media is on our troops by sticking their noses into what's none of their business. This is not the place to comment on whether or not JAG is right to scold the news media in this way (or in other ways in other episodes, especially the post-9/11 episodes) but at least they should pick allegories that don't strain credulity as much as this one does.