Oh, I don’t know about ages to get used to monovision. A couple of weeks, but with contact lenses, not glasses. The CAA don’t allow it, though, or varifocal contacts. Varifocal glasses, yes.
I have a very helpful optician who has spent a lot of time getting my eyesight optimised for two situations. Daily uses with a bit of driving in the daytime I use modified monovision, non dominant eye fully corrected for closer work, reading etc, and the dominant eye with a varifocal contact, low reading addition. I suspect I am only just legal for driving, but it’s useable and doesn’t involve using glasses.
Days when I am flying or doing a lot of driving, single vision contacts fully corrected for distance, and a pair of sunglasses which are varifocals with only the reading addition in a very small section at the bottom of a deep lens the upper part being Plano. When it gets dark I have a pair of half glasses that I can use instead of the sunglasses, but unless I need to see very small print I can manage with the single vision.
I really do like this better than wearing glasses to fly, no frame to get in the way, and they can’t fall off…The move to contact lenses came after losing a pair of 400€ glasses over the side of a hot air balloon. :(
Daily soft lenses, not quite as cheap as chips, and the sunglasses are good and dark. I can see the panel just fine with single vision lenses, it’s far enough away. The half glasses come from the supermarket, as the contacts take care of any difference between the eyes.
“in any case YOU are the client and they have to do as you tell them.”
Well, erm, no they don’t. A second opinion is a fine idea, but if someone has studied for 3/4 years to be an optician and thinks something you’re proposing is inadvisable, they have every right not to do as you tell them.
The info Im reading here in the US is that the company knew about his mental condition and treatment which he had a few years back. I think the company is
going to be on the hook for letting this slip threw the cracks.
I agree; it doesn’t look good. But unless the medical rights/privacy stuff is heavily amended, it’s hard to see what can be done about it.
The issue is huge in the population. Only this morning I was talking to a guy (public sector employee) who asked me what I thought about this. He said he had a history of depression and said he would never even want to apply for a bus driver job, let alone a pilot.
There is only one reasonable solution: fit toilets in the cockpit. Many airlines have done that in the past, so it’s just a question of money.
There is only one reasonable solution: fit toilets in the cockpit. Many airlines have done that in the past, so it’s just a question of money.
That seems pretty sensible 
I also like the idea of keeping commercial pilots out of large airliner cockpits until they have a reasonable amount of hours doing something else – like military or lower end commercial GA work. Putting people with zero demonstrated capability into schools intended to put them in an airliner without first demonstrating they are tough enough for the job is a dumb idea to me. It sets up an expectation on all sides from day one, instead of a meritocracy in which only a fraction adequately prove themselves capable over time, through independent achievements. What’s needed to maintain that situation is high enough pay driving airliners to motivate people to prove themselves in lower paid jobs.
No medical exam or airline screening process will ever work as well as making people prove they’re up to the job in the real world.
Putting people with zero demonstrated capability into schools intended to put them in an airliner without first demonstrating they are tough enough for the job is a dumb idea to me.
I might have said this before, but the MPL seems like a very strange license to me. The holder can be co-pilot on commercial flights with transport category aircraft, but can not be PIC for a private flight in the SEP trainer (s)he learned to fly in!
Almost certainly this problem will go away in time, when we have fully automated, and pilotless aircraft.
It will of course be replaced by the fear of the remote connection being hacked by terrorists.
Wasn’t a certain drone landed in iran that way not so long ago?
Well, erm, no they don’t. A second opinion is a fine idea, but if someone has studied for 3/4 years to be an optician and thinks something you’re proposing is inadvisable, they have every right not to do as you tell them.
No, he/she doesn’t. In fact the optician who checked my eyes tried just that. Until I told her who was the client – me. End of story. An optician can advise but cannot make a judgment call. An ophthalmologist can. But hey, in the UK every little shit thinks he/she’s important. Just don’t let them get away with it.
What’s your line of work?
In geriatric patients, bifocals/varifocals are generally believed to cause falls as a result of visual distortion. Helicopter accidents, in particular, have also been blamed on varifocals. With Monovision, I guess the risk is that if you get a speck in an eye, you are left with good vision in one eye only. Whilst I believe you can get an NPPL medical with one good eye, most of us here have a class 2 medical or better and our insurance premiums, privileges etc.. will be based on that.
Optometrists are members of a college and can be struck off for negligence. If you found that the spectacles you’d ordered were unsatisfactory, you could easily put in a vexatious complaint that would make life miserable for whoever had succumbed. and if a reasonable body of opinion felt that a prescription was silly and you had an accident, you could probably sue for damages on the grounds that the accident was caused by distortions/deficiencies in your vision due to the inadvisable prescription. You might not personally do either of these things, but for most people in the medical/allied professions complaints are fairly common and cause an immense amount of grief, even when vexatious, leading to conformity and defensive practice.
If you had trouble with a circuit breaker popping and ordered your aircraft engineer to fit a bigger (incorrect) circuit breaker I sincerely hope they’d refuse. The customer isn’t always right. Even without a professional body and risk of censure, I don’t think you can force a business to supply something they feel is inadvisable.
