If you get very small prescription glases (to work at a computer), do you need to tell your medical examiner / have a restriction in your licence, or can you not have a licence restriction (carrying glasses) if you can still see better than a certain threshold (e.g. read everything at the AME perfectly)?
Wearing glasses doesn’t in itself mean that you need to have them an your medical.
I sometimes wear glasses for distance (mainly driving at night on unlit roads) and always wear them when flying. But my prescription is not stong enough to mean that they are a requirement when flying.
So the requirement to carry them is only above certain thresholds of bad vision? (Mostly interested in UK-land)
One’s licence does state whether glasses should be worn.
The year before last my AME had that condition removed from my licence.
I do generally wear them though.
EDIT; so does a UK driving licence.
In general you can pass the EASA or FAA Class 1 medical with about -0.5 of short-sightedness. Then you get a spectacle-free medical.
But with -0.5 it is hard to drive a car. You cannot read road and motorway signs until quite close and street names are almost impossible to read usefully. Especially at night.
With -0.5 you can fly perfectly “safely” in bright conditions, because flying doesn’t need sharp vision, in most normal situations. At night it will be much harder though.
Many people I know get spectacles made specially for passing their medical. Cheap i.e. not really comfortable and probably flimsy frame, and made to the full prescription for distance and to the full prescription for the reading inserts to work at the 16" or so used in the medical. Not much good for flying because the panel distance is different from the kneeboard distance…
Thanks. In “my” case I can read perfectly in the distance and screens / ipad / (paper maps if I still had them), and was wondering if
A) telling your AME you sometimes wear glasses ==> automatic restriction in your licence (even if I were able to pass all eye tests without using the glasses)
or
B) As long as you can pass a minimum standard (or your vision deficiency is less than X), you don’t have a glasses restriction.
(B) I believe is fine, but (A) is advisable.
First of all, I would rather have the best possible eyesight, not “minimum standard”. Not just when flying, but in general…
In addition, vision tends to be worse at night and during dusk/dawn, when tired, and when slightly hypoxic. So whatever you achieve at the AME might not.
So if you have glasses anyway, why not have the stamp on the medical? Or is it just vanity? 
Cobalt wrote:
So if you have glasses anyway, why not have the stamp on the medical? Or is it just vanity?
Mostly so that one can be legal when forgetting to take the glasses, even if perfectly safe.
Or for instance to avoid needing an excessive number of pairs of glasses (say 1 at work that stays there for screen work, 2 for the flight bag)
One problem is that no optician is willing to do a reading insert of just 0.5 (or less). The smallest they will do is 0.75. Presumably this is because spectacles are made by buying an off the shelf lens from a catalogue and trimming it…
Obviously it is technically possible. Does anyone know of a lab which can make lenses of any desired shape?
Just an update in case anyone is interested in following this route… Seiko and Rodenstock are apparently able to make a reading insert of just +0.50. Zeiss might also… Rodenstock say they will do it on varifocals which is not useful in this case, and is an increasingly popular method in the industry for extracting large amounts of money from people.
The need for the low relative magnification (most reading inserts start at +1.00) is because the lens on the non-dominant eye is already a “reading lens” but at a greater than normal reading distance.
You are still left with the same old problem that almost no optician will make such spectacles without a prescription. You need a slightly “flexible” one, but even he will not write out such a prescription to give you. He will take say £200 from you allright but unofficially. It’s a weird business…
I tried spex4less but like others they simply emailed me saying that this is an unusual requirement and could they see the real prescription. So, short of photoshopping one, you are again stuck. One way to bullsh1t one’s way out of this, and this is a 100% genuine thing I did the other day for someone else (and it worked), is to say that the user of these had a cataract removed, and this usually results in the two eyes being very different (until the other eye gets done, perhaps years later).
