Dear folks!
I was just advised by a friend to check the ongoing discussion about color vision here and some answers are quite interesting.
Correcting a color vision defect with 'Viruses' and 'Vector-DNA' is surely a way to solve the medical problem in itself, but wouldn't it make more sense to find out, if a color vision defect poses any threat to the safety of air navigation?
This is a quite complicated question and it has allready been answered by three major court appeals in Australia. The Aviation-Color-Perception-Standard became totaly reassessed, and the conducted research projects, to justify the standard, were declared as flawed.
So, what I'm asking me again and again is: why is Europe still laboring for the highest color vision standards in aviation, and why do they tolerate foreign pilots from countries with remarkable lower color vision standards (Australia, USA, Canada...) to fly their airplanes into and out of the european airspace? Those possibly color vision defective pilots pose the same air safety risk then a color vision defective european would. But europeans are simply not allowed and the accepted color vision tests are nothing more then defacto color vision tests. Those tests just have one purpose: to show, that you ARE color vision defective.
"(...)colour discrimination is irrelevant to the multitude of tasks demanded of pilots. All the stuff about colour vision testing becomes irrelevant when that one truth is grasped. Does a pass or a fail on the Holmes-Wright lantern, the Ishihara, the anomaloscope and all the rest predict performance on actual flying tasks? No, without reservation, it does not." (Dr. Arthur Pape; some of you will know him.)
For my personal opinion: I think, that a color vision defect poses absolutely NO RISK to the safety of air naviagtion. My desire, to become a professional pilot in Germany, was not fulfilled in 1998 due too defective color vision. I would like to bring my matter for me - and all the others - to a german court room. Unfortunately it's very hard to find professional support.
-CVD Nils.