Early retirement due to short-sightedness
 

Hello

I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I understand that you can fly professionally with prescription glasses, provided that you can still achieve 20:20 vision.

My question in a nutshell is this: do older pilots sometimes have to retire from professional flying earlier than the legal age due to a deterioration in their eye sight? Both my parents are in their fifties and, though they never had to wear glasses when they were younger, they do now. So it must be perfectly plausible that a professional pilot who had 20:20 vision earlier in their career no longer does. Does this put an end to your professional flying career? If so, that's pretty tough, but I guess the medical requirements are stringent for a reason.

Thanks.
Nick

I can't answer the questions in terms of its impact on a flying career, but I think your definition is wrong.

Shortsightedness/nearsightedness (myopia) is the inability to see clearly things which are far from us. Thus we need correction for driving, cinema, etc.

As we get older, the condition which normally sets in is the opposite, longsightedness/farsightedness (hyperopia), which means we need correction to see things close to us, such as books, the computer screen, but can see distant objects clearly.

As I went through my forties, I wondered why the print on labels, in magazines, and so on got smaller and smaller.