When I was young I wanted to be a pilot. I’ve blogged about my favourite book, The Last Enemy, by Richard Hillary. Hillary was a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, and had joined the University Air Squadron at Oxford. When I went up to Oxford, I also tried to join. All was going well until it came to the colour blindness, Ishihara test. It’s a book with page after page of coloured dots from which you have to discern numbers, letters or trace lines. I was declared red-green colour blind, and rejected.
Some years later, after my first experience of sailing, a colleague who was a master mariner suggested that if I wanted to learn to sail, why not let the queen pay? He meant join the Royal Naval Reserve. I gave it a try, then those confounded coloured dots came out again. I thought I was about to be rejected again, but was told that it would only keep me out of the seaman branch. Well it was being on ships that interested me. They said that for the first two years I would undergo the same training as everyone, on minesweepers and patrol boats. So I joined and it was great.
Whilst I was serving, and working, I went to Florida to learn to fly. Going solo for the first time is unbelievable. I was all ready to take my final check ride with an examiner and get my FAA pilot’s license, but unfortunately the results of the written paper didn’t come back before I had to fly home. The following year I went back, and got my FAA licence. When I returned to the UK and tried to convert it into a CAA PPL (Private Pilot’s Licence), there were a few things I had to do, an air law exam, and a radio exam. Then when I applied I was told my FAA medical had expired so the FAA licence was no longer valid. I thought I would have to go back to the US to take a medical, but was told that I could go to the FAA medical centre at Gatwick. I did, and guess what, out came that damned book again. The doctor said it was very odd, because my licence qualified me to fly at night. I told him I had never had a problem flying or sailing at night, I could see the red and green navigation lights perfectly. He decided to give me the Farnsworth Lantern Test. I was placed at one end of a dark corridor and had to distinguish small dots of light, Red over green, green over white, white over red, and so on. I soon received an FAA letter stating my colour vision was adequate for any class of pilot’s license (including commercial) and that I need not be tested again. Now they tell me! Why hadn’t someone tried that test on me before? Why hadn’t they examined me properly, using all the tests available to them? I’d been sidelined unfairly.
Fast forward to the day before yesterday. Claire and I were moving our sailing boat from Portland to our new base on the River Dart. It had been a ten hour crossing of Lyme Bay, and the sun was going down. We were following another boat in, which passed a red buoy, leaving it to starboard. In our waters you’re meant to leave red buoys to port. I altered course to leave it to port. Claire shouted that it was green. No, it was definitely red. Claire shouted again that it was green. I didn’t understand what was happening. I took off my sunglasses, and sure enough, it was green. I changed course again, mystified.
Of course there were other things, apart from Claire shouting at me, that I should have picked up on. Shape for a start. Red buoys are cylindrical, green buoys are curved-conical. It was shown green on the chart. I could have gone below and checked. That might not have helped if I hadn’t taken my sunglasses off, although there would have been a “g” next to the buoy.
I thought my colour vision was perfect, I’d been told so by the FAA. What I should have remembered is that Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses are designed so as not to distort colours. The sunglasses I was wearing look like Aviators, but they’re prescription polarising sunglasses, which clearly distort red and green. My perception was distorted. I should have lifted my blinkers and taken a good look. I should have looked beyond colour, at shape, at anything else which would have helped me see the true meaning of the buoy. There were lots of clues, I just didn’t look properly.