Lots of action on this thread. Soaring's demographics are showing. We
probably wouldn't see the same interest in this subject among the
youthful readers of, say, alt.skate-board or rec.skiing.snowboard. The
next thing will be someone on RAS wanting to know how safe it is to fly
the morning after taking Viagra.

I have no opinion on that particular subject, but I've used contact
lenses and regular sunglasses with the stick-on reading segments and I
agree they work fine. But I prefer not to fly with contact lenses so I
use prescription sunglasses: bifocals when I was in my 40s and
trifocals now that I'm 55. Mine are definitely soaring specific: the
reading segment is for maps (in my lap) and the middle segment is for
the instrument panel, mainly the PDA (almost in the line of sight).
Chip Garner (Glide Navigator II) is of a certain age but I guess all
the other software developers are in their 20s because the fonts keep
getting smaller and smaller as they pack more functionality and data on
a PDA screen.

Don't bother relying on the optician to correctly position the lines
between segments. Sit in your cockpit and experiment with pieces of
tape on your lenses (eyeglass lenses, not contact lenses!). Best is to
fly with the stick ons for a while, because you'll probably discover
you want the line higher than normal to read the PDA and any other
displays on the panel but you want it as low as possible to be able to
look down out of the canopy. No matter what you do it won't be perfect,
and you may find you want to modify your cockpit a bit. I discovered
it's easier to use my handheld Garmin GPS receiver mounted on the
cockpit wall close to me because it's low enough that it's nearly
always in the middle or lower segment of my sunglasses. I will probably
move my PDA/moving map to that location this winter.

Welcome to middle age.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"