At 20:30 09 March 2015, Craig Reinholt wrote:
Something to keep in mind about tinted canopies. A tinted canopy
(or
sunglasses for that matter) result in less light reaching your eyes.
Less
light will result in lower visual acuity. I for one, want as sharp as
possible vision when I fly.
From Wikipedia:
20/20 is normal (daylight) vision. In low light (i.e., scotopic)
vision,
spatial resolution is much lower.
From personal experience, I use the least amount of tint on
sunglasses to
get the job done when I fly or drive. For other applications such as
kicking around the beach where I have less need of sharp vision, I
go with
a much darker tint.
Perhaps someone with the proper background could elaborate.


Tinted canopies simply don't reduce light levels to anything like the
extent required to reduce visual acuity in normal gliding daylight
conditions. This is easy to prove in a 2 seater with a tinted canopy
and comparing looking through the canopy versus looking through
the open clear view panel. My syndicate partner and I did this in
2003 in a Duo with a blue tinted canopy and could find no difference
in clarity of vision - in fact we found, against all logic and
expectations, that in hazy conditions we thought we could see
marginally better through the blue canopy than no canopy.

We also tried various different coloured spectacle lenses to nail the
then claim on RAS that brown spectacle lenses and a blue canopy
would make it dark inside! It was complete nonsense of course.
The subjectively perceived colour of the combination of the canopy
and spectacle lenses was always entirely related to the colour of the
much stronger spectacle tint rather than the canopy tint.

The only situation in which the blue canopy was noticeable from
inside the cockpit was in photographs from the cockpit which had a
definite slight blue bias.

I agree with Craig about not using an unnecessarily strong spectacle
tint. I use Zeiss Skylet Fun which is quite bright and it is very
comfortable inside my current green tinted canopy even in South
African summer conditions.

John Galloway