Tuesday, October 11, 2005

An eye exam

I managed to get a time with the eye specialist today. In Norrköping. Sometimes I wonder why we don't live in Norrköping. It seems like I go there every day...

The eye exam showed no new anomalies to my eyes. And I got confirmation on that my quite new eyeglasses are good. I do actually have more than perfect vision with them on (1.5 on the best eye). It's a bit frustrating to know that I could wear a couple of glasses with correction well within the regulated limits for PPL and still have vision above the required level. Unfortunately that's not the way the rules work.

The results from the exam is in the mail to Luftfartsstyrelsen. So now the waiting begins again. A rough estimate of the waiting time is one month. I suppose it will take longer. But the most important thing is of course that my permission is granted eventually.

The cost of the eye exam was SEK 1500.

I have also forgot to add the cost of the ground class (SEK 2750) which I paid last week. So now my accumulated costs are SEK 5940.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Back to square one

While I was having my lunch today the doctor from Luftfartsstyrelsen called. I answered and talked to him for a while. After having had my application for almost a month and a half, they had now come to the conclusion that they want me to perform a special eye exam with an appointed ophthalmologist. On my first contact with the authorities they told me that I shouldn't have to make a new such exam because they did already have a protocol from my previous one (almost five years ago). But obviously that wasn't true.

Or was it? I don't know. It almost seems like I know their rules better than them by now. They also told me that my medical exam protocol was too old. It only had a validity time of one year. This I knew wasn't true, which I also told the doctor. He went away to see an administrator, and finally they concluded that the protocol has a validity of three years. But I was still sure that this wasn't true, it should be valid for five years. After a new round of checking, the doctor actually came to the same conclusion (i.e. five years).

However, they still wanted a new special eye exam to be performed. And since there doesn't appear to be well defined for how long those are valid I guess I'll have to comply.

The problem is that there exist a very limited number of appointed ophthalmologists. So it will probably take some time to be scheduled with one of them. And after the exam has been performed, the doctor told me that the result will be processed for a month by some other authority before it is returned to Luftfartsstyrelsen.

I haven't even been able to reach one of the ophthalmologists today. My best guess is that I won't get any result from Luftfartsstyrelsen within the next two months. And after that, I'll be on vacation for almost a month. So there will probably be no more flying lessons this year. If I at all will get a positive response.

Within a minute after I had hung up, I got a new phone call (I managed to take one bite of my now cold lunch between the two calls). This time it was my flight instructor who wanted to know if I had heard anything from Luftfartsstyrelsen. Weird timing...

All this uncertainty and waiting takes away most of the motivation for my ground class studies. It is not fun to commit most of your free time to something you don't know if you ever will be able to make use of. :-(