A Sight for Sore Eyes
Roger Condit is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in Montgomery, Ala., with his wife, Frances, and his Scottish Terrier, Gus. He has since learned to adjust to his trifocals.

Rooting through a drawer of old eyeglasses I accumulated over the years, I came upon a pair of trifocals that reminded me of the occasion I first wore them and scared the daylights out of my crew.

My military service spanned the years between 1940 and 1970. During the last 15 months of my career, I flew a C-130 Hercules "Herky" from a base in Taiwan to Vietnam during the war. We flew day and night and landed on strips of pierced steel planking in all kinds of weather. The idea was to get the plane down, hit the brakes with the propellers in reverse thrust, and stay on the runway. A normal landing wasted too much critical landing area.

At age 52, I was a flying "grandpappy" in the 50th Tactical Airlift Squadron, and I needed help seeing the red lights of the engine and flight instruments more clearly—especially at night. So with the blessings of our flight surgeon (who prudently agreed it was a good idea for me to be able to see the instruments), I acquired my first pair of trifocals. Ultimately, I would own four pairs of glasses.

Our first sortie out of Cam Ranh Bay was to the Hue/Phu Bai area near the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam. The weather was rainy with low ceilings, and I was making an instrument approach to a small airstrip. Floyd "Fergie" Ferguson, my copilot, was flipping through the before-landing checklist to make sure we had taken care of niceties like having the plane's gear down and locked.

Fergie announced when we broke through the weather ceiling and he could see the runway, at which point I switched from using the flying instruments to landing visually. Unfortunately, as I was peering through my new trifocals, I slammed the Herky on the ground so hard it shuddered like a hound dog trying to pass peach pits. The crew and I thought we had bought the farm. I gently applied the brakes and carefully taxied off the runway and onto the parking pad.

Fortunately, the only damage found on the rugged Herky was a flat nosewheel tire. After the cargo was unloaded, we returned to Cam Ranh Bay, landing softly—and gracefully—on the long concrete runway. I made the appropriate entries in the aircraft log and debriefed Fergie on the corrective action I would take in the future to be sure nothing like that ever happened again. I told Fergie he would have to add an instruction to the before-landing checklist: As soon as he had the runway in sight, he had to say: "Slide glasses down nose!"

This worked fine on all subsequent landings, and my crew even started speaking to me again. The moral of the story: Never try to land an airplane by peering through the bottom lens of trifocals. It can be very hazardous to your health.