From the beginning

I've always wanted to fly. From as early as I can remember I wanted to be a pilot, either in the air force, commercially or privately. Then at a relatively young age my dreams were dashed when I couldn't pass the Ishihara test. For the uninitiated that's the circle of coloured dots with a number, letter or squiggly line in/through it. No matter how hard I looked, held it up to the light or even tried to trace the numbers I just couldn't do it. According to the optician that made me colourblind and according to the CAA that meant I could never fly professionally. I still had a chance to fly privately...in good weather...in the UK only, so part of it was still there, but I knew I would never fly fast jet for the RAF.

After university I decided to go travelling and planned to do my PPL in Florida on the way round. However, thinking that I needed to get on and get a job, lured me back home early and resigned my dreams of flying to something I'll do "one day".

The "one day" began in April 2012 during an attempt at explaining colour blindness with the help of the Internet. I stumbled across an article that explained how the CAA had decided that the Ishihara was too much of a pass/fail test and that there were potentially people out there who were absolutely safe to fly but just couldn't do the dots! As a result they had developed a new type of test that would assess not just IF you were colourblind but by how much. The test had been developed by City University who happened to be located conveniently close to my office. I booked and paid the £150 fee over the phone. The first of many outlays towards my new hobby!

The new test is called a CAD test and consists of a grey pixelated square with moving pixels. Every few seconds a beep sounds and you have to press one of 4 buttons to indicate which corner you think a smaller coloured square moving from one diagonal to another ends at, or if there was no coloured square, just a random button. The test takes about 15 minutes but is constant and pretty tiring. After I had finished the examiner had a look at my results and said that she thought I had probably come in under the threshold (6 deutans of green anomaly) but I would have to wait until the next day for the official result. A sleepless night ensued and a restless morning until at around lunchtime I received the email I had waited for for 15 years. Yes I was slightly colourblind, but only very mildly (3 deutans) and certainly not too much to pursue a hobby or even a career in aviation.