When considering buying a set of aviator sunglasses, most people don’t provide a considered the lenses and merely consider how “cool” they look after they hook them up to. While looks might seem to become important, ale the lenses to provide adequate protection to your eyes is way more important.
An excellent set of oversize aviator sunglasses starts off with picking a the lenses. The lens material should have a uniform composition and be perfectly transparent. Furthermore, the lenses must be ground and treated in a way as to provide maximum defense against harmful uv radiation.
What Are The Choices In Lens Material?
Generally speaking there are three choices in lens material:
Plastic
Polycarbonate
Glass
At first the sole option for lenses was glass, but as technology improved plastic after which polycarbonate became designed for making sunglass lenses. With many choices available on the market available it may be confusing regarding which may be best for you.
Plastic Lenses
Plastic lenses are becoming popular due to the fact they’re lightweight and for that reason more comfortable to use. They remove the problem of glass lenses which sometimes slip down your nose inside them for hours to constantly push it well up.
Among the difficulties with plastic lenses, however, is that they may be easily scratched. To fix this challenge plastic lenses use a scratch resistant coating placed on the lens and, if clean, will remain scratch free for a long time.
Polycarbonate Lenses
The benefit of polycarbonate lenses is because they are thinner, lighter and shatterproof. Because these lenses are impact-resistant you might drop a steel ball around the lens from quite a distance and also the lens wouldn’t normally break or shatter.
Glasses with polycarbonate lenses are known as safety glasses since they do a congrats in protecting the eyes from injury. They’re impact-resistant because the lenses are constructed with a really soft, pliable material; however, they’ll scratch quickly without proper care.
Glass Lenses
Glass lenses weigh more than either plastic or polycarbonate lenses and are scratch resistant eliminating the need for a scratch resistant coating. However, drop a set of glasses with glass lenses and they very likely will shatter.
On the other hand, glass lenses give you the best visual acuity. Visual acuity is the acuteness or clearness of vision, which means whatever you predict glass lenses will be sharper compared to any other lens material.
Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs)
Today we’re surrounded with devices like smart phones, car dashboard displays and computer screens involving liquid crystal displays to present information to us.
Because LCDs make use of a polarizing filter using a vertical axis the information shown on these screens can be challenging or impossible to find out with polarized lenses. Polarized lens have been developed specifically to eliminate vertically polarized light waves, which suggests attempting to view an LCD screen with polarized glasses or sunglasses is an issue.
The answer, of course, is always to wear aviator sunglasses which are not polarized. Actually, the only real advantage for wearing polarized sunglasses happens when you are on water which in turn enables you to see some depth into the water.
Your best option For Pilots
A pilot’s eyes are their most critical asset, and pilots must be able to see everything as clearly as you possibly can, such as the LCD displays which provide flight and navigation information for them from the aircraft’s panel.
Which means aviator sunglasses with non-polarized glass lenses would be the very best option for pilots. Actually, these would even be your best option for anybody who drives a car with an LCD instrument panel also.
Recommended Manufacturers
Today these leading manufacturers of non-polarized glass lens aviator sunglasses are:
American Optical Original Pilot Sunglasses
Randolph Engineering Aviator Sunglasses
Serengeti Aviator Sunglasses
Both American Optical and Randolph Engineering supply aviator sunglasses towards the U.S. military, in my experience Randolph Engineering Aviator Sunglasses are desirable to more pilots than any other brand.
As a possible ATP pilot by having an MBA running a business, the author writes a daily blog about aviation called “All Things Aviation.” In order to serve his community the writer reviews pilot supplies for pilots.
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