In my work in aviation safety, I had recently taken a keen interest in a procedure designed to test the resistance of cockpit windshields to just such bird strikes. The method was to fire a newly killed chicken, encased in a paper bag, from a pneumatic cannon at various types of windshield mock-ups. The technique is still in use today, except that the chickens are now fired at velocities as high as 700 miles an hour.

Thanks to such testing, the modern cockpit windshield is an inch-thick marvel of strength, with heated laminations to prevent its becoming brittle at high-altitude temperatures.

By a wry twist of fate,, stronger windshields had been ordered installed on all DC-3s. Ours arrived shortly after the accident.

It was several days before the doctors decided I was strong enough to hear the bad news: My right eye had been damaged beyond repair. It would have to be removed without further delay, they told me, in order to prevent a sympathetic reaction from developing in the good remaining eye.

The verdict didn't really surprise me, even though the damaged eye had been kept under wraps all this time. And there was really no point in brooding about it. I began instead to develop an overwhelming curiosity about the future.

Would my world be changed when viewed through a single eye? Would my activities be restricted? Would I ever drive a car again? Fly a plane? Play golf or even just cross a street with a reasonable expectation of reaching the other side alive?

In the course of my life, I'd met quite a few people who had lost the vision of one eye. Now I spent long of hours in my hospital bed anxiously trying to recall all with the details I'd learned about them.  

My goal was how can I apply this knowledge to my own personal  circumstances.

 

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