Navy Decides Four Eyes Can Be as Good as Two : Pilots: In the past, applicants had to have 20/20 vision to be admitted to flight school. But the service, facing a diminishing applicant pool, is relaxing the requirement.

Chuck Yeager didn’t wear them. Neither did Gus Grissom or Deke Slayton. And they couldn’t have become fighter pilots if they had.

But soon the Navy will relax its standard and let pilots wear “cheaters,” or what civilians call eyeglasses.

To increase the pool of eligible applicants, Vice Adm. Richard M. Dunleavy, assistant chief of naval operations for air warfare in Washington, has reversed a longtime Navy policy that prohibited pilots from entering flight school with less than 20/20 vision.

“We want to attract a larger number of people,” said Dunleavy, who wears glasses and failed the pilot’s eyesight exam seven times. But Dunleavy said the policy change had nothing to do with his own eyesight, which was 20/30 when he squinted.

“I didn’t do this because of my frustration--I was very happy being a naval flight officer,” Dunleavy said.

The new rule, which takes effect July 1, eases the standards to include individuals whose vision is 20/30 and correctable with glasses or contact lenses. Air Force and Army officials say they have no plans to change their 20/20 vision requirement for pilots. And Delta Air Lines--one of the few commercial airlines to require 20/20 vision--also will stand by its policy, spokesman Dean Breest said.

Sophisticated computer equipment, which has eliminated a number of dials and gauges in the cockpit, enables pilots to fly with less than perfect vision, Dunleavy says. The Navy also has improved aircraft carrier technology “such that it’s a thousandfold safer,” said Rear Adm. Philip S. Anselmo, commander of the Pacific Fleet’s Fighter Airborne Early Warning Wing.

Navy officials will decide within three years whether to stretch the newly set limits further.

For the brotherhood of Navy pilots, which prides itself on being able to land on an aircraft carrier pitching in rough seas, the new rule will call for a slight adjustment in the highly prized Tom Cruise image of a leather-jacketed fighter jock.

At Miramar Naval Air Station’s “Top Gun” school, most agree there is no shame in donning glasses in the cockpit, but few wish to be seen wearing them.

“Putting on ‘cheaters’ is a sign that you are getting old. Guys don’t walk around with glasses on--it’s an image thing,” explained Lt. Steve Nordel, 28, who keeps his reading glasses carefully tucked into a pocket and only produces them under duress. Nordel is a radar intercept officer; he sits in the back seat of an F-14 Tomcat, monitoring radar and weapons.

Pilots whose vision deteriorates after they graduate from flight school are allowed to keep flying, as long as their vision does not deteriorate below another set of standards. A pilot can fly a high-performance aircraft, such as an F-14 Tomcat, with vision of 20/50 if he wears a corrective lens. That means the pilot, without wearing eyeglasses, sees at 20 feet what someone with perfect vision would see at 50 feet.

Pilots flying transport aircraft, such as a C-9B Skytrain, can fly with uncorrected vision of 20/200, said Chief Petty Officer Bobbi Carleton, a Miramar spokeswoman.

The new policy does not affect the standards for pilots who already have earned their wings, though Dunleavy said those also may be expanded to include more people.

Dunleavy hopes the new 20/30 policy will help increase the ever-shrinking pool of applicants. The Navy gleans its pilots from the nation’s crop of college graduates. But by the year 2000, officials expect 7% fewer graduates because of population changes, said Lt. Jim Wood, a Navy spokesman in Washington. For the military, that means a squeeze.

The Navy now accepts one of every three pilot applicants, Dunleavy said. By 1995, it expects it will have to accept two of three applicants.

“This opens a lot of opportunities for young men and women. There are going to be a lot of happy people out there,” said Rear Adm. Philip S. Anselmo, who wears glasses. “It also indicates how far we have come with a lot of technology.”

Perfect vision was once necessary to see outside the aircraft, as well as to handle a slew of cockpit controls. But computerized cockpits eliminated about 50% of the dials, gauges and monitor boxes in airplanes during the ‘70s, said Capt. Tom Mitchell, the air training officer for the Pacific Fleet’s naval air force. A number of instruments, once scattered throughout the cockpit, are now in an eye-level computer panel that engineers have made more “user-friendly.”

For Steve Nordel and many pilot wanna-bes, their much desired careers as pilots crashed in an eye doctor’s office.

Nordel, a Sonoma native, read dozens of astronaut biographies when he was 13. More than half of the astronauts were former Navy pilots and Nordel decided he, too, would become a Navy pilot.

For the next nine years, he prepared himself for what he saw as his calling. He attended the Naval Academy, where year after year his vision tested 20/20. But when he applied to flight school, he was turned down. His eyes had worsened to 20/25.

“My career hopes, the challenges I had set for myself--it was all dashed. It was a time of inner soul-searching,” Nordel said. But because of the new policy, if Nordel were applying this year, he could be a pilot.

“If it were eight years ago, it would be perfect,” he said.

But his dream of becoming an astronaut has not been quashed. Though he no longer can become an astronaut pilot, Nordel could become a mission specialist or a non-pilot member of an astronaut crew. In hopes of joining the astronaut program, Nordel plans to attend the Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland, considered a steppingstone for many astronauts.

Nordel and others said they had recovered from their own stinging disappointment at being passed over for pilot school but were glad the opportunity might be available to others.

Said Lt. Alan Pietruszewski, 27, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., who failed the eyesight exam because of poor depth perception and now helps teach pilots at Top Gun: “I don’t go home any more and say, ‘God, I wish I could be in the front seat.’ But if God fixed my eyes, I’d probably go for it.”