Oakley Flight Jackets £187

Weight 34g

The Flight Jacket glasses are divisive in style, featuring a unique half-frame design that keeps the top part of the lens free from obstruction, as opposed to all others that tend to drop the frame from the lower half. This makes perfect sense for a set of glasses designed around road riding, where a head down position has you looking up and through the top half of your eyewear for the majority of a ride.

The Flight Jacket glasses share similar proportions to Oakley’s Radar EV and Jawbreaker models and while not as big as the Smith or Bollé, are still relatively large on the face, so might not suit those with a smaller head size. One of the other distinctive features of the Flight Jacket glasses is the articulating nosepiece. This pushes the glasses away from the face when at rest to minimise fogging. It does add weight and the design of the Flight Jacket glasses has proven to be effective at limiting mist build-up as standard.

The nosepiece and ends of the arms are covered in Oakley’s Unobtanium rubber. This grips to your skin incredibly well even when sweaty and steadfastly refuses to slip even when riding bumpy trails off-road, and in that respect they stay in place better than most. The Prizm lens featured here is as good as ever, offering really good optics with zero distortion. It works well in bright sunlight, but lets in enough light so that in the classic flickering light you can get when riding along broken hedgerows, you can still pick out potholes on descents.

Oakley also claims that the lens is practically shotgun proof, so should be more than capable of protecting your eyes from debris flung up from the road.

Unlike the other Oakley models mentioned, the Flight Jacket glasses are intended as a fixed lens set of glasses so you can’t easily switch lenses for differing light conditions.

Lenses: Prizm Road Black, Prizm Low Light

Colour: Matte Black, Polished Black, Black/red, Silver www.oakley.com

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