USAF gives thumbs up to LASIK surgery

August 2007

Patients considering LASIK eye surgery will be interested to hear about a new announcement. The USA Air Force has recently become the first branch of the military to allow aspiring pilots and aircrew members who have had LASIK corrective eye surgery to apply for entry into the service. The policy change also removes the altitude and high-performance aircraft restrictions for people who have had LASIK.

Since 2001, the Air Force has allowed applicants to try for spots as pilots or aircrews on high-performance aircraft if they had a different kind of corrective eye surgery known as PRK (or ASLA).

Air Force surgeons had said they needed more time to evaluate LASIK because they were concerned about issues associated with the LASIK corneal flap, which doesn’t exist with PRK surgery. The surgeons noted that pilots and crews aboard some airframes have to fly and work at very high-altitude, low-oxygen conditions. No one knew how well LASIK-treated eyes would hold up, according to an Air Force Medical Service website on the USA Air Force Refractive Surgery Program. Air Force surgeons also were concerned about what might happen to the healed-over flap if pilots or aircrew had to eject at high altitudes. However, studies eventually showed there was little to no effect, according to the website.

The Marines and Navy also allow pilot and aircrew candidates to have undergone PRK, and are studying LASIK, according to a spokesman for the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

In March, Capt. Christopher Armstrong, director of aerospace medicine for the Navy, told Navy Times that the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery was in the final administrative stages of approving LASIK for Navy and Marine pilots and aviation candidates, and that he expected to be recommending waivers for the procedure for aviators for both services this fall.

The Army, meanwhile, only allows pilot and aviator candidates who are enrolled in the USA Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory-approved protocol, or study program, to follow PRK and LASIK through flight school to have the surgery. All other pilots and candidates are not eligible to have the surgery.

More information on the Air Force’s policies can be found at:
http://airforcemedicine.afms.mil/USAF-RS
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=46483