After a busy beginning to the year with awareness raising tours and aircraft maintenance, our Flying Eye Hospital team are preparing for more sight saving trips where they'll be taking some of the best eye teams in the business to share their skills in the communities that need it most.
Next up for our team is some flight attendant training. As well as being fully qualified ophthalmologists, biomedical engineers, nurses and anesthesiologists they also need to be trained flight attendants. Now they can save lives as well as sight.
We’ll be landing in Kingston for the 8th time at the end of March! With the support of local partners, our 3-week regional ophthalmic training project will focus on improving the skills of eye teams right across the Caribbean and is a follow-up to our project in Barbados in 2018.
After Jamaica the plane will be flown to Memphis, Tennesse by its first ever all female flight crew! While in Memphis all our volunteer pilots will have their annual training at FedEx HQ.
This is the first project to take place in Chile since 1982. We’ll be touching down in Santiago in May where experts on the Flying Eye Hospital will conduct the first ever simulation training with local partners. Exciting stuff!
After another brief stopover in Panama for fuel we'll be heading to Canada where we'll be showing supporters and partners round this amazing aircraft in Toronto and Ottawa throughout June.
Our Flying Eye Hospital will be stopping in Alaska and Japan for some rest and re-fueling on its way to its next sight saving trip - crucial for powering our plane for those long flights ahead.
This is our 10th visit to beautiful Vietnam and our second time in Hue. Since 2006 we have successfully conducted 9 projects in Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Can Tho and Binh Dinh. We’re looking forward to kicking off our project in August where we'll be treating patients with vision problems and sharing important skills with local eye health teams.
The plane will be heading straight from Vietnam to Myanmar where we have a long history with the ophthalmic community - the Flying Eye Hospital first visiting Yangon in 1991. We will be back for the 10th time in September for two weeks - this time in Mandalay - working with local partners to deliver life-changing eye care and training local eye teams.
November will see the Flying Eye Hospital touching down in the capital Accra for two weeks of training. Four-out-of five blind Ghanaians are blind from causes which can be avoided. We're looking forward to working with our local hospital partners to improve the quality of eye care.
Finally, the plane will travel from Ghana to Cape Verde for a fuel stopover before heading to Goodyear, Arizona, where it will take a well deserved break for the holiday season.
So yes, a busy year ahead! We look forward to meeting up with many of you along the way as we all work together to help change the way the world sees.
As always, a heartfelt thank you for your continued support. Without you, sight-saving projects like these couldn’t happen.
And another big thank you to our Volunteer Faculty and pilots who graciously donate their time to change help transform lives around the world.
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