Human beings are creatures of sight. The eye and its function are woven inexorably into our mythos, literature, poetry, and psychology. Blindness, particularly preventable blindness, is a calamity the physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists, volunteers, and pilots of the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital travel the world to treat—and in many instances set right.
Founded in 1982 and headquartered in New York, Orbis is an international non-profit/non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to saving eyesight worldwide. Since its inception, Orbis clinicians and support staff have traveled the world treating those afflicted with ophthalmic pathologies and training healthcare providers in the latest ophthalmological techniques and technologies.
The business of transporting Orbis personnel is relegated to Orbis-One-Heavy, a 1973-vintage, MD-10-30F freighter donated to the organization in 2016 by FedEx. In addition to donating the aircraft—which has been converted into a state-of-the-art ophthalmological hospital, surgery-center, and learning facility—FedEx provides the parts, maintenance, and pilots that keep the airplane flying and doing good across the wide-world.
Orbis-One-Heavy (a.k.a. N330AU) is the third aircraft to undertake the organization’s humanitarian mission. The outfit’s first air-going eye-hospital was a Douglas DC-8-21 (N220RB) donated by United Airlines. As the 1990s dawned and replacement parts for the aging DC-8 became increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain, Orbis—by means of private donations—purchased a DC-10, which after two-years of conversion and renovation entered service in 1994. In 2008, Orbis replaced the DC-10 with a newer, DC-10 Series 30 freighter donated jointly by United Airlines and FedEx.
Eight-years later, FedEx—in a gracious reiteration of its former largess—provided Orbis the MD-10-30F that operates today as Orbis-One-Heavy. The aircraft, by dint of generous, private contributions, was provisioned with its unique, modular hospital suite, an advanced audio visual system, and a state of the art Mobile Simulation Center that uses virtual reality, prosthetics, and highly sophisticated, life-like mannequins to build skills and confidence in local eye-care practitioners before they progress to surgeries on actual patients.
By combining mobility and medical know-how, Orbis has improved the lives of people lacking access to quality healthcare, edified doctors in need of training, changed social-health policies in underdeveloped nations, and not least of all, develop enduring, congenial bonds with people and communities around the globe.
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