The Flying Eye Hospital, currently parked on Moffett Field in Mountain View, is a mobile ophthalmological hospital, technological marvel, and surely one of the most extraordinary vehicles on the planet. It is a converted MD-10 wide-body airliner that flies all around the world — it just got back from Bangladesh — performing eye surgeries on needy patients in developing nations while also helping to train their doctors, nurses, and medical technicians.

One of the most technically amazing things about the Flying Eye is that it is an entirely self-contained hospital: its systems, which run purely on jet-fuel-powered generators, include its own medical gases, its own clean room, its own water purifiers, its surgical equipment, etc., including extremely sensitive equipment (again, this is eyesurgery we’re talking about) which has to be stowed such that can survive serious turbulence or bumpy landings on difficult runways without requiring major maintenance.

And remember, this is a teaching hospital. Its onboard classroom features not just video screens but Zeiss VR headsets so that students can watch narrated recordings of surgical procedures. There’s a project in progress to stream them live in VR; currently they’re all streamed in high-quality video, live to classrooms around the world, and archived at their telemedicine service Cybersight for future reference.

Read the full article on the Flying Eye Hospital by Jon Evans at TechCrunch