Visionary pilot

There’s good reason for that: Charles is an engineer, with nearly 500 patents on surgical and imaging devices. He’s also a renowned eye surgeon. He’s performed more vitreoretinal surgeries than anyone else in the world—nearly 50,000. And hundreds of millions more patients around the world—cataract patients, retina patients, even orthopedic patients—have unknowingly benefited from the innovative devices and technologies Charles designed.

Charles first fell for airplanes as a wide-eyed kid in sixth grade. Newspaper-route earnings funded his first airplane ride in a Douglas DC–4 in 1953. But Charles didn’t learn to fly until his forties. While chafing through a commercial flight’s long delay, he had an epiphany: “An airplane is a time machine,” he realized. “With my own plane, I could do surgeries in Memphis on Thursday afternoon, have dinner with start-up partners in California that night, and spend three days doing lab research before flying home Sunday.”

Having taken matters—and the yoke—into his own hands, Charles pursued proficiency with laser focus. “I didn’t want to fly like a doctor,” he says. “A lot of doctors have died in their own planes. I wanted to fly like a pro.” Transitioning to turbines after barely 200 hours, he earned type ratings for five jets: three Citation models and the Falcon 50 and Sabre 65 (both of which he’s owned).

He sold his Sabre 65 in early 2025, but he’s still flying, logging recent left-seat time in a Piper Lance. But he’s not turning his back on jets; he does regular high-end simulator sessions, where he’s trained on multiple airliners, a Citation VII, a Falcon 50, and various Citations.

Charles credits aviation with more than just “time travel.” Advanced cockpit displays showed him the value of integrated systems—a lesson he applies repeatedly to his surgical innovations.

At 82, he’s still operating twice a week, outpacing many younger colleagues, and he’s still inventing. In April 2025, the optical giant Alcon Laboratories launched a new cataract and retinal surgery platform incorporating many of Charles’s technologies.

And in what might be the ultimate fusion of ophthalmology and aviation, Charles remains active with the Orbis Foundation. For decades he’s helped fund and staff Orbis’s Flying Eye Hospital (see “One Glorious Vision,” April 2019 AOPA Pilot), performing eye surgeries and training around the world. Soon he hopes to take to the skies again—although not at the controls—in the Orbis cockpit, where the co-pilot’s seat bears a plaque inscribed with his name.

Pilot. Surgeon. Inventor. Steve Charles is—above all—a man of great vision.

Jon Jefferson is a writer and private pilot. He has been flying for 20 years.