The Air Force Times notes that the Air Force approval of vision-correcting laser eye surgery has allowed people who would otherwise have medically unqualified to become pilots.

Early on, the Air Force offered photorefractive keratectomy vision correction to a limited number of aviators. With this procedure, the surgeon uses a laser to remove skin cells from the surface of the eye before correcting the patient’s vision.

Over time, the program was extended to more airmen and, in 2004, the Air Force approved Lasik surgery for aviators, with limits on the type of aircraft they could fly.

Those limits were lifted in 2007.

One of the few surgery locations is the US Air Force Academy, for obvious reasons:

“You can imagine when you’re an 18-year-old kid going to the academy, and you want to be a pilot, but you find out you can’t,” he said. “Now you can get laser vision correction while you’re there and go to pilot training.

Notably, the article speaks only to the surgery performed by the Air Force.  Don’t take this as inspiration to go get civilian eye surgery and think that will make you pilot qualified; it could actually be the opposite — you might permanently disqualify yourself.