I think that U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager flew for a while with an eye-patch after he lost his eye in a test flight crash (the one which was shown during the titles for the
Six Million Dollar Man show, and one of the reasons that Martin Caidin gave Col. Steve Austin the bionic eye), although the only photos I could see in a cursory sweep of Google show him with a glass prosthetic (not bionic, I fear). Anyway, it's not a definite grounding thing.
Also, I think that the pilots of 'planes dropping nuclear bombs were given eyepatches, which they wore, in case they were blinded by the flash; the patch would guard at least one eye from damage. They were expected to swap the patch to the damaged eye, and fly on with the good one... (gulp!)
Maybe Skut was involved in some cold war nuclear piloting?
Update 15/05/2006: It would seem that I inadvertantly conflated two incidents here, and made some fundamental errors.
Although Chuck Yeager came down quite spectacularly, it is not the crash shown in the
Six Million Dollar Man; it
is represented in the film and book
The Right Stuff.
Also he did not lose the sight in his eye - the damage was not permanent, due in part to the heat of the fire baking blood over his socket, which in turn probably saved the eye. His eyesight was unimpared, and he flew without problems after he recovered.
The pilot who crashed in the test film used in
TSMDM was in fact Bruce A. Peterson, a NASA test pilot and engineer, who
did lose an eye, and did keep flying after he was "rebuilt" - for much less than $6m, he reckoned.
The M2-F2 experimental 'plane shown was travelling at over 250mph when it hit the dry lake bed and crashed.
Sadly, although he was featured in a BBC documentary just this very weekend, Mr Peterson died at the start of May 2006.
There is a nice NASA (pre-crash!) picture of Yeager, Peterson and the M2-F2
here.