My friend Burt, a regular Paul’s Thing reader, alerted me to a New York Times article on potential long-term physical and mental health effects of flying fighter aircraft. Unless you’re an NYT subscriber, the link will be paywalled, so I’ll quote the headline and introductory paragraphs here.
Top-Gun Navy Pilots Fly at the Extremes. Their Brains May Suffer.
by Dave Philipps, New York Times
Dec 8, 2024To produce the best of the best, the Navy’s elite TOPGUN flying school puts fighter pilots through a crucible of intense, aerial dogfighting maneuvers under crushing G forces. But behind the high-speed Hollywood heroics that the school is famous for, the Navy has grown concerned that the extreme flying may also be producing something else: brain injuries.
This fall, the Navy quietly began a confidential project, code-named Project Odin’s Eye, to try to find out. The effort will collect roughly 1,500 data points on brain function for each TOPGUN pilot who flies the Navy’s workhorse fighter jet, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, according to communications by the project’s staff. The goal is to understand the scope of the problem and identify pilots who are injured, the communications said.
Some pilots say the effort is long overdue. In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Navy fighter-crew members said that years of catapult launches from aircraft carriers and body-crushing, high-speed maneuvers can take a cumulative toll. At the end of their careers, they said, some top performers become confused, erratic and consumed by anxiety and depression.
Pilots said the symptoms are routinely dismissed as unrelated mental health problems. In addition, they said, pilots often hide symptoms in order to keep flying.
The headline and accompanying article is Navy and Top Gun-focused, but that’s understandable if not forgivable. It’s written for the public, and what the public can relate to, thanks to Tom Cruise, is Navy fighter pilots and Top Gun school. What the intended audience might not realize is that the kind of extreme flying the article discusses doesn’t just occur at Top Gun school (or the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School equivalent), but in the everyday missions all Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force fighter pilots and backseaters fly. Only a handful of aircrews are ever selected for either school, and only then after they’ve already flown fighters for two to three years, pulling “body-crushing” G forces on every flight. If there’s a problem, it’s not just occuring at these elite training schools, but across the fighter world.
I speak with a modicum of knowledge, having flown Air Force F-15 Eagle fighters from 1978 to 1997. With the advent, in the 1970s and 80s, of fourth-generation fighters capable of outmaneuvering and overstressing the human body — the USAF’s F-15 Eagle and F-16 Viper, the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat and F/A-18 Hornet — pilots and backseaters began routinely and repeatedly pulling 6 to 7 Gs, often as many as 9 Gs, almost every time they flew (as do pilots and backseaters flying these and more modern fighters today, naturally).
I’m glad to see this getting some press and visibility. So far, it looks like only the Navy is officially studying the issue, but I suspect the Air Force is taking a hard look at it too. For sure, repeated exposure to high G forces takes a physical toll, probably a lasting one.
In my glory days as an Eagle driver I weighed 200 pounds. At 9 Gs, which I often pulled in training dogfights, I was tipping the scale at 1,800 pounds. My head, at the end of my neck, was nine times heavier than normal, yet I had to keep it up and moving to see the targets I was maneuvering against, and keep an eye out for additional bogies entering the fight. My arms and hands were lead weights, but I had to keep moving the stick, throttles, and weapons controls. Not just my brain but every organ in my body was pulled downward, often suddenly and violently, straining them and the connecting tissues holding them in place. I had to squeeze my gut, legs, and diaphragm to keep the blood in my arteries from pooling down in my lower extremities, causing me to black out. After nearly every mission my butt and backside would be covered in red blotches from capillaries I’d ruptured. At the debrief afterward, my wingmen and I often felt as if we’d gone a couple of rounds with George Foreman. Sometimes, home at night after a double- or triple-turn day, my joints would start to tingle — the bends, the result of rapid, repeated climbs to and descents from 50,000 feet.
In my fifties, a few years after I retired, my right calf and ankle became discolored and dark; a vascular surgeon had to cauterize several torn veins in my leg to stop the damage from spreading. When he asked what I did for a living and I told him I’d been a fighter pilot, he said “A lot of you guys get this condition.” He would know — Tucson, Arizona, where we both live and work, is home to an Air Force base and hundreds if not thousands of retired and active fighter aircrews.
What about the mental degradation, suicidal impulses, and brain damage discussed in the article? My primary point of reference is myself, and I haven’t noticed anything. Then again, how would I? It’s like finding out you need cataract surgery — the changes came on gradually over years and you weren’t even aware of them. Suppose I have changed? Is it simple aging or damage from my years pulling Gs? How about my squadron mates? I’m still in touch with several of them, and haven’t noticed anything there either. I think mental changes in friends would register, but I don’t see my old gang that often and more to the point it’s not the sort of information aviators, wary with good reason of being grounded over medical or mental issues, are willing to discuss — even with their spouses.
This kind of guardedness, familiar to anyone with a military or FAA aeronautical rating, is what makes studies like the one the Navy is conducting hard. All you really have are statistics: the number of men and women with early onset dementia or who have contemplated or committed suicide, those who have flown fighters in one column, the general population in the other. I bet the difference would be hard to discern, and even if there were a notable difference, many other factors could be in play.
Still. I know first-hand the cumulative effects of extreme G forces on the body, and I’m more than willing to believe there are mental effects as well. After all, isn’t there plenty of documentation on brain damage to boxers and football players, who experience similar rapid-onset G loadings?
And who among you, dear readers, hasn’t wondered about me?