[HN Gopher] Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots
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Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-12-10 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| warner25 wrote:
| This seems to be specifically about the effects of high g-force,
| but I'll say that learning to fly a military helicopter (in which
| coping with high g-force isn't a factor) felt like it probably
| demanded more neuroplasticity than anything else I've ever done.
|
| A typical test was being on the aircraft controls while
| navigating at 100+ knots and 50 feet above the trees, looking out
| for a nondescript clearing or dirt road on the map while wearing
| night vision goggles[1], ensuring that you hit checkpoints and
| land +/- 60 seconds from the designated times, listening to (and
| responding as necessary) to multiple external radios plus the
| internal intercom system, and being asked to also recite from
| memory (or suddenly execute) the procedures for some contingency
| (e.g aircraft emergency, change to the tactical situation).
| Everyone struggles through the training, because no prior
| experience or schooling really prepares you for all that[2], and
| I suspect that coming out the other end entails a massive
| reorganization of the brain.
|
| [1] Or substitute that with wearing a hood so you can only see
| the instruments and translating a 2D instrument procedure on
| paper into a 3D (4D?) reality.
|
| [2] Of course selection is based on school and athletic
| performance, which _seems_ to help, but I don 't know how much
| evidence supports that.
| ohazi wrote:
| There also seem to be a lot of anecdotal suggestions that
| learning how to use that AR/HUD single-eyepiece thing when
| flying the Apache helicopter similarly requires some brain-
| reorganizing shenanigans to fully master.
| warner25 wrote:
| True. I flew Black Hawks instead of Apaches, but we also had
| a HUD monocle that we could attach to our NVGs (so it was
| only for aided night flight in our case). It prevented us
| from having to shift our eyes from the NVG image down to the
| actual cockpit instruments. For me, adapting to the HUD was
| much easier than adapting to the NVGs themselves; I remember
| drifting backwards at 15 knots and 30 feet over a runway when
| I thought I was at a stable 10-foot hover a few weeks into
| NVG training[1]. The Apache monocle is probably more
| difficult to use because it overlays the instrumentation on
| the real-world instead of another synthetic image.
|
| [1] Somewhat amused, the instructor pilot let it happen for a
| few seconds before asking me if I was OK and could see what
| was happening. It was a formative learning experience.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Somewhat amused, the instructor pilot let it happen for a
| few seconds before asking me if I was OK and could see what
| was happening. It was a formative learning experience.
|
| I think the formative learning experience is why the
| instructor let you drift for a while. Of course, plus 20
| feet has a different impact on safety than minus 20 feet :P
| psunavy03 wrote:
| As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the
| one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny
| unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I
| rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a
| certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up,
| looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm
| going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set
| timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should
| go check that" that's within a minute or two.
|
| I always figured it went back to what you mentioned, being able
| to be on timelines down to the second while doing all the other
| ancillary tasks like listening to three radios, monitoring
| sensors, etc.
| gmays wrote:
| I guess it's individual. My wife flew F-18's for the Marine
| Corps and is chronically late for everything! So much for on
| time, on target.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Strangely that's how I was before I went to flight school.
| mschnell wrote:
| I have that too -- not a jet pilot, but a hobby musician.
| dttze wrote:
| I got that ability from playing a lot of Quake 3 deathmatch.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| As a kid I trained myself to keep track of time through using
| the 15m beep on my Casio watch.
|
| Eventually I was quite accurate on the current time, rarely
| missing by more than a minute, but at some point it felt like
| it wasn't really helping me since I had the watch anyway. It
| also was too weird for becoming a party trick (first time I
| admit to learning this), and didn't help with the idea that I
| had just wasted X minutes of my life between any 2 moments I
| thought about time or checked it without having done
| something useful, so I ended up disabling that.
| boogieknite wrote:
| Me and my old school friends always attributed this to
| playing sports with timers.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I should look more into my cat's past.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Does your cat jump on your bed right before the alarm rings
| as well?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator,
| the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny
| unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but
| I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a
| certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up,
| looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If
| I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set
| timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should
| go check that" that's within a minute or two.
|
| It's interesting, I have the same ability: waking up 2-5
| minutes before the alarm clock, feeling the washing machine
| or the oven alarm will ring in 20 seconds~2 minutes. I am
| rarely off and when I am it's by a huge margin. But I have no
| background or job or hobby history that would have helped
| fine tuned that. I also don't rely on it, I often set timers.
| fizx wrote:
| ADHD?
| tra3 wrote:
| I have relatively poor hand eye coordination/balance and I've
| been trying to learn how to pilot a drone (without
| stabilization). Anecdotally, kids can pick it up within hours
| of flying a sim, and adults take in general 20-30 hours to get
| proficient. I'm double that and I'm still terrible.. flying a
| helictopter in the conditions you describe must be orders of
| magnitude more difficult.
|
| Out of curiosity what do you do now?
| warner25 wrote:
| With the old mechanical linkage controls (not the newer fly-
| by-wire controls with a bunch of automatic stabilization) it
| was typical to have 20 hours before one (i.e. 20-25 year-old
| flight school student) could safely pick the helicopter up
| off the ground, hover, and set it back down. There are no
| younger nor much older military flight school students, so I
| don't know how age would affect the learning curve. The old
| simulators were no help with learning to hover because it was
| all about "feel" and the simulators could never get the feel
| quite right. I've never tried to pilot a drone so I can't
| compare with that.
|
| I'm still in the military but transitioned to studying,
| doing, and teaching IT and CS stuff in my late 20s (which is
| how I ended up here at HN).
| trentnelson wrote:
| It's insane how hard hovering is. I had about 35 hours of
| fixed wing time, and treated myself to a helicopter lesson
| for my birthday.
|
| Hovering was so humbling! You'd be stable for a few seconds
| and then oops now we're suddenly crabbing backwards whilst
| rolling laterally whilst exacerbating everything with
| pilot-induced oscillations in every conceivable axis of
| movement.
|
| Having to constantly enter three inputs whenever the
| external environment changes (ie wind, gust), or any time
| any one of the three inputs change... it absolutely
| requires some new neural pathways to be forged!
|
| I flew with Patty Wagstaff many years later and even she
| admitted hovering was so hard, to the point it looked like
| she wasn't going to be able proceed with her rotor license
| (before it all clicked).
| warner25 wrote:
| > so hard, to the point it looked like she wasn't going
| to be able proceed with her rotor license (before it all
| clicked)
|
| Yeah, I think we were all convinced that we were going to
| wash out of flight school in the first few weeks.
| Hovering was not something that you could see yourself
| gradually getting better at, so it felt impossible right
| up until it wasn't. It really did just "click" one day.
| Almost two decades later, I still have a vivid memory of
| the very moment that I realized I had full control of the
| aircraft when picking it up from the ground.
|
| When my buddy and I were telling an instructor pilot one
| day how we felt (like we'd never be able to hover), he
| wisely pointed out that the flight school syllabus had a
| certain number of hours for a reason. It had been refined
| over the past 50 years, so they knew _exactly_ how many
| hours were needed, and if things "clicked" for us ahead
| of that schedule it would mean that time and money were
| being wasted.
| mmooss wrote:
| > athletic performance
|
| Interesting - what do they measure? I could see hand-eye
| coordination and a sense of body position relative to the
| ground (the perception that Simone Biles lost temporarily). But
| most athletic performance would have seemed irrelevant to me.
| It seems mostly a mental task, as you describe.
|
| Someone I know in special forces said they don't look for
| 'jocks', but people with emotional and cognitive performance
| under stress, though a certain level of physical ability is
| necessary of course.
| warner25 wrote:
| It's not as direct as _measuring_ wannabe aviators for
| athleticism. You have to see it as the multi-year pipeline
| going from high school / college / enlisted ranks to the
| selection for officer training to the selection for aviation.
| All three steps are competitive, and athletic participation
| and achievement and physical fitness scores are major inputs.
| So a flight school class ends up having a disproportionate
| number of former varsity and intercollegiate athletes, and
| the intramural sports played among aviators tend to be quite
| serious.
|
| If it helps, it's probably for the reasons you said -
| generally being able to quickly process and accurately react
| to visual / audio / proprioceptive / vestibular stimuli -
| plus being used to working through physical discomfort.
|
| I agree that that's true of all SOF selection, and probably
| Army SF in particular.
| mmooss wrote:
| > All three steps are competitive, and athletic
| participation and achievement and physical fitness scores
| are major inputs.
|
| Are they? Why? I don't want an athlete next to me in a
| foxhole, but someone who can stay calm, think clearly, and
| make good decisions under extreme stress.
|
| Edit: Sports are the opposite of warfare: _Games_ , where
| the only consequence is 'points', where the losing team at
| worst buys the beer, and where participants follow rules
| and require fairness.
|
| Warfare is the opposite in every respect. You die, your
| country is overrun and your family dies and home is
| destroyed. Generations pass before you recover, if ever.
| There are no rules or fairness; quite the opposite - the
| participants look for every advantage they can.
|
| > agree that that's true of all SOF selection
|
| I said/meant that SOF does _not_ select for athletes.
| warner25 wrote:
| For better or worse, I think athletic participation and
| achievement is used[1] as a proxy for what you want. The
| idea is that one can prove himself through sport as a
| good teammate with grit, determination, toughness etc. in
| adversarial situations. It might be debatable, but I
| think that's the logic used by the institution.
|
| And I was trying to say that what's true is the SOF
| community's desire for "emotional and cognitive
| performance under stress" above most other qualities.
| Like you said, one won't even get looked at without a
| baseline level of fitness or athleticism, but after that
| selection appears to be based on the outcomes of mind
| games and the assessment of personality traits.
|
| [1] Officers coming out of Army ROTC, for example, get
| literal points for playing intercollegiate or intramural
| sports, and having more points gives them a better chance
| at getting their choice of career field. Getting an Army
| ROTC scholarship in the first place probably works the
| same way.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Neither pilot nor military but:
|
| Specifically to fly fighters you need strong cardio, strong
| core muscles, strong head/neck muscles. During high G
| maneuvers all the blood in your body wants to flow down to
| the lower parts of your body. You have to clench your lower
| body to mitigate that to an extent (the legs of the flight
| suit inflate too, to help) and do rapid deep breathing
| exercises to keep enough blood and oxygen flowing to your
| brain.
|
| You will also be keeping your head on a swivel to an extent
| while flying in combat, turning your head to see things
| around you, it's not just a matter of looking at sensor data.
| Imagine observing things behind you on a roller coaster (2-3g
| max IIRC) but now scale that up to potentially up to 9g when
| your body feels like it weighs 1,500lbs/700kg or so. It's a
| workout!
|
| While not as directly applicable to flying choppers, all
| military pilots in a given branch come from the same
| pipeline. You don't know your aircraft assignment (jet,
| heavy, chopper, whatever) until the end of flight school so
| everybody has to be pretty fit. Video of selections being
| announced during graduation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XF_VMwgaEI
| strangattractor wrote:
| I'm having difficulty in understanding why this is assumed to
| be related to g's pulled as opposed 100's of other things.
| Someone spending many hours doing a task that demands a great
| deal of focus and physical coordination might show changes in
| neuroplasticity different to someone that sits in front of a
| computer screen writing code all day.
| tlb wrote:
| Comparing fighter pilots to helicopter pilots might say
| something about the effect of G forces, since the cognitive
| loads are both high.
|
| However, the control group is "10 adults with no experience in
| flying ... matched for age, gender, and educational level". I
| feel like fighter pilots are pretty different from other people
| with the same amount of education.
| maartenscholl wrote:
| Do fighter pilots accumulate all that much exposure to G-forces
| in terms of duration? 2000 flight hours sounds like a lot, but
| aren't they flying steady most of the time?
|
| Wouldn't professional bobsleigh pilots, alpine skiers, formula 1
| drivers and downhill mountain bikers accumulate many more hours
| of high G-force exposure over the period of say a year?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Top-Gun Navy Pilots Fly at the Extremes. Their Brains May
| Suffer.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/us/navy-pilot-brain-injur...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/us/navy-pilot-brain-injur...
|
| https://archive.ph/FQ32k
| HPsquared wrote:
| The profile is different. Fighter pilots have sustained g-force
| in a vertical direction, draining blood from the brain. Formula
| 1 drivers have lateral and forward/backward acceleration, which
| will have different physiological effects. The other sports are
| probably different again. Not sure if anything has a similar
| profile to jets.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I'm not sure DH mountain bike hits the G-forces that one might
| encounter in a fighter jet. Maybe some instantaneous instances,
| but nothing sustained. I'm a mountain biker (nowhere near an
| elite DHer) and they don't require compression gear to keep
| from passing out.
|
| Bobsled/luge might be closer, but I have no direct experience.
| dailykoder wrote:
| I'd second that. I am far far away from being a pro, but my
| gut feeling and memory tell me that I felt way bigger forces
| while doing big, steep dirt jumps than any form of downhill.
| Though, the pros are actually fast around the corners, unlike
| me. So maybe there might be some g-forces, but I doubt they
| are anywhere near an F1 car or something else
| rjsw wrote:
| Alpine skiing doesn't result in particularly high G-forces.
| excalibur wrote:
| > A control group (mean age (SD) = 29 (3.2) years, range 23-32
| years) of 10 adults with no experience in flying was included,
| matched for age, gender, and educational level. Additionally,
| controls were also matched for handedness (9 right- and 1 left-
| handed in each group).
|
| Controls should be matched for military service. There is a high
| probability of this altering the brain in ways unrelated to being
| a fighter pilot. In fact, military pilots who fly other types of
| aircraft might be ideal.
| PKop wrote:
| Controls should be matched for people that end up being
| equivalently skilled pilots, unless we are supposed to pretend
| that those capable of being elite fighter pilots have the same
| brains as those that aren't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379879
| PKop wrote:
| How are they disambiguating between these brain markers being an
| effect, or a cause, of being an F16 fighter pilot?
|
| Like claiming "Becoming an Olympic swimmer causes long torsos,
| long arms and short legs"
|
| They should at least have control group be students in flight
| school, and then throw out control subjects that don't graduate.
| Of course, better would be before and after flight hours for same
| people. Seems pretty obviously flawed to just compare to some
| random other group of non pilots.
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