The original movie Top Gun may have popularized "the need for speed," but it didn't pay much attention to the dangers of crushing G-forces elite military pilots must endure to achieve that speed. Now, the Navy has for the first time launched a study into potential brain injuries in its vaunted Navy Fighter Weapons School—aka TOPGUN, reports the New York Times. Specifically, the study known as Project Odin's Eye will collect about 1,500 brain data points on pilots who fly the F/A-18 Super Hornet. The newspaper interviewed more than a dozen current or former crew members who raise concerns about the long-term effects of such extreme flights—and it reports three suicides by veteran Super Hornet pilots over the last 18 months.
"No one is talking about it, but this is a big problem," says Kristin Barnes, who flew in a different Navy jet—the F-14 Tomcat, which preceded the Super Hornet—for more than 20 years before becoming a doctor. "When you launch from the carrier, you accelerate from zero to almost 200 miles per hour in two seconds, and your brain gets squished to the back of your skull. You can heal from that once—you can heal from it 10 times. But I did it 750 times."
The 55-year-old says she began experiencing symptoms such as vertigo, sensitivity to light, and heart palpitations a decade into her military career, and they eventually forced her to retire. Only then did a civilian doctor raise the possibility of brain injury. The Navy's official line is that there is no definitive proof of a link between its flights and brain injuries, but the new study could change that. The Military Times has reported extensively on the issue of traumatic brain injury among those serving. (More US military stories.)
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