5 ms·

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'

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Strangely that's how I was before I went to flight school.
- mschnell 2y ago
  I have that too -- not a jet pilot, but a hobby musician.
- dttze 2y ago
  I got that ability from playing a lot of Quake 3 deathmatch.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  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.
tra3 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
> 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- warner25 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.
strangattractor 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.

ohazi 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Strangely that's how I was before I went to flight school.
mschnell 2y ago
I have that too -- not a jet pilot, but a hobby musician.
dttze 2y ago
I got that ability from playing a lot of Quake 3 deathmatch.
dietr1ch 2y ago
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.

tra3 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago

> 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
warner25 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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.

strangattractor 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.