Navy Failed to Protect Pilots From Brain Injury, House Report Says

As concerns mounted that the extreme physical strain of flying fighter jets was causing brain injuries in pilots, and may have led to the death of a number of career aviators, the Navy did almost nothing.

It didn’t even study its pilots to understand if it had a problem.

That is one of the numerous findings in a harshly critical report released on Tuesday by the powerful House Oversight Committee. The report said that because the Navy had repeatedly failed to act, Congress should pass legislation requiring the military to create a specific program to study and care for the brain health of all aviators.

“Despite credible warnings, external reporting and internal awareness, the Navy has yet to determine whether the very conditions that define naval aviation may also be causing long-term harm to the pilots who endure them,” the report said. “Instead, it has relied on a system designed to respond to visible injuries, while leaving potential cumulative damage largely unexamined.”

Naval aviators are repeatedly exposed to body-crushing forces as they catapult off aircraft carriers and pull high G-force turns in training. The Navy has never studied how those forces over time affect the human brain, which contains 100 billion neurons in a network with a consistency similar to Jell-O.

A number of career pilots have raised concerns that those repeated exposures may cause brain injuries that slowly accrue over years of service and lead to debilitating mental health problems.