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A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

military.com

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Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#61

Post by ordu »

nvahalik wrote: post #8

This makes me wonder. I get car-sick when I'm a passenger in a car. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes 10 minutes. However, if I'm riding in a convertible with the top down... I haven't gotten car-sick yet. Is the wind "fixing" the problem with my brain?

Wind blowing into a face is something special. Watch dogs, they are crazy about it. Like cats can't resist hiding in a box, so dogs can't resist heading against the wind. :)

Though, seriously speaking, I don't know really. I think wind helps against car-sickness, and maybe more than in one way: sickness can be triggered by too much of CO2 in a bloodstream. It normally doesn't but I believe effects of disorientation and increased levels of CO2 are additive. So it is possible to be slightly disoriented (but not enough for a sickness), slightly deprived of fresh air (but not enough for a sickness), but to feel sickness because of a combined effect.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#62

Post by jameshart »

oefnak wrote: post #12
sandworm101 wrote: post #4

>> It can take pilots up to 30 seconds to reorient themselves, a long time while behind the stick of a jet aircraft. Their is an old chopper pilot saying: the faster the aircraft the slower the pilot. You think 30 seconds is a long time in a fighter jet at 30,000 feet? Try 30 seconds when trying to land helicopter on the deck of a pitching ship. A 747 flies at basically the same speed as a fighter (~mach 0.8), in man…

Yes, but fighter jets often fly closer to the ground and change direction more often (than airliners).

At the point of closest approach, airliners fly just as close to the ground as fighter aircraft.

Usually twice per flight.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#63

Post by emilecantin »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #40
toss1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar striking phenomena happened when I shaved my head instead of haircuts. I was immediately very aware of every slight motion of air even in what seemed like still rooms, or generated by my motion, not even walking. It was like I had a new sensor upgrade. Almost more interesting is that it did not fade or degrade over the months that I kept that (non-)hairstyle. The tactile sense can be a very high-bandwidth i…

Similar experience, I mostly noticed that I could feel certain sources of radiation, like hot kitchen equipment and bright lights. I also found myself bumping my head a lot when working in semi-cramped spaces which I was doing a lot at the time. Hair normally acts as a small proximity sensor around your dome in a way I was completely unaware of before that.

Yeah, doing some home renovation work with my dad in confined spaces, I noticed he bumps his head A LOT (way more than me). The main difference between us is amount of hair on our domes (he's got practically none).

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#64

Post by skykooler »

ncmncm wrote: post #46
raisedbyninjas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read about a hobby project a while back that used vibrating motors to keep the wearer aware of magnetic north. It supposedly made quite a difference. Here's a project that could be the same thing. https://newatlas.com/north-paw-vibrating-ankle-compass-kit/2...

That was a good idea, but a very stupid execution. All you need is an ear bud that clicks as your head turns past each cardinal point. (The click can vary by which point it is.) You can implement this with 10 grams of microcontroller and a magnetic sensor. Add a couple of grams more for GPS, and you can have it click when your head points to where you parked your jeep or tent. To maintain battery life, you turn on th…

To have it be useful for those with hearing loss, it could use a little haptic motor instead to provide a virtual click you feel instead of hear.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#65

Post by Errorcod3 »

I had a co-worker lose his life to spatial disorientation during a night-training flight in Italy: "Maj. Lucas "Gaza" Gruenther, a pilot assigned 31st Fighter Wing, went missing during a nighttime training mission over the Adriatic Sea Jan. 28. In the days that followed, Italian and U.S. authorities collaborated as part of in an immense search effort to locate Gruenther. The search ended Jan. 31 when Gruenther's body was recovered by an Italian vessel... Gruenther completed more than 2,640 hours of flying time to include 400 combat hours."

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#66

Post by jameshart »

t0mas88 wrote: post #57
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #27

One of the surprises I got after being locally anesthetized for a surgery, was that I could no longer localize my arm in space without looking at it. Proprioception is heavily based on the flow of air against our skin and hair. Some flowmeters are based on that principle, using a tiny mechanical hair that vibrates as air flows over it, and I've always felt robotics should just dump a whole bunch of them on their movi…

I've always learned that proprioception is a standalone thing, not based on the air moving over the skin etc, but really just your own nervous system telling you the position of your joints. Which together tells you where your arm is. As far as I know it would theoretically still work in a vacuum with your eyes closed.

Proprioception is the overall sense of knowing where your body parts are.

You don’t just have a bunch of ‘proprioceptor’ nerves dedicated solely to that task, you have a whole wealth of signals coming into your brain that it aggregates into that overall sense.

Similar to how vision isn’t just the raw signals on your optic nerve, but a whole machinery around filling in the details and blanks and saccades from memory and inference to constitute a full visual sense.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#67

Post by h2odragon »

cdot2 wrote: post #5

"In 1974, the future Dr. Rupert was skydiving naked while he was a student at the University of Illinois. He noticed that the rush of air on so much bare skin kept him oriented, even as he spun and twirled in midair." Where do you sign up for naked skydiving?

At the risk of being pedantic, I assume the parachute and harness are still necessary clothing.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#68

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

fsckboy wrote: post #50
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #27

One of the surprises I got after being locally anesthetized for a surgery, was that I could no longer localize my arm in space without looking at it. Proprioception is heavily based on the flow of air against our skin and hair. Some flowmeters are based on that principle, using a tiny mechanical hair that vibrates as air flows over it, and I've always felt robotics should just dump a whole bunch of them on their movi…

> Proprioception is heavily based on the flow of air against our skin and hair. feeling sensations on the skin doesn't tell you where the skin is...?

It does, the air flow going downward on your skin tells you your arm went up.

I recall my arm being very numb, I had to poke myself strongly to feel it, I could move it but I had no idea where it went without looking at it, multiple times I was surprised to find it in a spot I didn't know it was. As I recovered sensation in my skin I regained proprioception gradually. Really trippy experience.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#69

Post by dylan604 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #55
dylan604 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, a 747 pilot is a glorified bus driver that flys in a fairly straight path. Nobody talks about quick thinking until they do. Captain Sully ring any bells? That wasn't a 30k feet either. When an airliner has something go wrong, it's hundreds of people that are affected and will always make the news. By design, a fighter pilot does a heck of a lot more than a airline pilot. When a pilot does something wrong,…

Sully is spoken about, but not always in the best light. There is a line of though that an automated system could well have landed that aircraft. Other lines of thought blame reliance on checklists, that a quick abandonment of checklists might have been more effective. But imho the unsung hero of that incident remains the airliner, designed by human engineers, that was able to survive landing on water and remain aflo…

Isn't throwing out the checklist exactly how Sully was able to make his decision? He realized from experience that he was too low to make it through the checklist in time, and jumped ahead knowing things needed to have a hurry-up applied.

Re: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight

#70

Post by tempestn »

sandworm101 wrote: post #55
dylan604 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, a 747 pilot is a glorified bus driver that flys in a fairly straight path. Nobody talks about quick thinking until they do. Captain Sully ring any bells? That wasn't a 30k feet either. When an airliner has something go wrong, it's hundreds of people that are affected and will always make the news. By design, a fighter pilot does a heck of a lot more than a airline pilot. When a pilot does something wrong,…

Sully is spoken about, but not always in the best light. There is a line of though that an automated system could well have landed that aircraft. Other lines of thought blame reliance on checklists, that a quick abandonment of checklists might have been more effective. But imho the unsung hero of that incident remains the airliner, designed by human engineers, that was able to survive landing on water and remain aflo…

Those checklists exist for a reason. Far, far more incidents and accidents are caused by ignoring them than by relying on them. These planes are sufficiently complex that pilots can't come close to holding all possible contingencies in their heads; the checklists are designed specifically to allow them to react appropriately in any foreseeable situation.

I'm not saying it's impossible that if they'd ignored the checklists and immediately made the perfect decision they could have turned back and landed the plane - just that it's far from certain, and if pilots get in the habit of doing this, it will harm more than it helps.

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