Top-Gun Navy Pilots Fly at the Extremes. Their Brains May Suffer.

A confidential Navy program is studying whether intense fighter jet operations can cause devastating brain injuries in flight crews.

To produce the best of the best, the Navy’s elite TOPGUN flying school puts fighter pilots through a crucible of intense, aerial dogfighting maneuvers under crushing G forces. But behind the high-speed Hollywood heroics that the school is famous for, the Navy has grown concerned that the extreme flying may also be producing something else: brain injuries.

This fall, the Navy quietly began a confidential project, code-named Project Odin’s Eye, to try to find out. The effort will collect roughly 1,500 data points on brain function for each TOPGUN pilot who flies the Navy’s workhorse fighter jet, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, according to communications by the project’s staff. The goal is to understand the scope of the problem and identify pilots who are injured, the communications said.

Some pilots say the effort is long overdue. In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Navy fighter-crew members said that years of catapult launches from aircraft carriers and body-crushing, high-speed maneuvers can take a cumulative toll. At the end of their careers, they said, some top performers become confused, erratic and consumed by anxiety and depression.

Pilots said the symptoms are routinely dismissed as unrelated mental health problems. In addition, they said, pilots often hide symptoms in order to keep flying.

Some eventually fall into a tailspin. In the past 18 months, three experienced Super Hornet pilots have died by suicide. According to their families, all had symptoms consistent with brain injuries.

Officially, the Navy denies that there is a problem. In a statement to The New York Times, a Navy medical spokesman said the Navy “has no data or research to prove any relationship between concussive injuries and either carrier takeoffs/landings or routine combat maneuvers.”