That being said, is it possible for the human body to be able to withstand such acceleration? The most likely answer is a resounding no. Older athletes retain more muscle mass and force with ageing than untrained older individuals, so if Maverick’s still playing plenty of volleyball on the beach and kept up his flying hours, he might just be able to outpace his younger self.Tom Cruise's character's feat of Mach 10 speed in Top Gun: Maverick is one scientifically improbable stunt out of many featured in the film. That said, increased strength and muscle mass also seems to help with G tolerance, and we tend to lose muscle mass and strength with age. Since G tolerance can be learned by experience, it could just be that older pilots are better adapted through years of training. There’s not a huge amount of data on older high-performance pilots, but there are some hints that suggest being older could be slightly beneficial to G tolerance, possibly due to higher blood pressures and slightly stiffer arteries seen with age. While it’d be reasonable to assume that Maverick wouldn’t be able to pull the same G’s as his younger self, that might be incorrect. This includes all the individual aspects of our cardiovascular system which works continuously to keep our brains well supplied with oxygen.
What does that mean for the 57-year-old Maverick in his latest adventure? As we age, our bodies decline in all sorts of physical functions. Controlling your own jet is a relentless maths challenge which fighter pilots must get a grip on while trying to out-think opponents in a highspeed 3D game of chess. Pilots must also master the mental aspects of high-performance flying. Rapidly changing gravitational loads on fighter pilots can result in severe back and neck pain due to constantly varying gravity, and delicate sections of pilots’ lungs can even temporally collapse under high-gravity loads. Military pilots are encouraged to keep fit as muscular strength helps with G tolerance.įighter jets are a long way from the relative comfort of crowded budget airlines. But it can make all the difference during a high-stakes duel where turning your jet faster than your opponent is life or death. This is physically exhausting training, comparable to working out to the maximum in a gym. With training and practice, pilots can withstand more than twice the G force that made me pass out. Pilots wear anti-gravity flight suits, which automatically squeeze their legs when they do particularly violent manoeuvres, to help push blood towards the heart. These are a special set of contractions that squeezes the muscles of their abdominal core and thighs and physically push blood upwards towards their heart to keep the brain supplied with precious oxygen. Pilots are also taught anti-gravity strain manoeuvres.
High-performance pilots train on facilities like the centrifuge I was in and learn how close to the edge they can go, recognise the symptoms of greyout and blackout and when to back off. Your neurons fire wildly while your brain tries to figure out what you just did and why. As you wake up your muscles twitch uncontrollably and you are disoriented. Approximately 15-20% of Royal Air Force fighter pilots have experienced Gloc at least once in their career. The next symptom was brain hypoxia – a complete loss of consciousness due to a lack of blood supply and therefore oxygen to the brain. That’s why one of the first signs that Gloc is about to occur was loss of colour vision ( greyout) before complete loss of vision (blackout). The retinal cells at the back of your eye are particularly sensitive to low blood pressure. I lost consciousness after about 15 seconds at 4G (or four times normal gravity pushing down on me) when this extra force overcame my blood pressure’s ability to move blood from my heart up to my brain.įormally known as gravitational-induced loss of consciousness, pilots refer to this as “ Gloc”, pronounced “gee-lock”. It adds to the force of gravity acting on you. When you rapidly change direction (think about riding a roller coaster or cornering a car), you can feel centrifugal force (which acts on an object moving in circles) pushing you outwards.
This force can be quantified as one unit of gravity (1G). We are held to the surface of the Earth by gravity. I failed this test in a way that would have crashed and killed everyone onboard if I had been flying a jet. I was strapped onto the outside of this, being tested as part of a study into the effect of high-gravitational loading (high G) on the human body. Think of a merry-go-round spinning around, but much, much faster, and then expand it out so it’s the size of a bus, and you have a human centrifuge. I was in a ground-based training faculty for military pilots as a research guinea pig. Thankfully, this wasn’t while in control of a multi-million pound high performance fighter jet and trying to outwit my opponent in a high-speed duel.
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