Navy Refused to Investigate Fighter Jet Pilot Brain Injuries

In 2024, a New York Times investigation raised valid concerns that the extreme physical strain of flying fighter jets might cause serious brain injuries in Navy pilots, leading to complications including death. Virtually nothing has been done to mitigate the problem, according to a scathing report from the House Oversight Committee. “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 says. “Instead, it has relied on a system designed to respond to visible injuries, while leaving potential cumulative damage largely unexamined.”

Launching off an aircraft carrier deck and hauling through high G-force turns in training subjects pilots to body-crushing forces which are absorbed over and over throughout a career. As the Times put it, not once has the Navy studied the effects on the brain, 100 billion neurons wired within a network roughly the consistency of Jell-O. The report excoriated the Navy for not even looking into the concerns, ultimately calling for Congress to pass legislation compelling the military to create a program to study and care for the brain health of its aviators.

“Landing on a carrier is like a car crash. In my career I’ve been in hundreds of car crashes,” said Matthew Buckley, a former pilot at the Navy’s elite TOPGUN school who founded a nonprofit to support military aviators who developed mental health problems due to their work. “I’m almost shaking, I’m so furious,” he said after learning the details of the House committee report. “People have died. We know we have a problem. And you’re telling me someone needs to call for legislation to have the admirals do their jobs? It’s insane.”

Buckley suffered himself, experiencing headaches, mood swings and suicidal thoughts after 15 years of flying. He is not an outlier. The 2024 Times investigation found three pilots with symptoms consistent with brain injury who died by suicide within an 18 month span, and a dozen more current and former aviators struggling with similar problems.

TOPGUN, meanwhile, quietly launched Project Odin’s Eye, a brain health monitoring program modeled on one built by the Navy SEALs — and told neither Navy leadership nor the other fighter wings. Leadership learned about it from The Times. But rather than consider ways to help service members, the Navy set up a closed loop.

Asserting that no evidence of a brain injury problem existed, Navy medical officials treated that absence as the reason not to go looking for one. “The medical team argued that because there was no evidence, there would be no need to investigate further,” the report states. Notably, when a civilian neurologist receiving Navy referrals flagged what looked to him like a pattern of brain injury in aviators in 2020, the referrals stopped.

Damningly, when an internal survey revealed widespread untreated mental health problems among pilots, a Navy captain forwarded results to several admirals with a warning: “Feedback from the bro-network is that this is a hot topic … and it is affecting retention of our senior aviators,” the captain wrote. “The suicides may, or may not, be linked by common causes. But we will not know until we choose to study this problem.” But no study followed. Instead, Navy leaders blamed pilots for their outcomes, saying they refused to seek help for fear of being grounded due to mental health stigma.

As such, the House committee found the Navy “well equipped” to study the problem, with an aviation physiology research program already in place that could absorb the work. By the Navy’s own estimate, following 1,000 pilots for a long-term study of brain health would cost $3.9 million — roughly what it takes to train a single aviator to fly. Instead, it chose to do nothing. Along with a frontline brain health program for every military aviator, the House Oversight Committee has recommended catapult takeoffs and high-G maneuvers entered in pilots’ medical records, and the effects tracked cumulatively long after they leave the service.