Despite warnings, the Navy refused to investigate the connection between flying fighter jets and brain injuries to pilots

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.

Recovery homes work, but Georgia cities want to keep zoning them out.

Izzy Lawter, 22, lives in a six-bedroom house on a lush golf course in Roswell, Georgia — the very opposite of what most people imagine when they hear the phrase “halfway house.” But that is precisely its purpose, with the residence serving Lawter and others recovering from substance use disorders, Georgia Public Broadcasting reports. The trouble is, their neighbors don’t want them there — even as more recovery homes are needed. 

Lawter, a Georgia native who struggled with undiagnosed mental illness from childhood, developed an addiction in college. “I was blackout drunk and high for the first two years, every single day,” she said. ” I got really physically sick because of it, but no one knew what was wrong with me.”

After an eviction and a suicide attempt, her mother moved Lawter through inpatient and intensive outpatient treatment and helped her return home. But soon, Lawter learned that her mother’s home was one of the worst places for her to be. Between 40 and 60% of people with substance use disorder relapse, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and research points to old friends and old routines as primary factors. 

Instead, she opted for a sober living residence in Marietta. That one didn’t work. “It wasn’t a good fit just because my roommate would stare at me in my sleep,” she said, laughing. But last year, a room became available on the golf course at Second Chance Recovery Residences. Her mother pays $1,500 a month, utilities included, while Lawter attends college nearby. So far, so good. “I have no fixed plan right now,” she said. “A lot of people try to rush out, but I love it a lot and I’m in a place where there’s a lot of transitioning, so I’m kind of fine being here right now.”

The residents in the house come and go as they like. They also share their agendas, attend a daily Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and submit to random drug tests, among other house rules.

Other than that, “We’re just another house; we are a family in the most literal sense of the word,” says Ian Neubauer, an attorney and recovering addict who founded Second Chance. “These girls and our guys, they prop each other up. They’re each other’s support network and that’s what a family is. They do chores. They eat together.”

Between 2021 and 2023, 17.4% of Georgians aged 12 and older had experienced a substance use disorder in the past year, close to the national rate, according to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Mental health conditions affect around 1.8 million Georgians annually, and the two often travel together. Moreover, nearly 5 million Georgians live in communities without enough mental health professionals, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness, and more than 1.4 million with mental illness go without care because of cost or availability. Among people with substance use disorder, SAMHSA found that those aged 18 to 25 were the least likely of any age group to get treatment.

Still, after learning that Second Chance is a home for long-term recovery, their neighbors sprung into action to get the home closed. Someone called the fire marshal, sparking inspections, violation notices, cease-and-desist orders and zoning board hearings. 

Thus far, the kitchen’s six-burner high-end Wolf range failed inspection for having more than five burners and Neubauer has also been ordered to add fire sprinklers and auto-closing doors on the property. “We’re talking about tens to maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to retrofit what is otherwise just a normal house and turn it into something that it is not,” he said.

Neighbors fear that the home will compromise the character of the community, Neubauer said, but research shows that those concerns are unfounded, with residents in similar residences posing minimal risks to neighbors. “The neighbors [have an] ability to sic code enforcement on us, call us ‘illegal’ and defame us without any repercussions whatsoever,” Neubauer said. In response, he has started to sue cities indulging in discrimination against recovery houses. He’s made filings against zoning laws in Buford, Columbus, Warner Robins and Greensboro, among others.

Ostensibly, recovery homes are protected by the federal 1988 Fair Housing Act Amendments. Municipalities work around these regulations by defining how many unrelated people add up to a “family.”

Georgia lawmakers have started to notice. Until recently, the state had no working definition of “recovery residence” and no way to stop the kickbacks some for-profit operators collect — selling a spot on a couch as sober living in a house where drug use never stopped, for example. A 2021 bill sponsored by state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick made patient brokering a crime carrying up to 10 years in prison for landlords. What struck her, she said, was that House committee members were shocked to learn that no one regulates the industry and no one knows where these places are.

Todd Wilson, who directs the Georgia Association of Recovery Residences, now wants mandatory certification along the lines of laws in Florida and Virginia. He and other advocates testified in 2025 before a Georgia Senate study committee led by Sen. Randy Robertson. Robertson filed a bill late in the session, but the bill said nothing about zoning.

Nevertheless, zoning is the whole fight, Neubauer said, and the single most fundamental change that has to happen before recovery residences are treated as a real, important, effective part of the recovery community.

In other news…

Friends become the therapists they always needed: George DeGroat and Geravis Brown have become the counselors they needed as adolescents, opening Inspire You Counseling in Portsmouth, Virginia. “Growing up in London Oaks, we didn’t have people telling us we needed therapy,” DeGroat told News 3 WTKR. Brown recalled his own youth saying, “I had been dealing with depression from as early as 10 to 11 years old, and in my house it wasn’t something that we talked about, as in many Black households,” he said. 

Over time, DeGroat’s work led him to help vulnerable young men in Newport News who were overwhelmed by grief and stress with nowhere to put it. He soon learned that many of the men with whom he spoke were seeking help from Black male therapists but struggling to find one. So he suggested the pair go back to school to earn their degrees in counseling. They did so, and are now serving Portsmouth and Hampton Roads with Black men squarely in mind. “We do want Black men to know that we exist, because 1% of therapists are Black men,” DeGroat said. Their new practice’s grand opening is September 28.