High-tech vest would help pilots correct disorientation
WASHINGTON — NASA and the Navy are developing a high-tech vest to protect pilots from becoming dangerously disoriented while in the cockpit, the predicament that may have doomed John F. Kennedy Jr.'s flight to Martha's Vineyard, a NASA researcher said yesterday.
The vest is fitted with 96 electronic motors that vibrate if the aircraft's instruments detect that the plane is departing from straight and level flight.
Navy Capt. Angus Rupert, a scientist with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the vest helps "tell pilots where down is."
Disorientation occurs when a pilot, having lost sight of the horizon either at night or in bad weather, incorrectly perceives the position, motion or attitude of the aircraft relative to the earth.
During disorientation, the pilot's brain still receives balance data from the inner ear and the skin-muscle-joint system, but this data is distorted by the plane's acceleration. Pilots often will perceive the aircraft to be climbing when it is not.
The vest is designed to prevent that. For example, if a plane were flying upside down, the pilot would feel a vibration in the back. A roll to the right would elicit a vibration on the pilot's right side. A roll to the left would result in a vibration on the left. The more a plane rolled to the left, the more the vibration would move up the pilot's side.
The device is dubbed TSAS, for the Tactical Situational Awareness System, and is a joint development between NASA and the Navy Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Fla. It has been under development since 1995 and is being flight tested on military pilots.
Rupert said the vest also is being developed for space shuttle pilots, who undergo a form of spatial disorientation when re-entering the earth's gravitational pull, and for Navy SEAL commandos, who can become disoriented when in miniature submarines.
Pilot disorientation is a prevailing theory behind the deadly crash that killed Kennedy, 38, his 33-year-old wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren Bessette, 34, last Friday.
Radar records showed that Kennedy's plane dropped precipitously after he took a right turn, leading aviation experts to speculate that the prevailing haze and darkness may have caused him to lose sight of the horizon.
A 1992 article in the scholarly publication Journal of Vestibular Research found that "when one considers the number of air forces in the world and the magnitude of commercial and general aviation activity, it is easy to arrive at an estimate that spatial disorientation wastes billions of dollars worth of resources every year."