loco wrote:
I don’t like coming back home with red spots around eyes and on forehead. I always think that the same is going on in my brain. Mini strokes killing few cells every flight. On the other hand, many older people who have flown aerobatics for most of their lives seem fit and fresh. What’s your take on this? @MedEwok ?
I must admit that this is not my field of medical expertise, but I have not yet found any medical publications that indicate that aerobatics may lead to “popping blood vessels”.
What would this be anyways? Blood vessels are highly elastic and will not easily rupture due to less than 10G alone. The acceleration or deceleration would have to be very sudden and require higher forces than any aerobatic aircraft can sustain. Yes that’s true, I’m fairly certain that your body can take more beating than your aircraft when doing aerobatics (apart from the problem of blackout due to high G forces or “redout” due to negative G forces, both of which are reversible conditions though).
One interesting abstract here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11482552
Generally, a search for “aerobatics” in the most prominent medical database, PubMed, leads to twelve publications of varying usefulness for pilots. You can only read the abstracts though without paying for the articles or having access via a university or similar institution:
