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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Major Paul “Goose” Gosden, U.S. Marine Corps, piloted his UH-1 Huey close air support helicopter across the Kuwait-Iraq border through the night’s oily blackness. His aircraft was first to cross into Iraqi airspace in the second Gulf War, in support of Cobra attack helicopters tasked to destroy observation posts on Safwan Hill, near the infamous Highway of Death. Their mission was the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom, designed to kick in the door for the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division, which would follow in a ground assault from Kuwait into Iraq. The Iraqi forces, however, anticipated the aerial sortie and had begun to destroy oil fields, filling the night air with oil smoke and haze so thick that it blinded the marines.
Military flight training ingrains night flying so deeply that pilots can do it practically in their sleep. Flying through an oil cloud at night, on the other hand, definitely ups the pucker factor. “Saddam had exploded the oil rigs to fill the air with oil. I couldn’t see the Cobra in front of me or the stars or the moon. It was just black,” Gosden recalled. To give yourself an idea of this feeling, start a mission in the helicopter combat Xbox game Apache (which one of us, Macknik, diligently toiled over as “research” for this article). Fly very high over enemy territory, then turn off your television (but not the Xbox) and try to land your helicopter blind as the bad guys begin to shoot at you. Remember, to simulate the experience of Gosden and his crew, you would have to commit to actually killing yourself if your simulated copter crashes; otherwise it’s just a game.
Spatial D and the Leans
Gosden told his hair-raising story at the Aviation Survival Training Center in Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego, Calif., during a course one of us (Gayles) teaches. This air station was the storied home of the U.S. Navy’s (“Top Gun”) Fighter Weapons School, featured in the 1986 Tom Cruise movie.
Gosden—coincidentally “Goose” is the call sign of Cruise’s wingman in Top Gun—continued, “We all had ‘spatial D’ or were suffering from ‘the leans.’” Spatial D is short for spatial disorientation, a catchall term to describe the summed result of the various perceptual illusions and degraded sensory perceptions that may occur on a mission. It is the total failure of situational awareness and, shockingly, the most common cause of crashes in the navy, accounting for almost 80 crashes between 1990 and 2008. Performance fails because pilots can no longer pay attention to what is happening—everything is off-kilter. All they can do is scan the instruments continually to give themselves as much factual information about the aircraft as possible, to counteract the false information from deceitful bodily senses.
The leans is not a colorful military term for gastrointestinal distress, although the two phenomena are, unsurprisingly, often experienced together. Rather the leans is a type of somatogyral illusion you feel in flight when your vestibular system (the inner ear organ responsible for balance and your sense of traveling through space) and your somatosensory system (skin and other bodily positioning sensors) together fail to provide you with an accurate description of where gravity indicates is down. The illusion happens when you come out of a tight acrobatic turn and the fluid in your vestibular semicircular canals system continues to flow even though you are no longer turning. As a result, you may feel like you are flying straight when in fact you are in a turn, something that investigators concluded happened when John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane crashed at Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. Technically, the leans is the name of a solution to the problem: leaning your head until your instruments match your perception. Even so, most pilots use the term to relay the problem rather than the solution.
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Add CommentYeah!: this is true, I'm aware of an F-86 Sabre pilot that completely convinced the fuel gauge indication of a partly loaded fuel tanks was wrong, and fearing to run out of fuel while still in flight, made an emergency landing in a plowed field just to see the fuel tanks broken and releasing a lot remaining fuel at bellying. It may have burn!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have never read an account of the Italian incident that describes anything but joyriding. He violated air space rules, and then engaged in a coverup. I just started reading this journal and now have questions about the editors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat article, well explained! I flew in Navy P3's during the Cold War and it was easy to become somewhat disoriented flying *between* cloud layers that seem horizontal but arent always actually horizontal; they form along pressure gradients rather than just altitude.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot only that, but the relatively slow moving P3 sometimes feels like it is flying *backward* after a great many hours of cruising and not only does one get visual effects, but auditory effects as one's ears try to make sense of the constant droning of engines and avionics. Sometimes I heard classical music; not like a replay in my mind, but I could actually hear it amid the droning of the engines. Knowing it was an illusion did not make it go away.
Then you must drop down to 500 feet above the oft-stormy sea to inspect a ship. You depend almost entirely on radar altimeter and attitude indicator because there is no horizon and you have absolutely no idea whether you are too close to little waves or adequately high above really big waves -- it all looks the same. Then you finally see the ship and realize the waves are REALLY big, twice the distance crest-to-crest as a supertanker is long.
I should point out that I wasn't the pilot of a P3, nor even strictly speaking crew -- rather, I accompanied P3's from time to time. I did get to sit in the right seat a couple of times and the P3 (Lockheed Orion, beefed up somewhat from the civilian version) was perhaps the best airplane ever made for operating in Alaska.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell this article makes unmanned aircraft all the more
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisattractive. Of what use is a control operator that is
less capable than the machine itself or subject to the
vagaries of being human.
Drones are the future. After all it is just a game and
an example of mans failure to agree sans war.
Right now America is the best armed second world power,
where just a few years back we had it all.
kienhua68, I do wish you would make up your mind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs it "After all it is just a game" in which case this nation ought not to bother with a military at all, or "America is the best armed second world power,
where just a few years back we had it all."
What is different? Just a few years back men flew airplanes, not drones.
So you see, you open the door by your own bad logic to more bad logic.
As I think on my own military career, I contemplate whether drones could have done any part of the military mission. The answer is obviously "yes" since drones ARE fulfilling part of the military mission.
But American P3 aircraft performed far more Search and Rescue operations (many) than destroying Russian submarines (zero). So, while one might imagine a drone capable of attacking a submarine, it is not easy to imagine a drone in a meaningful search and rescue operation. But let us consider that drone capable of attacking a submarine. What is the risk that it might be coopted, falling into operational hands of your enemy? There you are with a rogue and armed drone no longer in your control.
The white house still stands because human people onboard a human-piloted jet airliner chose to die in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania rather than allow that aircraft to be used as an agent of destruction.
Furthermore, I have doubts about the viability of drones in electromagnetically unfriendly environments such as was often the case around Iceland during aurora borealis outbreaks.
Back on the search and rescue aspect -- if you were floating on a raft out at sea, would you prefer to see above you a Navy P3 knowing it was crewed by human beings that now know where you are, and are about to toss out survival supplies until a rescue ship arrives, or would you rather see a small Boeing drone buzzing around, knowing that someone in Seattle knows where you are, thank you very much, and might care or might not. He's going home to supper and video games in a hour. No "skin in the game".
What you say may all be true even if it is based on press reports but the article is talking about something else. The article is describing why the pilot hit the cables even though visibilty was perfect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhether he should have been flying in that area or what his motive was for being there is the subject of a different article. The issue is why did he fly into something he could clearly see and could easily have avoided.