Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aircraft and Vehicles => Topic started by: moot on December 16, 2007, 12:01:27 AM
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Civil flying nowadays, in sleepy planes that almost never go anywhere near WWII warbird performance, is enough to hurt your eardrums.
How did WWII pilots who dove as we know they did cope with this? Was it ever a medical issue, or just a matter of getting used to it?
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Huh? Speak up.
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always curious about that as well, particularly the 163 pilots.
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My guess is Beeman's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRSbYXutreE
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Cannot watch the film (wont load).
It depends if the plane has a pressurized cockpit. If it is, and can maintain the normal airpressure like you have on the ground, you are not subject to this effect. Airliners have a pressurized cockpit and passenger cabin, but to save weight (smaller compressors), they pressurize the cabins at about 85% IIRC, of the air pressure on the ground at travel altitude. Thats why you have to compensate. If you dont have a pressurized cockpit, I guess you can only decend as fast as you are able to bear it, and compensate via yawning (or, in combat, not caring about. I would rather risk serious ear-pain than see myself leaking red out of various holes while being BBQed and suffocated at the same time ;) )
Regards,
Matt
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I seem to recall somebody whose grandpa was a B-25 pilot here on the forums, and he made a comment about how grandpa lost hearing along a certain range because of the engines.
Part of the price you pay, I guess.
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Kinda like a harp player (cherub style, not harmonica). Most lose a fair mount of hearing on their playing side due to the enormous amount of overtones. Risks of the profession. My grandfather was a gunner on the tanker USS Monongahela (AO-42) and has lost most of his hearing in his left ear (the one he had to keep un-plugged to hear fire direction orders).
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You can equalize the pressure on your eardrums. There are methods for both compressing and decompressing your eardrums.
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Originally posted by AquaShrimp
You can equalize the pressure on your eardrums. There are methods for both compressing and decompressing your eardrums.
I thought your body did that on its own. Drive up a steep hill once and when you feel your ears "pop" you know they equalized with the surrounding air pressure. I suppose it would be a different if your diving a few thousand feet a minute though...
I have heard of pilots having loss of hearing due to the constant sound of the engine which ends up pushing down the hairs in your ear that you use to hear. It's like listening to loud music all the time, you'll ruin your hearing doing it.
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I use to do a lot of snorkeling in deep water and when you descend and acend rapidly you have to constantly equalize the pressure in your ears. I would imagine it's pretty much the same ascending and descending in the air.
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This game is so realistic that I lose my high frequency hearing in the summer months.
This loss is brought on by dolphin like screeches that emanate from vox during that time.
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Hearing loss cannot be stopped by chewing gum, yawning, or pinching your nose shut wile blowing.
earing loss is caused by physical damage to the eardrum, repeated and/or long exposure to high decibel sounds.
Usually, damage starts in the higher range of frequencies as the lower range is more "felt", than actually heard.
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WW2 pilots hurt their eardrums frequently.
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Originally posted by wooly15
I use to do a lot of snorkeling in deep water and when you descend and acend rapidly you have to constantly equalize the pressure in your ears. I would imagine it's pretty much the same ascending and descending in the air.
Wooly and VonMessa are on the right track. While I wasn't a physics major, I was an experienced scuba instructor for several years. The principle is the same underwater as going up. It's called atmospheric pressure.
Not to get into too much detail of the physics, partially because I don't understand it myself, for every 33 feet (up or down) that is one "atmosphere". This refers to Boyle's Law.
Basically, as you ascend (or decend), in a non-pressurized environment, there are atmoshperic pressures put on the human body. (Below sea level is slightly different, but the priciple is the same) I forgot the formula on how much pressure.
As a scuba diver, we used to perform excercises to strenghten our eardrums. Hold your nose and blow out. Gently to start and you will hear your ears pop. That is the body equilizing the pressure to the outside environment. The reason why we have to do this is because of liquid in our inner ear. Helmeted divers, chew gum or moved the jaw muscles to equilize pressure.
The damage to the eardrum, I used to get ear infections from time to time. Home remedy to fix, vinegar and some Q-Tips. But since starting Aces High, the wife ack is the only damage to my ears lately. (Sorry, no cure for that one!)
Thats the best I can come close to an explanation. Hopefully sombody else can add to this.
Obie
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Well, it's easy to deduce WWII pilots were subjected to harmful atmospheric changes and I know all about the Eustachian tubes.. I meant to ask if anyone knew how dogfighters most especialy dealt with what must have been pretty painful not once but multiple times per flight.. day in, day out.
It's a bit of a loaded question, but e.g. in the case of the 163 pilots, maybe someone has heard of anything they did to mitigate the effects.
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I'd never really even considered it, but that would have to be excruciating if there wasn't something to counteract the effect. Were cockpits sufficiently airtight, even in unpressurized cockpits, that the pressure would bleed off/build up slowly enough to be tolerable? Bits of cotton or wax in the ears to do the same thing internally? Mortal terror enough to make you forget about your ears for a few minutes?
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Mortal terror definitely was incentive enough, wax and cotton filling probably not effective enough, and unpressurized cockpits I'd bet were no help if I'm guessing correctly they were probably the same as nowadays'..
Maybe they just bore it all they could, like any other pain in the heat of battle.
Would it be gamey to include it in flight sims? It's the sort of thing that'd fit in well enough in games like Il2, but it's not totaly superfluous IMO.
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Something along the lines of decreasing the master volume during compression or extreme changes in alt? An effect that would be short lived, but similar to the blurring or shaking you get now in such a situation? Might be an interesting addition, like the wind sound that plays at high speeds now.
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Would it be gamey to include it in flight sims? It's the sort of thing that'd fit in well enough in games like Il2, but it's not totaly superfluous IMO.
Don't we have this? Pull too many positive G's and you start to black out. Too many negative G's and you red out.
I tried a quick search on the net. "Aviation Medicine during WW2". There were several articles listed. Unfortunately, the one pertaining to German Aviation Medicine is copyright protected. It appears that the two volumes can be requested from the Bulletin of Medical Library Association. A link giving a brief review of the material is here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=195154&pageindex=1 (http://)
This German scientist, Theodor Benzinger, was recruited after WWII under "Operation Paperclip". He also worked on the problems of high altitude protection.
Benzinger's article is here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asma/asem/2007/00000078/00000009/art00010?crawler=true (http://)
Then you have the Father of Army Aviation Medicine, Harry G. Armstrong. His contributions are found here: https://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/EARS/Hallionpapers/aerospacemedicine.htm (http://)
Just going over the material in a few of the reviews I could find, this is a very interesting subject. There was another article describing how scientists from the Mayo Aerospace Medicines developed a working oxygen system in the 1930's for military use.
So I guess to answer your question Moot. The answers are out there. We just might have to dig a little to find them (and pay for the articles).
Obie
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Hey moot, don't worry. You fly the Ta152 - one of the few WW2 planes with a pressurized cockpit :D
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It doesn't make much difference.. I turn down the volume in it because of all those damage sounds :p
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Ear drums do get punctured because of fast descents even today. Antihistimines are sometimes prescribed to help people with stuffed up sinuses to avoid damage to their ears. Pinching ones nose and blowing does help clear your sinuses. I spent 6 years as a radar/sensor operator on a Navy P3C patrol plane in the 70s and saw a few people wind up with bleeding ears.
AKwoodee
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Originally posted by WOOD1
Ear drums do get punctured because of fast descents even today. Antihistimines are sometimes prescribed to help people with stuffed up sinuses to avoid damage to their ears. Pinching ones nose and blowing does help clear your sinuses. I spent 6 years as a radar/sensor operator on a Navy P3C patrol plane in the 70s and saw a few people wind up with bleeding ears.
AKwoodee
Did you know Bill Tuite?
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From the sound of this quote the noise in the cockpit varied from type to type, and was worse in some types. Charles Kittel from the 13th AF on the B-25.
"The only thing we didn't like was that was so god-awful noisy. I have 80 percent loss of some of my hearing range, and it is partially due to my service with B-25's. But it was a fantastic aircraft for that time and place."
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Thanks WOOD1.
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Underwater you can easily enter all the spectrum of the atmospheric diffrence, however not the limits, since underwater there is always pressure. There is no number close to zero pressure. Does that make a difference?
Not sure about eardrums, but it will eventually with life and death and then you have the tales of "bends" and how differently they worked on people.
So, your body can cope with 1 feet underwater, or 33, or even 333.
But it will not cope with 50K for long. At 50K you start to need pressure for breathing. So I guess what I am saying is that maybe the pressure difference alone is not the main element, the human body exposed to extreme low-pressure needs to be taken into account as well.