Abstract

Aircraft with increasingly high performance were important to the war effort in World War II. Changes in technology allowed aircraft to reach faster speeds and to complete missions at higher altitudes. With these changes came new obstacles for pilots who had to tolerate these stresses. Of primary concern to the U.S. War Department was the loss of consciousness that often occurred with high-speed maneuvers and especially during pull-up after dive-bombing missions. In some cases, pilots would experience up to 9G of force during rapid ascent, much more than the 6G threshold that typically leads to loss of consciousness. In 1941, a research team in Red Wing, MN, proposed experiments to elucidate the mechanism ..