As concerns mounted that the extreme physical strain of flying fighter jets was causing brain injuries in pilots, and may have led to the death of a number of career aviators, the Navy did almost nothing.
It didn’t even study its pilots to understand if it had a problem.
That is one of the numerous findings in a harshly critical report released on Tuesday by the powerful House Oversight Committee. The report said that because the Navy had repeatedly failed to act, Congress should pass legislation requiring the military to create a specific program to study and care for the brain health of all aviators.
“Despite credible warnings, external reporting and internal awareness, the Navy has yet to determine whether the very conditions that define naval aviation may also be causing long-term harm to the pilots who endure them,” the report said. “Instead, it has relied on a system designed to respond to visible injuries, while leaving potential cumulative damage largely unexamined.”
Naval aviators are repeatedly exposed to body-crushing forces as they catapult off aircraft carriers and pull high G-force turns in training. The Navy has never studied how those forces over time affect the human brain, which contains 100 billion neurons in a network with a consistency similar to Jell-O.
A number of career pilots have raised concerns that those repeated exposures may cause brain injuries that slowly accrue over years of service and lead to debilitating mental health problems.
“Landing on a carrier is like a car crash. In my career I’ve been in hundreds of car crashes,” said Matthew Buckley, a former TOPGUN pilot who after 15 years of flying struggled with headaches, mood swings and suicidal thoughts. He later started an organization to help the many other pilots he encountered who were experiencing similar problems.
“I’m almost shaking, I’m so furious,” he said after learning about the findings of the House committee. “People have died. We know we have a problem. And you’re telling me someone needs to call for legislation to have the admirals do their jobs? It’s insane.”
In 2024, The New York Times published an investigation showing that three pilots who all had symptoms consistent with brain injuries died by suicide in an 18-month span, and that a dozen current and former pilots were struggling with similar issues.
In the following months, Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who heads the House Oversight Committee, formally demanded to know how the Navy was responding to the problem.
The report released this week said that the Navy had barely responded at all: It had not done a formal investigation to see if fighter jets were causing injuries. It had not put monitoring in place that might detect injuries. And it had no plans to offer expanded brain health services to its aviators.
While the Navy has done extensive research on the immediate health effects of flying fighter jets, it has never looked at the long-term impacts. Because the Navy had no evidence of a brain-injury problem, its medical officials maintained that no problem existed. It continued to do so even as Navy doctors started sending pilots who were experiencing issues to a civilian neurologist.
When that neurologist raised concerns to the Navy in 2020 that he was seeing a pattern of brain injury, he said it stopped sending him patients.
Internal documents reviewed by the House committee showed that a few years later, when three career pilots who flew the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet died by suicide, several Naval officers grew deeply concerned.
In 2024 a Navy doctor and former pilot conducted an informal survey of pilots and found widespread mental health issues that were often going untreated. His report rippled through the pilot community, and a Navy captain soon sent the report to several admirals.
“Feedback from the bro-network is that this is a hot topic … and it is affecting retention of our senior aviators,” the captain wrote. “The suicides may, or may not, be linked by common causes. But we will not know until we choose to study this problem.”
The committee said no study took place.
Instead, Naval leaders blamed the crisis on stubborn barriers to seeking mental health, including pilots not coming forward out of fear that they might be grounded. The Navy tended to blamed individuals for not seeking help. The House report found no evidence that leaders considered that the problem could be caused by its jets.
The Navy’s elite TOPGUN fighter jet school saw things differently.
In 2024 it surreptitiously set up a brain health program, known as Project Odin’s Eye, to monitor its top fliers, modeled on a program created by the Navy SEALs. TOPGUN did not alert the larger Navy to the suspected problem, or inform other fighter wings, the report said.
Navy leadership knew nothing about Project Odin’s Eye until The Times wrote about its existence in December 2024.
After The Times published its investigation, top Navy leaders pushed Navy medical experts on whether flying was causing brain injuries, according to the report. In a bit of circular reasoning that seemed pulled straight from the novel Catch-22, the experts said the Navy had never studied the problem, so there was no hard evidence that it existed. And since there was no hard evidence that existed, there was no reason to study it.
“The medical team argued that because there was no evidence, there would be no need to investigate further,” the report noted.
The House committee was particularly critical of that decision because, it said, the Navy was “well equipped” to study the issue, and already had an extensive aviation physiology research and monitoring program that could easily add a brain health study.
The Navy, by its own estimate, could conduct a long-term study of brain health for 1,000 pilots for $3.9 million — about the cost of training one pilot to fly.
Instead, the Navy chose to do nothing, the report said.
“In sum, the Navy’s response to the committee reveals a paradox: A well-funded and expansive research enterprise that has nonetheless failed to address a consequential question in aviator health,” the report said. “Given the Navy’s substantial investment in human capital, failing to allocate comparable resources to understanding risks and protecting that investment, particularly in terms of long-term health, is unfortunate.”
The committee recommended that Congress step in and require a comprehensive program that would create a frontline brain health care program for all pilots, modeled on Project Odin’s Eye.
The committee also called for requiring the Defense Department to track catapult takeoffs and high G-force maneuvers in aviators’ medical records, and conducting a comprehensive, study of the cumulative effects over time, including after pilots leave the military.
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