Combating Fatigue In Crewmembers

This CIA Foreign Intelligence Information Report, distributed in November 1976, is mainly about Soviet aviation medicine. An American source described how Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, kept its crews fit and alert. UFOs appear in the subject line almost as an afterthought.

Pilot fatigue and testing

The report says Aeroflot fought fatigue three ways: physical conditioning, with supervised exercise facilities at major airports; medical checks before every flight; and a “prophylactorium” at each big airport, a quiet building where transiting crews could rest. A cyberneticist at the Civil Aviation Institute of Leningrad demonstrated prototype machines to automate the pre-flight check: a coded metal plate held each pilot’s baseline, the machine took blood pressure, pulse and an electrocardiogram, then ran a colored-light reaction test and a miniature-cockpit tracking test. The whole sequence took about three minutes.

The UFO conversation

A noted radiation biologist, Dr. I. G. Akoyev, explained that cosmic-ray particles were causing Aeroflot pilots to “see” flashes of light while flying at night, an effect known as phosphenes. He then asked for the personal opinion on UFOs of someone whose name is blanked out, and was told that 99 percent of reports could be traced to natural or man-made causes such as celestial objects, aircraft or satellites, and that the remaining one percent could not be explained and might be hallucination. Akoyev asked whether something could be coming from outer space; the report does not record an answer.

The exchange is a small example of an ordinary cause – cosmic rays striking the eye – for some light flashes reported by crews.