G'day all,
Certainly from personal experience, flying with goggles et al is extremely tiring given the weight of the helmet, googles, weight pack, lip light battery pack etc etc. As was mentioned, if it were simply a case of bearing this weight and flying around as you normally would by day, it would be hard work but when you consider the limited FOV, a fair amount of head movement is required by all the crew to cover their arcs of responsibility. This can be further increased depending on ambient light levels, if you're conducting formation work etc etc.
It all adds up and I'm not surprised there have been reported cases of neck strain and so on. However, I am surprised at the severity of the problem as reported by the initial article and our German contributor. I would be very interested to find out the rate of (and total amount of) goggle flying required to bring on these kinds of injuries.
Cheers,
P68
