Air Force F-35 pilot helmets must fit down to the millimeter or it throws off the high-tech displays that keeps them alive.

First, the pilots have their heads measured and scanned. In the Marine Corps, those scans are used to build a portable helmet liner that goes between the F-35B pilot’s head and the hard-shell helmet itself.

“This styrofoam cap fits into any size helmet, enabling a pilot to take the helmet liner from squadron to squadron for use throughout his or her career,” a Marine Corps press release said.

Once the scanning is complete, the helmet optics have to be perfectly aligned with the pilot’s eyes. Technicians use a pupilometer, which measures the distance between the pilot’s pupils within two millimeters of its center.

Next, aircrew flight equipment technicians fit the pilots with oxygen masks and identify any leaks around the mask that could prevent proper oxygen flow.

“The next part is to ensure there is a proper distance between the mask and the visor,” Arteaga said. “We have to make sure when the pilot moves or talks, the mask doesn’t hit the visor. If it’s too close, it will bend the visor and distort the display image.”

That’s not the end of it though. After the initial fit, the helmet is inspected every 105 days and has a 120-day fit check to make sure it’s still snug.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This is the helmet Soviet fighter pilots wore in the 70s/early 80s. In the second picture of the article, you can see a version of it with the HMD over the wearer's right eye. It calls the HMD piece a "NWU-2M" but I can't seem to find any info on that specifically - not in English anyway.

    So now I've looked it up and apparently American helicopter pilots beat Russian fighter pilots to this technology, and the first country to use the tech operationally was South Africa. But the whole point is that it lets you target things without having to swing your entire plane around to point at them, which greatly improves the attack capability of your aircraft (and is a big part of why the Soviet Su-27/Mig-29 were generally favored in short-range engagements over the F-15/F-16, though better radar tech and missiles gave the American planes an advantage in long range ones). The F-35 helmet reinvents the wheel on this technology and makes everything way more expensive and fragile than it needs to be.